DECATUR, Tenn. – In the past decade, the Tennessee Valley Authority has spent billions of dollars in the East Tennessee region served by Volunteer Electric Cooperative building TVA’s newest nuclear reactor at Watts Bar and starting work on a new power control center near Georgetown.
Local officials have welcomed the TVA investments in the region, but they insist their biggest need from TVA is for more competitive power rates. Wholesale electric rates from TVA, once among the lowest in the country, are now above many neighboring utilities, according to rate comparison studies done by two of the biggest electric coops in the area.
“The Tennessee Valley Authority has done a lot of great things for this part of the country, but their prices kept escalating and their wholesale rates are just not competitive with others in the region at this point,” Rody Blevins, a 38-year utility veteran who has headed Volunteer Energy for the past 15 years. “We’ve met with the TVA board and its leadership and spent a lot of time helping them see how their wholesale rates have increased more than other utilities. Since 2005 when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [FERC] adopted open transmission access to make the electric markets more competitive, [electricity] costs have gone down nationally, but costs have gone up in the TVA region (where such competition does not exist).”
Volunteer Electric Cooperative (VEC), one of the first local power companies to begin buying TVA power in 1935, began exploring its power options for future energy three years ago, Blevins said, and VEC requested proposals for alternative power suppliers earlier this year.
Volunteer Energy, which serves 118,00 customers, combined with North Georgia Electric Membership Corp., which serves more than 101,000 customers, to solicit requests for proposals to meet the power needs of the two local power companies.