When Jim McConville joined NAES in 1991, NAES was still finding its footing in the third-party operations and maintenance business.
After completing his MBA at the University of Washington and spending six years as a nuclear test engineer at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Jim joined NAES as a project engineer after being introduced to the company by a colleague. Early on, he worked alongside a small corporate team and supported a growing business that looked very different from the one NAES operates today.
“We were a pretty small group,” Jim said. “We didn’t have a lot of infrastructure in place for our core business, which is the operations and maintenance of power plants. At the time, we only had six plants under contract, and it was a fairly new business line for the group.”
Jim quickly became involved in work beyond the traditional responsibilities of a project engineer. The small size of the company meant employees took on whatever needed to be done, from developing procedures to supporting plant operations and mobilizations.
Jim grew alongside the company thanks to that hands-on environment. Over the course of his career, he took on new roles with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership, moving from project engineering and project management into senior leadership. Along the way, he worked across a range of NAES facilities and technologies, including an early cogeneration plant in Lowell, Massachusetts, that supplied both electricity to the grid and steam to a pasta manufacturing company.
Today, Jim serves as a Senior Operations Director, bringing more than three decades of experience with NAES to his role overseeing projects, leading Plant Managers and working to ensure the facilities NAES operates and maintains stay up and running.
An Industry in Motion
As Jim’s responsibilities expanded, so did the industry around him.
The third-party O&M market became increasingly consolidated as the energy landscape shifted from the major combined-cycle development of the 1990s to coal retirements and the growth of wind and solar. NAES had to adapt to stay ahead of those changes.
“The early third-party operations and maintenance industry that we’re in was pretty fragmented,” Jim said. “There’s been quite a bit of consolidation and NAES has come out on top in that consolidation with acquisitions along the way.”
Jim’s career followed that same evolution. His work eventually extended across a wide range of technologies and clients, and in turn, clients. “Every project is different. There’s different technologies, different clients,” Jim said. “It may be the same general process, but with, again, different locations, different technologies, different types of clients.”
Jim’s history of work includes combined-cycle generation, wind, utility-scale solar, battery energy storage, and hydrogen generation and storage. His work with the ACES Delta project in Utah is another example of NAES moving into an emerging area of the energy industry.
That variety has been a constant throughout his career, even as the nature of the work has changed. For Jim, the people and culture have been just as important to his longevity at NAES as the work itself.
“I think it’s important to have a place where people can express their opinions, grow and not be worried about making a mistake,” Jim added “I’ve always felt supported. People are willing to help, and I try to do the same for them.”
Looking Ahead
Jim has watched NAES evolve from a small company into the energy industry’s leading independent O&M service provider over the last 35 years. The latest chapter of that growth is being shaped by emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, Cantilever, and advancements in hydrogen; areas Jim sees as particularly exciting for the future.
For him, the appeal has never been tied to one particular project or technology. It has been the opportunity to keep learning, work with different people and take on new challenges as the industry changes.
Nearly four decades after joining NAES, Jim’s career offers a firsthand view of that evolution. What began with six plants, a small corporate team and a still-developing O&M business has grown into a career spanning decades of change across both NAES and the energy industry.
