TVA president Bill Johnson speaks during a TVA board meeting in February.Since the Tennessee Valley Authority helped electrify the South in the 1930s, demand for electricity has typically grown at a faster pace than the growth rate of the overall economy.
But coming out of the Great Recession, there’s been a power shift in the Tennessee Valley. Even as households and businesses use more electric-powered computers, televisions, phones and other gadgets than ever before, electricity demand is barely growing.
In homes and industries across the region, electrical appliances, equipment and heaters are becoming more energy efficient while power controls and smart grids are allowing customers and utilities to better manage their electricity usage.
“In our long-range plans coming out of the credit crisis (in 2008 and 2009), we’ve seen a fundamental shift in the growth of electricity,” TVA Chief Financial Officer John Thomas told industry analysts last week. “We’re looking at a gross, growth rate of roughly 1 percent, which is far below the 3 to 4 percent we saw before the credit crisis.”
TVA projects the amount of electricity it sells won’t return to the pre-recession levels of 2007 for perhaps another decade following a drop in power usage in the economic downturn and a sluggish recovery in power consumption since the recession ended.