The directors of America’s biggest government utility may be appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. senate, but the federal agency they head appears ready to vote to shutter more of its coal-fired generation over the objections of the White House and the most powerful U.S. senator in the Tennessee Valley.
TVA directors on Thursday will decide the fate of aging coal plants near Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Paradise, Kentucky, which a 6-month environmental study suggests should be shut down over the next four years because the type of base load power produced at the plants are no longer needed or cost effective.
President Trump, who promised during his presidential campaign to revive America’s “beautiful, clean coal” industry, urged TVA this week to “give serious consideration to all factors before voting to close viable power plants, like Paradise #3 in Kentucky!” The tweet was welcomed in Muhlenberg County, where Trump won nearly 72 percent of the vote in the 2016 presidential election and where the Paradise steam plant has been one of the biggest economic engines for more than a half century.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urged TVA to delay any decision on Paradise, which he said is a vital part of Kentucky’s coal industry. McConnell said TVA should wait until the board, which now has seven members, has all nine seats filled.
On the eve of a possible TVA board vote Thursday, community residents and political leaders around the Paradise plant in western Kentucky and the Bull Run fossil plant in Anderson County also appealed to TVA directors not to shut down the power plants.
“The decision to close (the last coal unit at Paradise) would not just be catastrophic financially, but it would displace families, create emotional turmoil in our homes, empty our schools, lower church congregations and close our small businesses,” said Emily Cardner, the CEO of the ACT Christian Academy near the Paradise plant and the spouse of one of the plant workers. “You are holding the life support switch for thousands of people who cannot be here today.”
Similarly in Oak Ridge, Anderson County Commissioner Tracy Wandell said the Bull Run Fossil Plant “is more than just a power plant in our community” and shutting down the facility will cost jobs and tax revenues in the region.
But during a public listening session Thursday before the 7-member TVA board, environmental activists urged TVA to shut down the aging coal plants as TVA has already done at its Watts Bar, John Sevier, Widows Creek, Colbert, Allen and New Johnsonville coal facilities.
“Phasing out expensive and unnecessary coal plants has saved TVA money, while protecting our health and the environment,” said Jonathan Levenshus of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “And new renewable energy purchases are aiding TVA’s economic development mission and bringing more jobs to the region.”
Barbara Kelly, an environmental leader in Chattanooga also affiliated with the Sierra Club, said solar and wind generation are now the cheapest energy resources in many parts of the country and already help support more than 3 million jobs – far more than the number in the coal industry.
“Solar capacity increased almost 70-fold in the last decade so we should be clear: clean energy is not some futuristic notion – it’s a present reality,” Kelly said.
The growth in solar, wind and other so-called distributed or consumer-generated power makes large base load coal plants like Bull Run and Paradise less in demand to meet TVA’s variable power needs, according to TVA’s environmental assessment of Paradise and Bull Run released this week. TVA projects its future power demand will be stagnant or declining even as TVA boosts the power output from its nuclear plants, more customers self-generate power with their own solar panels and a growing number of TVA consumers such as Facebook and Google want only renewable power from TVA.
The TVA study said Paradise and Bull Run don’t operate enough and will require too much expensive maintenance or equipment upgrades to be cost effective for TVA in the long run. The study suggests that Paradise close by 2020 and Bull Run shut down by 2023.
But Ryan Driskill, an attorney in Greenville, Kentucky who reviewed TVA’s environmental assessment, said the study was based upon outdated data on outage rates at Paradise before the plant was updated.
“As members of the TVA board, you cannot do your job making investment decisions relying on old data and a report that doesn’t have the right numbers,” Driskill told the TVA board.
Charles Snavely of the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, said Paradise is critical for “the resiliency, reliability and security of the electric grid.” The Kentucky state House and Senate both passed resolutions Monday urging the TVA board to delay its scheduled vote on the fate of Paradise.
The coal-fired unit at the Paradise Fossil Plant has operated since 1967 along the Green River in Muhlenberg County, an area that was once the country’s top coal producer and was immortalized in a song by singer John Prine in 1971. Federal data show that as recently as 2017 the plant received much of its coal from a mine owned by a subsidiary of Murray Energy Corporation, whose CEO Robert E. Murray has donated to Trump’s campaign.
The Bull Run Fossil plant located on Bull Run Creek near oak Ridge is the only single-generator coal-fired plant in the TVA system and also has been in operation since 1967.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 757-6340