The Tennessee Valley Authority is putting a pause on the release of a new long-term power plan to give the federal utility more time to consider changing markets and regulations as it tries to plan how to electrify its seven-state region through 2050.
TVA President Jeff Lyash said Tuesday that the federal utility will take more time this year to prepare the plan.
“We recognized that we wanted to look out farther into the future — out to the year 2050 — and we wanted to consider higher growth scenarios from more electrification and what carbon-constrained futures might look like,” Lyash said during a quarterly earnings call. “We were headed toward issuing the draft … for comment, but we just thought the circumstance warranted a bit of a pause. We wanted to make sure our board of directors had time to digest and comment on the plan, and we’ve had some input late in the process that we want to make sure we really consider.”
Lyash said the rules proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week could require changes in TVA’s approach to building new natural gas plants, which will need to cut carbon emissions by about 90% from existing levels. TVA is building or planning to build up to 8 gigawatts of new natural gas generation at plants in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky to help meet rising power demand and replace the remaining coal plants TVA plans to shut down during the next decade.