.
Would ‘Green’ Movement
Have Pulled TVA’s Plug?
Region ’s Health, Well-Being
Would Have Languished Under
Existing Environmental Policies
An Analysis by Tom Kuennen
for
The Greening Earth Society
Arlington, Virginia
September, 1999
.
Executive Summary
During the Great Depression, the Tennessee Valley region of the east-central
United States was even worse off than the rest of the country in terms of average
income, public health, living conditions, education and economic opportunity.
But the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority - created in 1933 by an Act
of Congress - built dams and provided low-cost electricity, which led to an overall
improvement in the region’s society and economy, boosting incomes, bolstering public
health, and fostering growth of capital and economic opportunity.
In following years, TVA has been a partner in the region’s progress, building lowcost, coal-fired and nuclear power plants to supplement its hydroelectric power;
developing active recreational areas and reservoirs which provide cash inflow and local
jobs; expanding its electricity transmission and distribution system to keep the power
flowing; and participating in the life of the Tennessee Valley in many other ways.
But it is a great irony that under federal environmental policies developed under
Republican and Democratic leadership since the Carter administration, the TVA never
could have come into being.
TVA’s dams and its fossil and nuclear-fueled power plants would have met
insurmountable environmental barriers to construction and operation, especially
because of federal ownership. Its recreational and reservoir developments would have
been curtailed or eliminated. Its transmission and distribution system expansion would
have been fought successfully.
The great benefits TVA has provided the people of the Tennessee Valley since
1933 would never have come to be.
Introduction
As the United States slipped further into the Great Depression, nowhere else in
the country fared worse than did Appalachia and what is now the service area of the
Tennessee Valley Authority P A ) .
NAs mostly rural service area - the state of Tennessee and parts of adjoining
states - already had lagged the rest of the country in public health, nutrition, income
levels, and economic potential. And with the coming of the Great Depression after 1929,
the people of the Tennessee Valley could have seen their opportunity for a better life
slip out of sight.
Instead, the low-cost electricity generated by the federally created and owned
TVA enabled residents of the Tennessee Valley to progress upward from the
widespread poverty, hunger, disease, underemployment, low literacy levels, and outmigration prevalent in 1933, when TVA was established.
But, ironically, had today's bipartisan federal and state environmental policies
been in force back then, the Tennessee Valley Authority certainly would never have
been established. And this region and the United States would have been much worse
off for it.
What happened?
Tennessee Valley in desperate straits
Even by Depression-era standards, the Tennessee Valley was in desperate
straits on May 18, 1933, when the Tennessee Valley Authority was created by an Act of
Congress.
Over half the population lived on farms. Much of the land had been overfarmed,
its soil was eroded and depleted, and agricultural yield and farm income had
plummeted.
Enormous amounts of timber had been overharvested with accompanying
erosion. It is thought that fires burned 10 percent of the Tennessee Valley's wooded
areas each year. Annual flooding of the Tennessee River and its tributaries caused
great suffering.
Public health was at an intolerable level, with malnutrition, malaria and yellow
fever too common.
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A romantic paradigm held by today's environmental movement holds that
mankind should be more connected with the soil, that humanity should eschew energyconsumptive lifestyles and conduct ourselves in a more "sustainable" fashion that takes
from nature only what we need.
For example, AI Gore writes in his 1992 tome, Earth in the Balance, 'l[O]ur
civilization is holding ever more tightly to its habit of consuming larger and larger
quantities every year of coal, oil, fresh air and water, trees, topsoil, and the thousand
other substances we rip from the crust of the earth, transforming them into not just the
sustenance and shelter we need, but much more that we don't need."
Ironically, a kind of subsistence existence was all too typical of the lives of many
Tennessee Valley residents during their darkest hour. It was only after cheap electricity
became available that wealth began to form in the region's economy, thereby leveraging
natural resource utilization, boosting farm productivity, and adding value through
manufacture.
Near-medieVal conditions
"There are districts in West Virginia, East Tennessee, Kentucky, where the mode
of material existence is not different from that of the first settlers," wrote British observer
Odette Keun in 1937. "A very large percentage of [farms] had kitchens with ovens
burning wood, the poor cooking in pots and pans over a little fire on the hearth, as in the
Middle Ages; that they were lighted by dim, smoking, smelly, oil lamps, that the washing
of clothes was done by hand in antiquated tubs; that the water was brought into the
house by the women and children, from wells invariably situated at inconvenient and
tiring distances."
