TVA, remember your mission

Tennessee Valley Authority's sign is seen at the downtown complex.
Tennessee Valley Authority's sign is seen at the downtown complex.

Throughout the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, signed into law 82 years ago this week, are passages written to require TVA to seek low-cost power for its customers.

Variously, it says "the objective [is] that power shall be sold at rates as low as are feasible"; that power shall be sold to secure "revenue returns which will permit domestic and rural use at the lowest possible rates"; and that TVA should be a "national leader" in "low-cost power."

It's that message Tennessee Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker wanted to remind TVA officials about during a hearing on the utility's long-range power plans on Monday in Knoxville. Both senators warned that pursuing high-cost, less reliable wind and other renewable energy would be going against its mission.

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Tennessee senators caution TVA about 'romance' with renewables

Alexander noted that TVA's reliance in recent years on nuclear and hydro generation, along with natural gas and cleaner coal plants, has allowed smog and particulates emissions to drop by more than 70 percent from peak levels some 30 years ago.

Indeed, TVA already has or will retire 33 of the 59 coal units it once operated. In its place, natural gas plants are likely to be built, and a small solar farm already has been bought in "a very attractive deal."

While doing so, TVA's still respectable power costs, once among the lowest in the nation, have risen to 14th lowest for industrial customers and 38th lowest for residential customers, according to the Energy Information Administration.

"It's clearly moving in the right direction and, in my view, our rates are competitive," TVA President Bill Johnson said.

It makes sense, then, to continue that trend and not pursue more expensive sources such as wind, which even one wind producer admitted would require the use of the federal wind generation subsidy to come close to the average price TVA charges its wholesalers for power.

Alexander and Corker were pointed in their remarks.

"If nuclear is zero [carbon and air] emissions and wind is more expensive," Alexander said, "and you don't need wind most of the time, why would you buy it?"

Corker said a glance at Germany, with which he is intimately familiar from his negotiations from Volkswagen and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, finds evidence of "a truly idiotic energy plan."

That country has seen its electricity rates more than triple those that TVA charges with its decision to replace nuclear with wind and solar power, he said. The subsequent energy prices, he said, have prompted German companies to locate in the Tennessee Valley to make products and send back to the European country.

When and if wind and solar power -- without being subsidized -- are able to equal or better the cost of TVA power produced by natural gas, nuclear, hydro and clean coal, that would be the time to invest more in them. To do so before would be forgetting TVA's original mission to its custo-

mers.

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