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Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018

Clean Line: A TVA Failure of Clean Energy and Environmental Leadership

Author:     Stephen A. Smith
Source:     cleanenergy.org
Publication Date:     January 8th, 2018
 Link: Clean Line: A TVA Failure of Clean Energy and Environmental Leadership
Stephan:   On 18 May 1933, as America wallowed in the crisis of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt, who had pressed the congress to create it, signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act. The purpose of the act was to create a regional system to foster wellbeing. The TVA was explicitly created as a federally owned corporation whose purpose was to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region of the U.S. then severely depressed, technologically backward, and subject to frequent disruption from extreme weather events. It was, like much of the New Deal a social policy designed to foster wellbeing as the first priority, while still working with profit. It was wildly successful and transformed the region. But time went on, corruption increased exponentially, the Tennessee Valley fell under the sway of Republicans and now we have this.

It has become increasingly clear that the Tennessee Valley Authority is taking a hostile position towards renewable energy. (emphasis added) TVA’s recent decision to ignore, or flat out reject, renewable energy from the Plains and Eastern Clean Line project is the latest in a string of anti-renewable energy positions taken by the nation’s largest public utility. TVA is woefully behind peer utilities in procuring significant solar energy resources (Duke Energy North Carolina, Georgia Power, FPL in Florida to name just a few). Newly proposed 2018 solar rate structures would undermine distributed energy resources by taking the buy back rate below retail for TVA’s customer owned solar systems, effectively making TVA an “anti net-metering utility.” In 2016, TVA quietly let a 300 megawatt wind farm power purchase agreement lapse – a nearly 20% drop in renewable energy purchases. These are all examples of TVA’s movement away from clean, renewable energy.

The Plains and Eastern Clean Line project was the largest renewable energy project proposed for the Southeast. The project would have delivered 3,500 megawatts of exceptionally low-cost, high capacity factor wind energy […]

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1 Comment

  1. Anne Louise Horgan on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at 2:17 pm

    I have been contributing to my local electric co-op’s Green Power Switch for many years.We are part of the TVA system….does this mean that my donations are being reallocated for another purpose? Time to make a call!!