Three months after being inaugurated, President Joe Biden is quickly putting his stamp on America’s biggest public power utility by nominating new directors for nearly half of the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The four nominees for the TVA board announced Tuesday will help diversify the 9-member panel and give it more backers of Biden’s green energy policy as the president prepares to host a Summit on the Climate with world leaders on Thursday and Friday.
The board nominations for TVA by the Biden White House include a long-time labor leader in Chattanooga, the former chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore, an Alabama businesswoman who was the first Black female elected chair of the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce and the head of a nonprofit that promotes solar energy and other green power.
If ratified by the U.S. Senate, the nominees would change the makeup of the current TVA board with six white men and one white woman to a new board with five white men, three white women and a Black woman.
The new board would include the most female directors in TVA history and the first elected labor union representative on the part-time board that oversees TVA. Two of the TVA directors also would be from Chattanooga, which is the power headquarters for TVA and where the biggest share of the utility’s 10,000 employees work.