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.
(Bellefonte is a nearly finished, scrapped, nearly finished again, scrapped again nuclear plant in Jackson County, Alabama, that, according to five congressmen, has cost TVA $9 billion since 1975 when work began. Last summer, those five congressmen - four from Alabama and our own Tennessee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann - wrote a letter to the effect that they wanted us taxpayers and ratepayers to help pay for the plant again. This time, they want us to subsidize Haney's privatization of nuclear power with as much as $6 billion in government-backed loans and $2 billion in production tax credits. In other words, Other People's Money - mostly ours, to the tune of at least $2.5 billion and maybe as much as $9.5 billion if you count the loan guarantees for which we'll also be on the hook. But we digress )
» Also in mid-November, we got the news that TVA CEO Bill Johnson plans to retire next year.
He'll be 65 in January and, by TVA's telling, in the past six years he's reduced TVA's debt by $3.5 billion - to a mere $24.3 billion, the lowest TVA debt in more than 25 years. He cut 3,000 TVA jobs and thousands of contractor jobs, reducing annual operating and maintenance costs by $800 million. Yes, also in his tenure, TVA made the controversial purchases of a Cessna Citation Excel jet in 2015 for $11.2 million, another jet in 2017 for $10.7 million and a Mercedes Benz-style EC145 helicopter for $6.95 million previously used by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. In case you were wondering, TVA's inspector general said last month that many trips TVA executives made on the utility's executive helicopter were too short to use such aircraft, such as those between Knoxville and Chattanooga. Auditors said it cost $1,160 to make the helicopter trips between airports in the two cities and saved only 15 to 24 minutes.
» The very next day, we learned that Johnson will close out the year with a $5.7 million bonus - incentive pay in TVA speak. His total compensation package, including his $1.05 million salary and $1.3 million in deferred compensation and pension benefits, will give him a tidy sum for the year of $8.1 million, up 21.9 percent from the previous year and making him the highest paid federal employee in the country. TVA said most of its staff will get year-end bonuses averaging more than $14,000 per employee.
» On the day after we learned of the bonuses, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it launched a special investigation at TVA's Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant west of Huntsville after a diver received a high dose of radiation during underwater work close to an equipment pit wall near the pool used to hold spent nuclear fuel.
TVA later determined that a basket of used filters had been moved from the spent fuel pool into a position near the equipment wall, and this was not communicated to the next shift. TVA spokesperson Malinda Hunter said there was no risk and or excessive radiation exposure for the diver or radiation releases that endangered the public.
"Upon receiving the alarm, the diver immediately left the pit and his unintended dose did not exceed regulatory limits," the NRC said in statement.
Feel safer? We don't either.
Nor are we feeling too good about our electric bills.