When TVA managers present the utility’s 20-year energy plan to the agency’s board of directors here Thursday, they are expected to call for shutting down several of the agency’s dirtiest coal-fired plants in favor of near-term investments in natural gas generation and, over the long term, more nuclear capacity. They are expected to seek only modest additions of renewable and alternative power sources, and to propose even weaker plans to reduce energy consumption through conservation and energy efficiency programs.
Such a plan would be predictable, and strangely akin to the agency’s last integrated resource plan. But it would also be predictably deficient in its focus on renewable energy, conservation and energy efficiency, though the latter two are by far the safest, cleanest, least costly and most underrated way to meet a substantial portion of the Tennessee Valley’s future demands for electricity.
TVA’s unfortunate lack of enthusiasm for conservation since the late 1980s – when it virtually shut down the nation-leading conservation program it had erected over the previous 15 years – is as predictable as it is lamentable. It owes partly to the agency’s traditional engineering prowess and build-a-plant mindset, and partly to its reliance on the 155 independent distributors of TVA power. These municipal and rural utility managers have long eschewed conservation and energy efficiency programs because they finance their operations by selling electricity – not by helping their customers whittle their power usage.
TVA and its power distributors, organized under the Tennessee Valley Public Power Association, must do better if they are to keep power rates affordable and competitive. Resource and cost trends for nuclear, gas and coal-fired plants make that evident.
The agency has good reason to consider shutting down some of its dirtiest old coal-fired plants – the ones which account for about 7,000 megawatts of power generation capacity, or nearly a quarter of TVA’s mainstay capacity.