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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
Washington, D.C.
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 low-­cost, 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 (TVA).
TVA's 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
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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 out-­migration 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.
A romantic paradigm held by today's environmental movement holds that mankind should be
more connected with the soil, that humanity should eschew energy-­consumptive lifestyles and
conduct ourselves in a more "sustainable" fashion that takes from nature only what we need.
For example, Al Gore writes in his 1992 tome, Earth in the Balance, "[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
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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."
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 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 Al 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. 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.
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Today's policies would have aborted TVA
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 TVA 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 insect-­borne 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 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.
● 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 generation.
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
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previous administrations.
● 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.
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 TVA'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.
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.
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.
TVA the engine, the anchor
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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.
TVA is the largest power corporation in the United States, yearly producing more than 131
billion kilowatt hours of electricity. TVA operates coal-­fired, nuclear, pumped-­storage 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 TVA 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 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
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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 II 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, accounting for 73 percent of TVA's
generation. TVA 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. TVA’s cost
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.
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-­scattering facility
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
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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-­
candidate Gore 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 are countless micro-­
entrepreneurs whose 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 conventional wisdom and the Clinton/Gore administration is
attempting to quell coal use by restricting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions
rationalizing that 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
environmental technologies 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 TVA'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
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plans that will sustain it long after the Clinton/Gore administration passes into history.
END
Copyright 2006 by The Expressways Publishing Project
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