Tag: renewable energy

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Environmentalists Blast TVA’s Next Power Move

(Credit: TVA)

Environmental groups immediately blasted plans by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to build new electric power generators that run on fossil fuels, saying the move will bring higher electric bills and more pollution. 

TVA filed its plans Wednesday, which are to be published in the Federal Register on Thursday. The federal agency said it wants to build six new aeroderivative combustion turbine (CT) units at the Allen Combustion Turbine (ACT) site. 

That site sits close to the now-closed Allen Fossil Plant, which used coal to make electricity. The ACT site should not be confused with the new-ish Allen Combined Cycle Plant, which uses natural gas to make power and is the main source of the city’s electricity. 

The Allen Combustion Turbine facility houses 20 turbine units that use a mix of diesel and natural gas to produce energy. These smaller turbines run “rarely,” according to a TVA spokesperson, and “are designed to only be used when peak demand requires.”

However, 16 of those units failed to start during December’s Winter Storm Elliott. This cut TVA’s overall power generation here by 240 megawatts. Those 16 units ceased operations completely and now only two units at the facility are operable, providing a total of 120 megawatts of power at the site.

TVA said Wednesday it hopes to build six of them to generate a total of 200 megawatts. This will “help meet the growing system demand,” the utility said. It will also help “facilitate the integration of renewable generation onto the TVA bulk transmission system.” This means the new turbines would offer backup power to stabilize the TVA grid should renewable sources of energy fail or simply not produce enough power. 

“For instance, cloud patterns that temporarily block the sun and reduce solar generation require other generating units to respond to continue to reliably supply power to customers,” reads the TVA document. “Aeroderivative CTs are inherently well-suited to provide flexibility, enabling the remainder of the system to better integrate renewables.”

Construction would take about a year, TVA said. If approved, it would begin sometime in 2025 or 2026. 

Environmental groups quickly criticized the move. As it would use fossil fuels, they called it “dirty gas” and said the plan was “the federal utility’s latest move in its multi-billion-dollar gas spending spree, which is the largest fossil fuel buildout in the country.” Further, the new turbines “will lead to higher monthly power bills, reduce grid reliability, and worsen the impacts of the climate crisis.”

”Enough is enough,” KeShaun Pearson, president of Memphis Community Against Pollution said in a statement. “Memphis families shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill for TVA’s fossil fuel spending spree. The utility should instead invest in cheaper energy options, like solar power and energy efficiency programs that meet our energy needs while lowering monthly bills.” 

Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia said TVA “is once again plowing ahead with plans to build expensive, unreliable, and outdated fossil fuel infrastructure.”

“Families across the Tennessee Valley already felt the impacts of the federal utility’s obsession with fossil fuels when TVA’s coal and gas plants failed during last year’s winter storm, causing rolling blackouts throughout the region,” Garcia said in a statement. “Instead of putting all its eggs in the fossil fuel basket, TVA should invest in more diverse sources of energy — including renewables and energy efficiency — which can lower power bills while creating a more reliable grid.” 

A Sierra Club report issued Tuesday showed TVA has plans to build more gas-powered energy sources than any other utility in the nation, said Amy Kelly, the Field Organizing Strategist for organization.

“Memphis should not have to endure even more pollution and higher electric bills because of TVA’s refusal to seriously incorporate energy efficiency and renewable energy in its planning, planning that is largely hidden from public view,” Kelly said.

The public will have 30 days to weigh in on TVA’s new plan, after it is published Thursday. The agency will also host an in-person, public open-house meeting. Click here for more information on that meeting. 

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U.S. House Members Want Answers on TVA

TVA president and CEO Jeff Lyash. (Credit: Toby Sells)

Some U.S. House members criticized the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) last week, concerned that ratepayers pay too much and that the agency is not working hard enough on renewable energy. 

Four ranking Democrats in the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a letter to TVA president and CEO Jeff Lyash last week. It said TVA’s business practices “appeared inconsistent” with the federal agency’s law-bound commitment to provide low-cost power. The lawmakers were also concerned “that TVA is interfering with the deployment of renewable and distributed energy resources.” 

As for energy prices, the committee members worried they were too high and impacted low-income households the most. For proof, the members pointed to a study from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE). It found that half of low-income Memphians pay more than 13.2 percent of their annual incomes on energy and more than a quarter of them pay more than 25 percent on energy each year. The study noted, however, that low-income Tennesseans pay some “of the lowest energy rates in the United States” and blamed high bills on homes that are not energy efficient.

