Last week, you may have read that the Tennessee Valley Authority had a record year in 2018 for helping the Tennessee Valley land new economic development.
Development to help the depressed South grow was one of the mandates given to TVA 85 years ago when President Roosevelt created the New Deal agency, and this year TVA is touting that it worked on valley corporate investments tallying more than $11 billion and bringing about 65,000 jobs to the seven-state region.
How does TVA do this? The federal utility won’t tell us the specifics, but here’s a hint: In a study earlier this year by Synapse Energy Economics Inc., consultants found that TVA’s industrial customers enjoyed a nearly 20 percent decline in the price of electricity from 2011 to 2016. Meanwhile, we regular old residential electric users have seen our bills go up an average of 50 percent since 2011.
But wait, there’s more.
» In mid-November, TVA announced it had written off the last $764 million of debt on its Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant, where TVA invested billions in construction expenses, interest payments and security costs before scrapping the project and eventually agreeing – conditionally – to sell the vacant plant and its 1,300-acre riverfront site to 73-year-old financier and Chattanooga entrepreneur Franklin Haney. Just a few days before that, TVA granted Haney a few weeks’ extension to complete his $111 million purchase of the plant. The original deadline was Nov. 30.