Powering down: Stuckey retires after 34 years at Graham power plant

Powering down: Stuckey retires after 34 years at Graham power plant News Staff Mon, 06/17/2024 - 2:12 pm

• (THOMAS WALLNER | THE GRAHAM LEADER) Greg and Keress Stuckey stand in front of the Graham Luminant Power Plant where Greg Stuckey worked for 34 years. He retired at the end of May after working both at the Graham plant and many other plants across Texas.

Thomas Wallner editor@grahamleader.com

With over 44 years in the power industry, 34 of those at Graham’s power plant, Greg Stuckey turned the lights out on a career which has helped to shape both the future of the Graham Luminant Power Plant as well as plants across Texas.

Stuckey grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and moved to Deer Park, Texas his freshman year of high school. He attended the University of Texas in Arlington to play basketball and graduated in 1979.

The following year began his long journey working at the Graham plant for Texas Electric Service Company.

“I stayed about eight years in Graham as a young engineer. I had a mechanical engineering degree from UTA and moved to Morgan Creek (Power Plant) from there, and then on to Big Brown (Power Plant), which was a coal plant,” he said. “Our company was primarily a natural gas company. With all the gas power plants that we had, at one time I heard we were the largest consumer of natural gas in the world.”

He first served as an efficiency engineer at the Graham plant before returning in 1998 and becoming the operations and maintenance superintendent.

“I got a manager’s job working at Lake Hubbard, which is in east Dallas knowing that the manager here (in Graham) was about to retire. When he did retire, we ended up managing both Lake Hubbard and Graham,” he said. “They reorganized some things, and I managed Graham and DeCordova, and then Graham and Lake Hubbard, Parkdale, North Lake, several things as they shut down.”

It was in Graham where he met his wife Keress at the Graham High School tennis courts, the same location her parents had met.

She said the early days for her husband were also some of his fondest.

“I remember early in our marriage, his clothes (weren’t) just dirty, it was like unidentified power plant chemicals, but he was having more fun climbing around in there,” she said.

The last six years Stuckey has been managing four power plants – Graham, Lake Hubbard, Stryker Creek and Trinidad.
He said the plants are located a good distance from each other and he was making sometimes weekly trips to each location.

“He was having to do a lot of traveling the last few years and I think he had a lot more fun when he was a young engineer and got to crawl around in those boilers… and (got to) actually do engineering,” Keress Stuckey said. “…It seems like the higher up you go the more management you’re dealing with (and) people. You’re on conference calls, or you’re traveling to Dallas, or you’re traveling to east Texas. I think somewhere along the way the fun went out of it because the engineering went out of it.”

Stuckey said in his career he has seen 14 sites like Graham that have been demolished, with the current technology at the plant being aged out.

He said newer technologies are more efficient and there is a bigger push for renewable energy.

“Our industry is quickly moving away from coal and moving (toward) the renewables, which everybody’s got an opinion of, but (also) a lot more of the natural gas assets,” he said. “We quit building power plants after the 80s. After the coal plants got built, we pretty much quit building. There were other people that were building at the time. They were building the new generation of fleets that are called combined cycle power plants.”

The Graham Luminant Power Plant has two units which became operational in 1960 and 1969. Stuckey said the units were meant to have a lifespan of 35-40 years, but unit one is now approaching 65 years in service.

“Until people start building new power plants, new generation power plants, we’re going to be able to keep the Graham plant going for the foreseeable future,” he said. “That’s my hope. That’s what we’ve been working towards for the last 20 years.”

Another change that Stuckey has seen in his years at the plant is the decrease in budgets and employees.

He said when he started in 1980 the plant had 65 employees and today has 19.

“Not only (do we have) 19 people, but we’re cycling every day, so those people are having to twist valves or push buttons every day. Where before, we put it on and it ran in automatic (but it) wasn’t quite that simple,” he said.

He said over the years the plant structure has remained relatively the same but revisions have been made to enable the plant to cycle on a daily basis.

“It was built not to do that,” he said. “It was built to put on and run. It probably started maybe 10, 20 times a year to (now) over 150 times a year.”

After celebrating his retirement at the end of May, he is looking forward to building and creating things.

His wife said the impact he has made on the power plant has been one focused on keeping it alive.

“It seemed like everywhere we (moved), the towns were small that had the power plants and it was just the lifeblood of the community,” Keress Stuckey said. “When those little power plants would shut down, that would just be almost a deathblow to those little towns for the workforce and just the morale. So it’s a testament to Greg that he was able to keep this plant going.”

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