TVA said its rates are now lower than 80 percent of other U.S. utilities; industrial rates are lower than 95 percent of them. The agency has kept rates flat for 10 years, TVA said in a statement, even as fuel costs rose in that time. 

“Even with TVA’s low energy costs, we recognize the challenge of high-energy burden in our region,” TVA said in a statement. “TVA is in partnership with 153 local power companies and other organizations to help address the root-causes of this issue, including the need to weatherize and implement energy efficiency measures in buildings and housing.”       

In 2018, TVA lowered power rates 50 cents per kilowatt hour and charged local utilities (like Memphis Light, Gas & Water [MLGW]) a fixed fee to access the TVA electricity grid, the letter said. Locals, like MLGW, passed those fixed costs on to ratepayers who could, then, pay even more, sometimes even if they used less energy. The House committee worried the move would deter energy efficiency deployments, and maintain TVA’s electricity demand and revenues.

House members said, too, that TVA may be stalling the implementation of renewable energy initiatives by residential and industrial customers. For proof, the letter pointed to internal TVA documents that said its grid access fee would “curtail the deployment of solar projects by 40 percent.”

Finally, the group called TVA’s plan to decarbonize by 2050 “unambitious” and not in line with President Joe Biden’s goal of carbon-free energy by 2035. But TVA said it is making strides, embracing “emerging technologies, from carbon capture to advanced nuclear, while supporting national clean energy initiatives, such as a robust electric vehicle charging infrastructure.”

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Opinion The Last Word

Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables: All Forms of Energy Are “Intermittent”

True, the wind isn’t always blowing. (Photo by Lovelyday12 | Dreamstime.com)

On May 8th, my wife and I pulled into a local gas station and filled the family car’s tank. It wasn’t intended as a smart move, nor did it result from a premonition. It was just dumb luck. Within 24 hours, we were driving past gas stations with yellow plastic bags over the pump handles and “no gas” signs at the lot entrances.

On May 7th — although they didn’t bother to tell us until a day later — Colonial Pipeline shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline, which normally carries almost half the gas sold on the U.S. east coast, due to a cyberattack. On the evening of May 9th, to take the edge off, the Biden administration declared an emergency covering 17 states, lifting restrictions on delivering gasoline by truck. No word on when the pipeline will resume operation.

For the last few years, as the price of electricity produced by sunlight and wind power has continued to drop, fossil fuel flacks have insistently informed us that the problem with solar and wind power is that they’re “intermittent and incapable of meeting our needs” (as Ron Stein puts it in Natural Gas Now, an online publication put out by, surprise, the natural gas lobby).

Well, they’re right to a degree: The sun only shines so many hours a day, and we can have cloudy days; the wind isn’t always blowing at sufficient speeds to turn turbines.

What we really need, they say, is reliable old coal, oil, and natural gas.

The fossil fuel advocates either ignore or minimize the progress of a third technology: large battery storage capacity. We’re getting better and better at generating the electricity when conditions are good, then delivering that electricity to your home (or from a home battery rig) when it’s needed.

Another thing the fossil fuel advocates ignore is just how vulnerable fossil fuels are to intermittency due to long and not-always-reliable supply chains. Pipeline or drilling rig accidents or attacks. Labor conflicts. Derailed trains or wrecked trucks. Suez Canal blockages. Wars, or warlike political embargoes or blockades.

“Intermittency” isn’t the only complaint we hear from the fossil fuel lobby, of course. They also like to complain about government subsidies to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

I’m with them on that. But the thing is, they’re not with themselves on that.

Fossil fuels are by far the most government-subsidized energy form on Earth — everything from “steal that land via eminent domain so we can run a pipeline over it,” to “hey, could you pretty please send the U.S. Navy out to secure our tanker routes, take out a competitor, or scare a stubborn supplier?”

Then they throw a hissy if a renewable energy competitor gets special tax treatment on a new solar panel factory.

Coal, oil, maybe even natural gas are on their way out, even with the massive subsidies they’ve enjoyed for more than a century. Withdraw the subsidies — all of them, to everyone — and the market will likely make even shorter work of fossil fuels.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

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Report: Memphis Could Save Even More Money with Renewable Energy

CREDIT: TVA

TVA

TVA’s new natural-gas-fueled Combined Cycle Plant.

Experts say Memphis could save even more money now on a switch to renewable energy than the $240 million to $333 million they predicted it could back in January.

