PDF: TVA Integrated Resource PlanWHAT'S NEXTAt 6 p.m. Wednesday, TVA will conduct a public briefing and listening session in Knoxville to update the status of its new power plan for the next decade. The public session at the TVA West Tower in downtown Knoxville also is available via the Internet by registering for a webinar at www.tva.com/environment/reports/irp.
With power sales falling and Congress still deadlocked over carbon control legislation, the Tennessee Valley Authority faces an uncertain economic and environmental landscape as it tries to draft its power plans for the next two decades.
"Long-term financial planning is very difficult in this environment," TVA President Tom Kilgore told the TVA board last week, citing the uncertainty as one of the agency's biggest hardships right now. "There are a lot of proposals out there -- everything from renewable portfolio standards to climate control bills."
Knowing what will pass political muster -- and how the Great Recession also may alter future power usage -- makes TVA's current power planning exercise far more difficult than when TVA wrote its last long-term power plan in 1995.
On Wednesday, power planners and advisers will conduct a public briefing and listening session on the development of TVA's new Integrated Resource Plan designed to guide its power generation for the next 20 years. Nearly halfway through the 18-month process for the long-range plan, TVA project manager Randall E. Johnson said TVA wants to hear more public comments on how it should supply power to its seven-state region.
A draft version of the new Integrated Resource Plan is expected to be prepared this spring and, after additional public comments, could be adopted by TVA directors in January.
The newest planning approach is considering more options than the previous integrated resource plan -- Energy Vision 2020 -- completed in 1995.
"There is a lot of uncertainty right now, and I really think that is what TVA is trying to get its arms around right now," said Jack Simmons, president of the Tennessee Valley Public Power Association and a member of the stakeholders review panel for TVA's new Integrated Resource Plan.
Political power battle
President Barack Obama is urging Congress to limit carbon emissions linked with global warming, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Congress are considering other measures to control coal ash disposal and require more wind, solar or biomass generation from TVA and other utilities. But the outlook for such measures appears to be weakened by the Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts in January.
TVA is preparing to add more generation from nuclear power plants in Tennessee and Alabama, a natural gas plant in Upper East Tennessee and wind turbines in the Midwest, rather than build new coal-fired power plants.
TVA is building a combined-cycle, gas-fired power plant near Rogersville, Tenn., for power generation by 2012 and adding a second reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tenn., by 2013. TVA also is studying whether to finish a reactor at the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Hollywood, Ala., as soon as 2017.
TVA has contracted for up to 1,265 megawatts of additional wind power from new turbines to be built in Illinois, Kansas and the Dakotas. The turbines could generate more power than one of the Sequoyah nuclear reactors -- enough for two cities the size of Chattanooga. But Mr. Kilgore said that power only will come when the wind blows and will have to be transported over new transmission corridors of up to 1,100 miles.
"Those sites are a long distance away, and we've got some work to do to get that power delivered," he said.
Recessionary relapse
The economic slowdown has cut the demand for any type of TVA power. After rising just 0.4 percent in 2008, TVA electricity sales plunged by a record 7.1 percent in 2009. Earlier this month, TVA disclosed that power consumption in the Tennessee Valley dropped another 4 percent in the first quarter of fiscal 2010, and the utility expects overall power sales to drop this year for the second consecutive year.
"We've had a downturn with the economy, but I definitely think that demand growth will come back," Mr. Simmons said.
However, the future growth in power consumption may be slower than in the past if consumers adopt more of the energy efficiency and alternative production methods being encouraged by the Obama administration. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects electricity consumption will grow at an annual pace of 1 percent through 2035 -- about half the historic growth rate in the previous 25 years.
TVA officials insist new energy generation will be needed to offset the expected end of coal-fired generation at some of the utility's oldest fossil plants that were built more than a half century ago.
"These plants are old, inefficient and will be hard to maintain with coming carbon controls," Mr. Simmons said. "You are going to have to have something to replace fossil production."