"Of the 50 million horsepower required by farms, 61 per cent is still furnished by
animals and only 6 per cent by electric stations," Keun wrote. "About 90 per cent of the
citizens on farms, say the statistics, do not have the lighting and the simple comforts
that have become a commonplace in most middle-class dwellings in urban
communities.
I'
TVA harnessed the rivers by building its famous dams. The dams controlled
floods, improved navigation, and generated electricity. TVA also developed fertilizers,
taught farmers how to improve crop yields, and helped replant forests, control forest
fires, and improve habitat for wildlife and fish.
During the Second World War, TVA built dams in record time to provide
electricity to serve aluminum plants for war materiel. During this time, important
elements of the Manhattan Project were devised at the burgeoning ordnance plant at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. By war's end, TVA had constructed a 650-mile navigation
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channel the length of the Tennessee River, and had become the nation's largest
electricity supplier.
Low-cost electricity brings change
The most dramatic change in life came from low-cost, abundant electricity
generated by TVA dams. Electric lights and modern appliances made life easier and
farms more productive. Electricity also drew industries into the region, providing
desperately needed jobs.
Statistics show that while about 90 percent of city residents in the region had
electricity by the 1930s, only 10 percent of rural residents did. Privately owned power
companies said that it was too expensive to build power lines to isolated rural dwellers,
and that they were too poor to afford them anyway.
The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the initiatives President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt embraced under his New Deal plan to bring the United States out of
the Great Depression. TVA was conceived as a completely distinct type of federal
enterprise or agency.
Roosevelt felt that the government should supply electricity to the remote regions
if private enterprise would not. To promote purchase of consumer goods, TVA
established the Electric Home and Farm Authority (EHFA) to help farmers buy major
electric appliances, using low-cost loans to buy appliances through local power
companies and electric cooperatives.
Roosevelt wanted more consumer goods for the Tennessee Valley. That stands
in contrast with the contemporary environmental movement, whose philosophy is voiced
by Vice President AI Gore, who denigrates consumerism in Earth in the Balance. "Our
industrial civilization makes us a ... promise," Gore writes, "[that] the pursuit of
happiness and comfort is paramount, and the consumption of an endless stream of
shiny new products is encouraged as the best way to succeed in that pursuit."
The people of the Tennessee Valley are fortunate that federal public policy did
not oppose such "shiny new products'' when electrification came to the valley.
Refrigeration, for example, brought vast public health and economic benefits to the
region. Before TVA and refrigeration,fresh meat was available to farmers only during
the few cold winter months. One estimate is that before TVA and refrigeration, in four
Southern states, loss from spoilage of pork alone added up to 25 percent of the value of
all hogs slaughtered on farms.
Because many farmers still were too poor to afford refrigerators, EHFA promoted
large walk-in coolers to farmers, the cost of which could be borne by a group of farmers.
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Smaller units also were available for home use. Construction of the larger units
generated business, eliminated food loss from spoilage, and improved the farmers'
diets, according to Keun.
But in providing low-cost energy, TVA did much more than distribute appliances.
It provided the basis for regional economic development that brought much higher
levels of public health and economic prosperity to areas mired in an economic
backwater.
Today'spolicies would have abotted W A
On July 5, 1999, President Bill Clinton launched his "New Markets" tour by
visiting eastern Kentucky in the Appalachian Mountains. Clinton visited eastern
Kentucky to highlight economic distress in Appalachia. A host of corporate and public
agency projects were announced that day, all of which are intended to spur economic
growth. Just over two weeks before, Vice President Gore visited his birthplace in central
Tennessee to launch his year 2000 presidential bid. At his June 16 speech in Carthage,
in the foothills of the Appalachians, Gore recalled his mother at the turn of the century in
Tennessee, "a poor girl when poor girls were not supposed to dream." But he went on
to describe today's "strongest economy in the history of the United States."
What neither politician said, though, was that today's environmental policies - as
embraced by Clinton/Gore and preceding Republican administrations - hamper coal
mining, resource development and the tobacco industry, and have put those industries
at risk, hurting regional economies in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Moreover, virtually every component of today's TVA would have been prohibited
from development under current federal environmental policies. Despite its dedication to
the health of economically disadvantaged citizens and social equity, today's
environmental movement would have blocked W A at every turn, with disastrous
results.