Those early projections came from Friends of the Earth (FOE), an environmental advocacy group. That group ordered a study of the switch from the Boston-based Brattle Group, an “energy, economic, and financial research group that advises major energy providers, utilities, and governments around the country and across the globe.”

The study comes as Memphis Light, Gas & Water (MLGW) reviews a possible switch away from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for its power. In April, MLGW formed an advisory council to weigh the option of alternative power sources. 

MLGW picked Siemens to develop an integrated resources plan (IRP), a document to help the team determine the most viable options it should consider. Since April, the Power Supply Advisory Team (PSAT) has met five times. It meets again on Monday, September 16th from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. at First Baptist Church on Broad Ave.

FOE tapped Brattle again for an updated version of the numbers as they suspected more savings could be reaped now by the switch on lower market prices for solar and wind energy.

“We think the IRP has to have the most up-to-date, cutting edge information,” said Damon Moglen, senior strategic advisor with FOE. “We think the Brattle report produced in January is absolutely a timely analysis but the IRP has just been launched. So, we wanted (Brattle) to dive back in there and take a look. As, (Brattle principal and study author Jürgen Weiss) says, our first report, which already said there was much to be gained, was conservative.”

The new report does not predict even more headline-grabbing savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, it notes that the price of equipment, like solar panels, has fallen and so has the cost to run them. The cost of wind contracts, it says, has fallen substantially since the earlier report, too. All of the data, Weiss said, is based on numbers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

TVA

So, while the updated figures strengthens the FOE’s earlier findings (and, it hopes, its argument for Memphis to switch to renewables), the crux is this:

“The new report suggest that the costs Memphis would likely incur if it developed a substantial portfolio of renewable resources as part of its supply mix would be even lower than they calculated in the January 2019 report,” reads a news release on the matter.

The first report was based on a set of assumptions on how the costs of wind and solar would decline over the next few decades. Those assumptions, Weiss said, were “conservative, pessimistic about how rapidly the cost of these resources would decline.”

Weiss said the cost of solar has dropped 20 percent over the last decade. Wind power has dropped by 10 percent in the same time. Those costs are falling at a more rapid rate now and will most likely keep falling in the future.

Making the switch to renewable energy would achieve three primary things for Memphis, Weiss said. It would lower the cost of power, clean up that power, and give the city greater control over where its power comes from.

TVA

TVA’s current mix of energy is about 29 percent gas, 15 percent coal, 42 percent nuclear, 10 percent hydro-electric, and 3 percent wind and solar. TVA plans to make wind and solar 10 percent of its total energy mix by 2030. By that year, 61 percent of TVA’s overall energy sources would be carbon free, according to the utility. (That mix includes 41 percent nuclear power.)

Moglen said TVA looks like “failed energy systems of the 20th century that got us into the problem that we’re in now with climate change and fossil fuels.”

“Memphis has an opportunity to to think about what it looks like to run such a (renewable) system in the 21st century, not the 20th century, and TVA just isn’t making that transition,” Moglen said.

Either way, Memphis has a choice. That choice will come from MLGW, of course. But likely the final vote on such a move would come down to the Memphis City Council.

Herman Morris, the once-CEO of MLGW and now a member of FOE, said it will be a tough choice but that the job is “full of tough choices.” Morris said there’s a risk in doing nothing — in staying with TVA — because it’s been a reliable source of energy.

“If you’re on the C-suite, on the board, or on the city council, you’ve got to make a 20-30-50-year decision,” Morris said. “What you’ve got to decide, basically, is whether you’re going to be on the past or on the future. The decision point on this will be whether or not the future of energy is going to be what TVA’s strong suit is, fossil fuels, coal, gas, and nukes.”

TVA’s Scott Brooks said Thursday that while his agency has not reviewed the report in full, it “appears to advocate a future that is uncertain at best.”

“We can refer back to conclusions from TVA’s 2019 Integrated Resource Plan, which also assumes a substantial increase in renewable resources for TVA, particularly solar,” Brooks said.

“However, the IRP also acknowledges the reality that renewable energy is not a guaranteed source of baseload power, and would require the addition of small natural gas units to supplement the power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

“Simply relying on the declining cost of the sources ignores the reality of the investments that would be required to ensure reliability.

“That said, we remain confident that TVA is the best option for MLGW and the region’s future energy needs. Of course, the final decision is in the hands of the consumers and MLGW.”