NASHVILLE – U.S. Senate Democratic hopeful Phil Bredesen on Tuesday slammed President Trump’s budget proposal calling for the sale of TVA’s transmission network, warning it will prove “bad for Tennessee” and the federal utility’s customers.
“That network is a valuable asset that has been paid for by TVA’s customers over almost a century,” the former governor said in a statement. “It is efficient and reliable, and this sale makes no sense if you’re thinking about what Tennesseans need, rather than how to increase the profits of some corporation.”
On Monday, President Trump unveiled a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan. The administration says the Tennessee Valley Authority and similar federal agencies should be given authority to divest their transmission assets “where the agencies can demonstrate an increase in value from the sale would optimize the taxpayer value for federal assets.”
Trump said selling the government-owned transmission lines would help raise funds to pay for other infrastructure projects and could spur more spending by the private sector on the electricity grid. TVA, which provides power to Tennessee and parts of six other states, has some 16,000 transmission lines.
Bredesen warned that any corporation “that pays billions of dollars for an asset like the TVA network is going to get that money back, plus a profit, somehow. That ‘somehow’ is TVA’s customers. I’m not always against privatization; sometimes it can make sense. In this case it’s a very bad move.”