For example, today's environmental movement wants U.S. government policy to
discourage both hydro-generated and coal-fired electricity. Hydroelectric power is to be
suppressed because of its ecological impact to rivers and their valleys. Coal combustion
is to be suppressed because it is presumed that the resulting emissions of carbon
dioxide will trigger apocalyptic global warming and will lead to the spread of insectborne diseases, such as malaria.
Had such policies been in force during the Great Depression, they only would
have perpetuated the abysmal public health conditions - including widespread malaria of the Tennessee Valley at that time. Instead, low-cost electricity led to economic
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growth and accompanying rises in the level of public health, and the suppression of
malaria.
The "environmental justice" card - by which public works and industrial projects
can be blocked on the pretext of their violating federal civil rights law -would have been
played to block TVA projects. Yet, without TVA, the region's potential losses in
economic deprivation, diminished public health, and unfulfilled human lives would have
been catastrophic.
TVA's 29 hydroelectric dams never would have been built under current or
recent administrations, given their support of the environmental movement and the
movement's hostility to dams, hydroelectric power and water projects.
0
TVA's 11 fossil-fueled plant sites - with their 59 operating units - certainly
never would have been permitted in federal TVA authorization under the Clinton/Gore
administration, considering its many-faceted opposition to coal-fired electric power. But,
in 1994, those coal-fired facilities accounted for nearly three-quarters of TVA's electric
generat ion.
0
It's also fair to ask, would a Republican administration have promoted federal
development and ownership of these coal-fired plants? Probably not, considering that
President George Bush signed the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate
Change, or "Rio Treaty," in 1992. When the Rio Treaty was subsequently ratified by the
Senate, the United States pledged to use voluntary, non-binding measures to limit
greenhouse gas emissions. The treaty also is the foundation of 1997's Kyoto Protocol,
which places binding measures on developed nations only. Such measures take dead
aim at low-cost, coal-fired generation of electricity.
TVA's three nuclear units at two sites never would have been permitted
under federal ownership of TVA, given the eclipse of nuclear electricity generation
under current and previous administrations.
0
0
TVA's historic programs to raise the living standards of its rural customers
through provision of transmission lines, inexpensive electricity, and consumer goods
would have been greatly altered or truncated, given the environmental movement's
suspicion of power line and electrical distribution grid construction, low-cost power in
general, and "self-indulgent conspicuous" consumption.
Instead of low-cost power spurring the regional economy, electricity in the
Tennessee Valley would be considerably more expensive, given the "Green
movement's" support of a carbon tax, as articulated by Vice President Gore in Earth in
the Balance, and the movement's support of the Kyoto Protocol.
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Ironically, it was a Democratic administration -that of President Jimmy Carter
(1977-1981) - that launched Project Energy Independence, which encouraged use of
low-cost, domestic energy reserves such as coal, as national energy policy. His 1978
Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act mandated conversion of industrial boilers to coal
and prohibited the use of oil or natural gas in new electric generating plants.
The Kyoto Protocol would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent
below their 1990 level by 2008-2012. This would require an approximate 40 percent cut
in fuel consumption from projected levels by then. Analysts agree that significant carbon
taxes are the only effective way to attain this phenomenal and economically devastating
cut in emissions. And, if successful, other environmental and Clinton administration
policies to cut emissions of ultrafine particulate matter, ozone and nitrous oxide (NOx)
compounds also would substantially drive up the cost of low-cost, coal-fired electricity in
the Tennessee Valley.
The result would be diminished manufacturing, depressed wages, cash outflows
due to importation of needed goods from elsewhere, and continued rural migration to
overcrowded urban centers along the Atlantic Seaboard and in the Southeast and
Midwest. The coal mining industry would be further suppressed throughout Appalachia.
As a result, the travel and recreation sectors would be pressed to provide more jobs, but
they too would have been put at risk.
That's because TVA's job- and pleasure-providing recreational projects
would never have been developed as an adjunct to W A ' s water projects. Instead, in line
with current, environmentally acceptable, passive-use recreational policies, and lacking
state and local initiatives, any federally sponsored recreational areas would more
closely resemble exclusive, limited-development, limited-access projects such as Utah's
Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument.
