The Tennessee Valley Authority will be receiving only half the power from its biggest coal-fired plant for several days because of a transformer fire Monday night.
A fire at the main transformer disabled one of the two units at TVA’s Cumberland Fossil Plant northwest of Nashville, TVA spokesman Scott Brooks said Tuesday.
The Unit 1 transformer fire is the third blaze at a TVA coal plant and is the fourth coal unit to be knocked out of service by an unexpected outage in less than eight months.
TVA President Tom Kilgore said TVA’s aging plants sometimes show their age – and prove costly to fix or lose power at key times.
Fires at the John Sevier plant last December and the Shawnee plant in February, combined with a boiler outage at Widows Creek Unit 5, have cut power generation and forced costly repairs for TVA’s fossil division during the current fiscal year.
“Our equipment gets stressed under the heat just like everything else,” Kilgore said Tuesday. “Thankfully, no one was hurt at Cumberland because the fire was outside the plant.”
Fortunately as well for TVA, the Cumberland plant has an extra transformer to help convert the energy from the plant from 25,000 volts to the 500,000-volt transmission lines into Cumberland City.
“I think we’ll be back in a few days or a week or so,” Kilgore said. “We will meet the demand, but this does take 1,200 megawatts off of our production at a key time.”
Brook said TVA engineers still are trying to determine the cause of the transformer fire, but plant workers are focusing on connecting the spare transformer to resume power distribution as soon as possible.