A new book looks at how a gutsy Texas generation and transmission cooperative left its sleepy paper-G&T identity behind and became a billion-dollar player in the state’s wholesale power market.

The book, Status Quo is not Company Policy, is about Rayburn Electric Cooperative in Rockwall and was written by Heidi Scott and Rayburn EC’s president and CEO, David A. Naylor. It takes the reader back to the 1970s to show the G&T’s gutsy attitude was there at the beginning.

It was in the DNA of Ray Raymond, the longtime general manager of Kaufman County Electric Cooperative (now Trinity Valley Electric Cooperative after a 1997 merger), who dissented from a group of co-op leaders that wanted to buy into the South Texas Nuclear Project near Bay City.

According to the book, the Atomic Energy Commission leaned hard on Texas lawmakers and utilities to garner support for the 2,560-megawatt generating plant. The skeptics, including Raymond, “were initially in the minority, but after many heated discussions … half of the cooperatives favored the plant and half did not.”

“The two groups split, and in 1979, Rayburn Electric Cooperative was created as the solution for those who did not want to get saddled with the immense debt of a nuclear plant against their will,” the book states. “This decision turned out to be extremely wise, as the power plant costs soared far beyond projections, and those co-ops who had bought in were forced to take legal action to get out of their contractual ties to fund it.”

Construction on the plant began in late 1975 with a promised completion date in 1981. Instead, construction of Unit 1 was completed in 1988 and Unit 2 in 1989. The projected cost was $964 million, but by the time the Unit 2 reactor came online, actual costs had ballooned to $5.5. billion.

“Rayburn was born from a desire to question what felt like the ‘normal,’ acceptable thing to do,” the authors wrote. “To resist the status quo.”

The paper G&T birthed in Rockwall in 1979 saw two decades go by before the payroll had more than five employees on it.

“Husband-and-wife duo John [the first CEO] and Annette Kirkland essentially were Rayburn,” the book notes. “They had to decide where to get power, what kind of contracts to hold and what assets the company needed to own.

“In those early decades, they took turns filling every role in the company, from reading meters to paying bills to staying abreast of new advancements and regulations.”

Shannon Beber was hired as a temporary accountant in 2003 before becoming full-time.

“Nothing was automated back then, so she managed all the accounts and financials manually,” the book reads. “Most days, she unlocked the doors in the morning, worked all day, and locked the doors behind her as she left without ever seeing another person. For years.”

“There were only five of us, so somebody had to stay in the office and answer the phone,” she told the authors.

Today, Rayburn Electric Cooperative has more than 100 employees. Between 2019 and 2024, its assets grew from $300 million to more than $1 billion, due in large part to the acquisition of the Rayburn Energy Station, a 758-MW combined-cycle natural gas plant in Grayson County. The G&T also owns 25 percent of the 1,058-MW Freestone Energy Center, also a combined-cycle plant.

Rayburn Electric is the power supplier for four co-op distribution systems—Fannin Electric in Bonham, Farmers Electric in Greenville, Trinity Valley Electric in Kaufman and Grayson-Collin Electric in Van Alstyne—operating in 16 counties and serving 575,000 consumers. Power is delivered over 265 miles of Rayburn Electric-owned transmission lines.

Rayburn Electric “is certainly beyond anything I could have imagined or asked for when I joined the organization in 2011,” CEO Naylor writes in the book’s introduction.