0
Lack of reservoirs would have precluded water recreation, killing off an entire
regional industry. Not only the fishermen, motorboats and jet skis would be gone, but so
too would be restaurant, housekeeping, boating, fishing and bait shop employment.
Prosperity-bringing federal highway programs such as the Appalachian
Development Highway System (ADHS) - authorized in 1965 and still under construction
- probably would not have been authorized had the environmental movement been in
ascendancy, considering the movement's preference for "sustainable" transportation
over conventional highways and its opposition to constructing highways in wild areas.
0
It's safe to surmise that had current environmental policies - as supported by
presidential administrations of the past two decades - been in force in 1933, there
would have been no Tennessee Valley Authority. Instead, perhaps, a variety of federal
subsidy or entitlement programs might have been enacted and life in the Tennessee
Valley would not have improved the way it did under TVA.
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TVA the engine, the anchor
The Tennessee Valley Authority is both engine and anchor for the economy of
Tennessee and parts of Appalachia. TVA - a federal government-owned corporation generates electricity, manages water resources for flood control, navigation and
recreation, and directly and indirectly boosts economic development for the region.
W A is the largest power corporation in the United States, yearly producing more
than 131 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. TVA operates coal-fired, nuclear, pumpedstorage and hydroelectric plants, and owns and maintains extensive networks to
transmit power and handle telecommunications.
TVA's region overlaps but is not conterminous with what we call Appalachia.
However, they share many of the same geographic, economic and social challenges
that have resulted in parts of each region lagging the rest of the nation in economic
growth.
The Appalachian Regional Commission defines Appalachia as an area of 406
counties, including all of West Virginia and parts of twelve other states, with a
population of 22.2 million. It's a vast area, extending more than a thousand miles from
the southwestern part of New York to northeast Mississippi, and includes all or parts of
West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
TVA's service area covers 80,000 square miles of southeastern states, including
all of Tennessee and parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia
and Kentucky. The U S . Congress passed legislation in 1959 to make the TVA power
system self-financing, so TVA has paid its own way since.
No TVA dams under environmental policies
Its eminence in fossil power notwithstanding, TVA is most closely associated with
hydroelectric power and dams. When N A was established as a federal agency by
Congress in 1933, one of its primary functions was to provide flood control, improve
navigation and produce electric power for the Tennessee Valley through the
construction of multipurpose dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries.
Today, TVA has 29 conventional dams - along with its Raccoon Mountain
pumped-storage facility - producing electricity on the Tennessee River and its
tributaries. In addition, four ALCOA dams on the Little Tennessee and eight U.S. Army
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Corps of Engineers dams on the Cumberland River contribute to the TVA power
system.
"Hydropower is America's leading renewable energy resource. Of all the
renewable energy sources, hydropower is the most reliable, efficient, and economical,"
proclaims TVA in its official literature. But that still wouldn't justify it to the environmental
community or even to the Clinton/Gore administration. It's clear that TVA's 29
hydroelectric dams never would have been built in recent years because creation of
reservoirs - with unavoidable damage to habitat - is politically impossible.
Instead, just the opposite is happening. In July 1999, the Edwards Dam on the
Kennebec River in Maine was the first-ever hydroelectric dam demolished under federal
orders. Seeing the demolition as a precedent for other projects, especially in the West,
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said, "This has fixated the attention of river
communities across the nation."
Moreover, President Clinton's June 3, 1999, Executive Order, "Greening the
Government Through Efficient Energy Management," does not include hydropower in its
definition of renewable energy and imposes an additional federal certification process
on hydropower in federal purchases of electricity.
While hydropower is the only renewable source of electricity able to provide
power in practical quantities and on demand, dams are opposed on the grounds that
they choke rivers, limit fish migration and pose hazards to water users. Few, if any,
future dams will be constructed because of the lack of suitable sites and their
interference with fish migration. And, under the U.S. Energy Policy Act, many existing
hydroelectric dams face daunting relicensing challenges.
Coal fuels bulk of TVA power
if the federally owned TVA dams would never have been authorized under
current environmental policy, neither would have TVA's shift to coal-fired power plants
during World War I1 and through the 1950s. Thus TVA would never have supplied the
power that helped win the war and bring the prosperity that followed. Instead, the Green
movement's emphases on electricity conservation, power generation using exotic
renewable technologies, increasingly restrictive emission control efforts, and strong
support of the Kyoto Protocol which demands reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions, guarantee that coal-fired electricity would not have become part of TVA's
power mix.
