Tennessee Valley Authority faces a push to get greener and more transparent

ASHLAND CITY, Tenn. — When he heard about the sale, Kerry McCarver was perplexed.

In 2020, the mayor of rural Cheatham County discovered that the Tennessee Valley Authority bought about 280 acres of rolling farmland “in the middle of nowhere” in his county, which lies just west of Nashville and is home to about 42,000 people.

He asked another county official who formerly worked for the TVA, the nation’s largest public power company, to find out what it planned to do with the land.

The answer they got was “future use,” and they speculated a solar farm might be in the works.

“It’s kind of the last we thought about it,” McCarver said during an interview in his office in May. “Then a year ago last summer, TVA called here needing a place to have a public meeting.”

The authority was now proposing a 900-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, battery storage, pipelines and other associated infrastructure for the site, which came as a shock to McCarver and many other locals who felt it was wholly inappropriate for the area.

“I called the county attorney and said ‘What’s our options?” McCarver said. The answer he got: “It’s TVA. You don’t have any options.”

Opposition to the Cheatham County project dominated a public “listening session” of the TVA’s Board of Directors in May, when TVA officials told States Newsroom that the proposed plant is in the early stages of development and just one potential option to meet growing power demand in the region and replace retiring coal power.

“We understand that some members of the Cheatham County community do not view this location as appropriate for a new generating site, and we respect that viewpoint,” TVA spokesperson Scott Fiedler said in late June. “No decisions have been made.”

However, the backlash comes as the federal utility faces bipartisan legislation in Congress seeking to boost transparency in its planning process as well as its management and salary structure. TVA has also been in the crosshairs of green groups over its planned gas power buildout, which is among the largest proposed in the nation, and anemic renewable power growth compared to other utilities.

“Back when it was created in the 1930s, TVA was on the cutting edge of transforming a region of the country and investing in a lot of infrastructure to create that transformation,” said Amanda Garcia, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who has worked on TVA issues for a decade. “We’re just not seeing that happen now.”

(READ MORE: TVA seeks to buy more power to meet growing electricity demand)

‘CLEARLY A LAGGARD’

Created by Congress in 1933 during the Great Depression, the TVA today provides wholesale electricity to 153 local power companies serving 10 million people in Tennessee and parts of six neighboring states.

The authority is replacing major coal-fired units at its Kingston (site of a massive coal ash spill in 2008) and Cumberland plants with gas generation and is planning to retire all of its coal power fleet by 2035. It has set a goal of 10 gigawatts of solar power by 2035 and boasts that 55% of its electric generation is carbon free, most of it hydroelectric and nuclear power. And TVA President and CEO Jeff Lyash said a little less than half of the 10 gigawatts of solar it wants to put in by 2035 is already “in operation or in development and construction.”

    TVA / The Tennessee Valley Authority is the nation’s largest public power company, providing electricity to about 10 million people in seven states in the Southeast. Environmental groups and other clean power advocates are pushing it decarbonize faster and it is facing bipartisan concern in Congress about its transparency and executive pay.
  

For comparison, though, utility giant Duke Energy had more than 10 gigawatts of solar installed across its 16-state footprint as of 2022. Environmental and clean power groups say TVA, a federal nonprofit power company, could be doing much more to advance a transition to cheaper, cleaner power.

“They, unlike many utilities, have the ability to do big things and do big things faster,” said Daniel Tait, executive director of Energy Alabama, a clean energy advocacy organization, and a research and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog group.

Tait and others say TVA’s leadership has been historically dismissive of the role renewable power can play on the grid.

“TVA is clearly a laggard when it comes to renewable energy,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Southern Alliance for Clean Energy who has served on TVA advisory panels in the past. “Florida Power & Light has deployed more solar in a quarter than TVA has in their whole history.” Smith, who joked that he’s been “beating his head against the gates of TVA since 1993, said the…