The Agency That Brought Appalachia Electricity Must Focus on the Climate

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/climate-Tennessee-Valley-Authority.html

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In the 2020 Democratic primaries, presidential candidates are finally competing to put forward big ideas for tackling the climate crisis.

One of the boldest comes from Bernie Sanders, who wants to spend a whopping $16 trillion of public money on a series of measures that includes a national takeover of electricity production in the United States. The plan would shut down dirty power plants and replace them with clean energy.

The plan calls for a huge expansion of a group of federal agencies that already produce and market large amounts of electricity. On the campaign trail, Mr. Sanders often cites one of them: the Tennessee Valley Authority, created during the New Deal era to bring power and economic development to one of the most benighted parts of the country.

Mr. Sanders contends his plan would eventually pay for itself through power sales to the public and other measures, like taxes on the oil companies. We’ll let readers judge how likely the Congress might be to approve such a sweeping federal seizure of the power markets.

But we do want to point out that as a model for environmental cleanups, the modern T.V.A., which sells power across parts of seven states stretching from Virginia to Mississippi, leaves a great deal to be desired.

In December 2008, an immense spill of coal ash at a T.V.A. plant in Kingston, Tenn., polluted a nearby river and caused millions of dollars of property damage. The T.V.A. had failed to carry out elementary safety measures, and the lead cleanup contractor was found negligent in court. Many workers on the cleanup have fallen ill and close to 40 have died; how much responsibility the contractor bears for the deaths is still being contested in court.

The Kingston spill brought to public attention one more hazard of the fossil-fuel economy: the creation of immense, dangerous piles of filthy coal ash near power plants.

More recently, the T.V.A. has been devious and unambitious in its plans for clean energy. In an excellent new book, “Superpower,” Russell Gold, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. documented the way the T.V.A. strung along a developer who wanted to build a power line bringing huge amounts of wind power into the Tennessee Valley region from Oklahoma. The T.V.A. ultimately helped kill plans for the line.

That proposal for wind power transmission ought to be revived. Moreover, solar power could go a long way toward cleaning up electricity production in the South; in fact, utilities in the Carolinas, Georgia and several other states are committing to reasonably ambitious plans.

It is true that under a new chief executive, Jeff Lyash, the T.V.A. has recently made noises about building a lot of solar plants. But they seem to be just noises: The actual budget the T.V.A. has adopted calls for a more modest solar program that will most likely leave the Tennessee Valley lagging much of the South.

None of this necessarily means that Mr. Sanders is wrong in principle. The most rapid emissions cuts in advanced economies occurred in France, Canada and South Korea in the 1980s, as a result of speedy buildouts of nuclear power plants led by state-owned enterprises. Given the right mandate, a government-owned authority like the T.V.A. might well be able to move faster than private utilities in adding renewable power to the electric grid.

“If someone could make a compelling case that you need to put this country on a war footing to solve the climate crisis, then T.V.A. could be a tremendous asset for doing that,” said Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, an environmental advocacy group that has long battled with the T.V.A. “But you’d have to clean house.”

A core problem is that the T.V.A. really has no boss, other than the president, who appoints the board members to staggered terms. When Barack Obama was in the White House, he avoided pushing the T.V.A. very hard, not wanting to pick fights with Tennessee’s slightly moderate Republican senators at the time.

So the agency, long dominated by a conservative engineering mind-set, has gotten little pressure from Washington to move faster on the energy transition. But it is starting to get pressure from the other direction: cities that buy power wholesale and resell it to their citizens. Memphis, for instance, is considering pulling out of the T.V.A. system and cutting its own deals for clean power. If the T.V.A. remains so stuck in the past, we encourage other cities in the region to look hard at their options. They certainly need to resist the T.V.A.’s recent efforts to strong-arm them into signing new 20-year power contracts.

The real shame of the situation is that the T.V.A. could achieve a lot in short order, if it chose to do so. It already has some of the lowest emissions in the country. It operates seven nuclear power reactors, and is the only utility to get one built and running in this century: the new reactor at Watts Bar began operating in 2016. The T.V.A. still has the dams that it built in the 20th century, another low-emitting source of power. And to its credit, the T.V.A. board voted last year to shut down two particularly dirty coal plants, despite protests from President Trump.

Overall, the authority’s power mix is more than half clean, well above the national figure of 38 percent of all electric-power generation coming from low-carbon sources. To get to 100 percent would thus require less work at the T.V.A. than for many power suppliers. But the agency, unlike several big investor-owned utilities, has yet to announce such a goal.

The backwardness of the T.V.A. on this issue is not just a national embarrassment; it is a betrayal of the agency’s own progressive legacy as one of the signature creations of the New Deal. The next president, whether Mr. Sanders or somebody else, needs to shake up the T.V.A. board and demand that the agency become a leader, not a laggard, in battling the climate crisis.

Justin Gillis, a former Times editor and environmental reporter, has been a contributor to the Opinion section since January 2018. He is working on a book about energy policy. Jameson McBride is an energy and climate analyst for the Breakthrough Institute, a research organization in Oakland, Calif.

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