TVA began its fossil fuel-fired power plant construction program in the 1940s.
Today it has 59 operating units at 11 plant sites throughout the Tennessee Valley. In
1994, fossil fuel-fired plants produced 92.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity,
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Page 9 of 12
accounting for 73 percent of N A s generation. N A is also the largest single utility
purchaser of coal in the United States, buying about 40 million tons per year. That's four
percent of U S . steam coal production. WAScost for coal is about $1.1 billion annually,
it reports.
In addition to utilizing low-sulfur coals and the installing modern pollution control
equipment throughout its system, TVA demonstrated the competitive operation of
atmospheric fluidized bed combustion (AFBC) at its Shawnee Fossil Plant. This is an
advanced coal burning process that utilizes coal in a cost-effective and environmentally
acceptable manner.
Coal plants are a very important part of TVA's generating, supplying power to
159 distributors serving more than 8 million customers. TVA-generated electricity travels
across 17,000 miles of transmission lines. These lines carry power to customers in parts
of seven states.
Nuclear power and TVA
If TVA's hydro- and coal-powered electricity production had never been launched
under current environmental policies, certainly nuclear would never have been
developed either, even though it is the one power source with the statistically safest
record.
TVA Nuclear operates two different types of nuclear power plants at three sites.
Its Sequoyah and Watts Bar Nuclear Plants are based on a Pressurized Water Reactor
(PWR) design, while the Browns Ferry plant is based on a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR)
design.
Nuclear generation accounts for about 22 percent of the nation's electricity
supply, but its future is uncertain due to public resistance to the construction of new
nuclear generating plants. Complicating this future is the coming retirement of plants
nearing the end of their life spans, and the reluctance of the electric power industry to
build new "nukes" in the face of widespread public resistance and the politics exploiting
that resistance.
Industry analysts at Resource Data International, Inc., predict that 25 percent or
more of the nation's nuclear generating capacity will be retired by the year 2015.
Because of the inadequacy of exotic "renewable" technologies (coupled with the
suppression of hydropower), nearly all of this shortfall in capacity will be borne by new
natural gas- and coal-fired power plants, according to the Energy Information
Administration. EIA is an independent data reporting and analysis service within the
U.S. Department of Energy.
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Diminished recreation opportunities
The environmental movement's philosophies - because they so influence today's
public policy - indicate that not only would the Tennessee Valley Authority not have
been established, but that the wild and natural areas left undeveloped or unflooded in
TVA's absence would not have been developed for recreational purposes, even if set
aside as federal preserves. This lack of recreational development in an area with few
other economic alternatives would have been devastating and certainly would have
accelerated outmigration to East Coast and Midwestern urban areas, thereby
encouraging urban sprawl and overcrowding, two other environmental concerns.
As a part of its mission, TVA manages 100 public recreation areas that offer
opportunities for boating, hunting, fishing, hiking, swimming and camping. This
recreation adds to the local economies because, each year, visitors to TVA lakes
contribute $1.25 billion to the economy of the Tennessee Valley. Pre-eminent among
these sites is the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area, a 170,000-acre
national recreation and environmental education area located in western Kentucky and
Tennessee. It attracts more than 2.2 million visits a year and is the centerpiece of a
$400 million regional tourism industry.
There can be no question that Tennessee's economy benefits from high levels of
recreational public use and visitation. However, Clinton/Gore Administration policy
reflects Green philosophy and would limit, not expand, public contact with and visitation
to federally owned and managed natural areas. For example, new plans for the Grand
Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks will restrict public parking and make
access more difficult for time-pressed vacationers. Plans for Utah's new, 1.9 million-acre
Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument - which effectively forestall resource
utilization, such as mining low-sulfur coal - greatly limit development for visitors, in
essence keeping most of the vast tract free of humans.
In November 1998, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management released a master
plan that would manage more than a million acres as "primitive" areas, only permitting
wilderness use. Another 500,000 acres would be preserved as "outback" with
somewhat less-restrictive controls: no new paved roads, no major parking lots, and no
concessions, nor would recreational vehicle hookups be established. In limiting casual
access to such areas, vast regions in effect will be off-limits to persons who lack the
time or resources to mount a major wilderness trip, i.e. middle- and lower-income
citizens. That this is an elitist attitude is not lost to neutral observers. Fortunately it is an
end-of-the-century scenario. It will not have to be endured by residents of the region
served by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
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TVA and the future
Now, as ever, the region's future is joined at the waist to TVA and its ability to
supply low-cost power. For example, at Oak Ridge, it is proposed that Congress fund a
110-acre parcel as the site of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), a massive $1.3
billion neutron-scatteringfacility for research in fields ranging from medicine to structural
biology to superconductivity. This is according to Edge, a TVA publication.
