Will TVA change its ways?

Leaders of the Tennessee Valley Authority, an agency long detached from its founding vision as an environmental steward and a powerful force for progressive change in the utility industry, are suddenly talking about shifting direction and recovering TVA’s abandoned sense of mission. That would be a smart and wonderful change, to be sure. But it would take a commitment and focus that the current seven-member board, based on its recent history, seems ill-equipped to deliver. How, indeed, would it begin?

TVA does, after all, face some huge environmental and financial problems. It’s under a cloud, and deservedly so, for a 1.1 billion-gallon coal-ash spill at the Kingston power plant, the largest toxic spill in the nation’s history. It may cost more than $800 million and take a year to clean it up.

A second spill, at the Widow’s Creek plant near Chattanooga, barely a week later added to its woes. And a third spill, an inexplicably deliberate release of toxic reservoir sludge from an upper Ocoee dam, coated one of the South’s most renowned white-water rivers with thick, fish-killing slime just a week after the Widow’s Creek spill.

Then there’s a new North Carolina federal court judgment declaring TVA’s lung-damaging pollution from four of its dirtier power plants a public nuisance. The judge’s order demanded installment of expensive emissions controls — this for plants that should have received scrubbers any time since the Clean Air Act amendments of 1977 that TVA has long and unreasonably fought.

TVA’s financial burdens are as legend as its excessive air pollution. The agency is saddled with a massive debt of more than $25 billion, mainly for a notoriously over-reaching nuclear plant plan in the 1970s. Just six of more than dozen projected reactors were completed; the other partially built plants were written off to debt.

It was that debt, and an itch to generate and sell more rather than less electricity, that prompted TVA in 1988 to jettison an aggressive energy conservation program that, in just 10 years, had become the nation’s premier conservation and renewable energy program.

Turning the TVA ship around now to focus again on conservation, renewable energy and cleaner coal power plants would require not just another tedious overhaul of the agency’s culture. It also would require a serious commitment from both TVA’s executive leadership and the nine-member board — a board known for its Republican bankers who, as one prominent critic notes, are more accustomed to checking TVA’s balance sheet and then playing golf.

In fact, in a meeting attended by just seven of the nine members, the board voted by a 4-3 margin last week — to the expressed chagrin of Tennessee’s senators — to install Mike Duncan as the agency’s new chairman. The vote came after the 58-year-old lawyer lost his recent bid for a second term as president of the Republican National Committee — a post not associated with energy-efficiency experts known for compelling desire to restore TVA’s environmental stewardship and conservation and renewable energy programs.

Still, board member Dennis Bottorff proposed last week to revamp TVA’s strategic vision to accommodate new national demands for energy efficiency and environmental responsibility. His suggestion prompted TVA president Tom Kilgore to acknowledge the agency’s black eyes for its spills and air pollution.

“Many have said that TVA should be a role model for the nation, rather than seeming to resist environmental initiatives,” he said. “I’m willing to accept that challenge.”

TVA should embrace that challenge. Reconstituting conservation and renewable energy programs would serve TVA ratepayers and the national interest. TVA also should take to heart the long ignored Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act of 1978. It mandates co-generation hookups with small independent power producers and commercial and residential renewable energy producers through interchange meters connected to the power grid. Few people know about that option.

Load management, power cycling and more rate options to encourage off-peak electric use also would be helpful. TVA also should quit buying coal from suppliers who practice mountain-top removal mining. And it should change its rate incentives to encourage renewables, rather than subsidizing its externalized pollution costs of coal-based power.

These are all big but desirable adjustments. The question is whether TVA will commit to them.