The Tennessee Valley Authority – the nation’s largest electric utility – may appear far too large an outfit to shift course dramatically or quickly toward a greener, cleaner energy future.
Daily electrical demands anchor the agency to a heavy-duty power system that supplies electricity through nearly 160 power distributors to 9 million people across Tennessee and parts of six surrounding states. The bulk of its electrical energy is produced by huge coal-fired plants, and almost all of the rest comes from big nuclear plants, natural gas units, and hydro-electric turbines on 29 dams.
Keeping those plants operating reliably is more than a full-time job: It’s also the agency’s proud tradition and first priority. Shifting the bureaucratic gears to focus TVA toward a cleaner, more energy-efficient future begs an analogy on an order of magnitude larger than that of turning around an aircraft carrier.
A landmark shift
But a key landmark shift apparently occurred at the TVA’s board meeting last Friday. Prodded by CEO Tom Kilgore, board members committed to a milestone strategic vision of producing 40 percent to 50 percent of the agency’s power from clean energy sources in the next 10 years.
The plan is to make that happen by phasing out its oldest and dirtiest coal plants and relying more on nuclear power and gains in energy efficiency through peak load management and time-of-use rates to all classes of consumers – residential, commercial and industrial.
Smart Grid and off-peak rates
Those rates will be significantly facilitated by new smart-grid capacities both by TVA and local power distributors. Here, the Electric Power Board’s model direct-to-customer fiber-optic capacity will allow customers to use Internet-accessed, remotely controlled meters to take advantage of rate incentives to reduce their appliances’ peak-hour energy consumption.
A collateral TVA goal, and key benefit, is to improve air quality in the Tennessee Valley by removing a large portion of the electric industry’s enormous air pollution load from coal-fire plants. Another major goal/benefit is to reduce coal’s carbon emissions, the principle greenhouse gas.
Both are notable additions to TVA’s list of key target goals. In past years, neither were at the top of the agenda for TVA, nor for many other southern utilities that rely heavily on coal-fired electric plants. Indeed, utilities in southern states and the Ohio Valley have traditionally ranked among the nation’s worst contributors to air pollution. Most, including TVA, resisted installation of scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide in the 1990s and in earlier years of this decade due to the cost, never mind the horrendous air pollution.
Their enormous toxic coal emissions, the major contributors to harmful air pollution and thick smog, cause respiratory disease, lung damage and damage to plants, lakes and rivers.
In recent years, TVA filtered out most of its nitrogen oxide contaminants, but a handful of its oldest, dirtiest coal-fired plants continue to operate without sulfur scrubbers.
Grudging compliance with the EPA’s clean air rules – egregiously delayed by an industry-friendly Bush administration most of this decade – seems now to be giving away, at least in TVA, to an embrace of a cleaner energy future as a matter of a more enlightened, rejuvenated corporate policy.
Efficiency trumps smog
The aim to increase energy efficiency is equally enlightened corporate and economic policy, though it’s now a policy virtually compelled by increasing global recognition of climate change due to greenhouse gases and the development of intensely more competitive economic and energy markets.
In the newly defined near-term future, higher prices for all fossil fuels, coupled with federal and global energy efficiency and emissions regulations and consumer demand, practically dictate a sharp shift toward energy efficiency to control costs and improve the environment.
In the new energy paradigm, the new TVA policy simply conforms to these new realities. For TVA’s management to seek to become a leader in the Southeast in energy efficiency, however, confirms that the agency’s decision-makers are ready to restore TVA’s long neglected mantle of regional and national leadership in the new energy era.
That is a welcome change, one we all can applaud.