According to estimates by the University of Tennessee's Center for Business and
Economic Research, the facility would support more than 2,300 jobs and generate $3.6
million in state sales tax annually throughout its construction phase. Its ongoing
operations would create 1,589 jobs and pour $2.2 million per year into state coffers. It
will also help justify continued operation of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in an
era when funds for defense and federal R&D are on the wane.
ORNL's impact on the area is immense. In 1997, ORNL provided direct or
contract employment for a total of 14,500 Tennesseans across 20 eastern counties.
Through its subcontracting and technology-partnership programs, ORNL indirectly
benefits countless others. "The DOE Oak Ridge programs have been the force that
drives the East Tennessee economy," says Joe Lenhard, a former DOE administrator
and local economic development activist. "You're talking about close to two billion fresh
dollars coming into East Tennessee annually through Oak Ridge; it has an incredible
economic impact."
No 'digital economy' without coal
A new Digital Economy - in which "telecommuting" and interconnected computer
systems ostensibly minimize the need for fossil-fueled, polluting transportation, and
encourage development of businesses outside of sprawling urban areas - is held up as
a paradigm for sustainable economic growth by the environmental movement.
"I want to extend our prosperity to the unskilled and underprivileged -to
Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, to our farms and inner cities -to all who have
been left behind," presidential-candidateGore said in a campaign speech in
Manchester, New Hampshire in June1999. "We are just beginning to reap the gains of
the Information Age. I want to move America forward, toward a horizon of boundless
growth, high technology, and unleashed creativity."
In 1998, Gore described how life in a remote farming village near Chincehros,
Peru, changed when an Internet service provider set up a link for 50 peasant families.
"The village leaders formed an on-line partnership with an international export company,
which arranged for its vegetables to be shipped and sold in New York," he said. "There
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are countless micro-entrepreneurswhose quality of life and incomes would change
dramatically overnight if they had access to the same tools."
But the digital economy will never come to Appalachia (or anywhere else) if fossil
fuel use - and especially coal-fired electricity - is suppressed by environmental and
climate change initiatives. That's because new research sponsored by The Greening
Earth Society indicates the Internet and other information technologies will increase
domestic and world demand for electricity in ways undreamed only a year or two ago.
A preliminary study performed by Mills.McCarthy Associates shows that in the
United States alone, electricity use by the Internet has grown from zero in 1989 to 8
percent of all U.S. electricity consumption in 1999. It may be responsible for one-half to
two-thirds of all the growth in U.S. electricity demand in the last decade - and over half
of U.S. electricity is generated from coal.
There is no way that this additional demand can be met without a tremendous
increase in coal utilization. Instead, environmental conventionalwisdom and the
Clinton/Gore administration is attempting to quell coal use by restricting carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gas emissions rationalizingthat doing so will forestall climate
change. But that's not stopping TVA from meeting the power demands of the future
while using fossil fuels and incorporating the environmentaltechnologies of today.
As the electric-utility industry moves toward deregulation,TVA is preparing to
compete with other utilities. TVA has cut operating costs by nearly $800 million a year,
reduced its workforce by more than half, increased the generating capacity of its power
plants, stopped building nuclear facilities, and developed a plan to meet the energy
needs of the Tennessee Valley for the next 25 years.
In 1998, TVA unveiled a new clean-air strategy to reduce pollutants that cause
ozone and smog. The initiative will cut annual NOx emissions from W A ' s coal-fired
plants by 168,000 tons by 2003, TVA says. Modern equipment - costing $600 million will help states and cities in the Tennessee Valley meet new, more stringent air-quality
standards while providing greater flexibility for industrial and economic growth in the
region. TVA earlier invested more than $2 billion to reduce sulfur dioxide (SO2) and NOx
emissions, it says. Thus, the federally owned corporation that would have been stillborn
under contemporary environmental philosophies has plans that will sustain it long after
the Clinton/Gore administration passes into history.