News21 A Journalism Initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations

KNOXVILLE, TN – Listen to the politicians, the media, even the scientists, and it sounds as if coal and oil are not just fossil fuels but actual fossils — relics of a bygone era that global warming, economic hardship and rogue regimes abroad will soon push back underground.

Yet America didn’t come to depend on fossil fuels merely by chance. Conscious decisions made by politicians, businessmen, citizens and voters — decisions informed by the complicated realities of war, prosperity and the lure of the American dream — set that course.

And perhaps no entity so encapsulates those decisions as the Tennessee Valley Authority.

This year TVA celebrates its 75th anniversary. And while it began as a New Deal hydropower project and remains the nation’s largest public utility, TVA now struggles to produce even 10 percent of its power from its 29 hydroelectric dams.

Instead, the majority of TVA energy, roughly 60 percent, comes from 11 coal plants and another 30 percent from three nuclear plants. These proportions roughly mirror the national power mix, except TVA lacks significant amounts of natural gas.

Over three generations, this public-private hybrid of a company has been the country’s largest air polluter and largest single-utility purchaser of coal. The public side has come to represent a vast, wasteful federal bureaucracy and the private side a utility that led the country into surfaced-mined coal.

All true. But there are bright spots in its long history, as TVA also led the way in economic development, land reclamation, power conservation and resource management across the seven states of the Tennessee Valley. And it is now a leading player in the turning tide that favors nuclear power.

TVA is the story of America’s energy dilemma, a prism to examine the thorny choices that made America’s soaring post-war growth possible but also caused irrevocable damage to the environment.

And TVA, in fact, could light the way for America’s utility future as we elect a new president.

In one of its many oddities, TVA’s nine-member board is still nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, leading to its frequent use as a political instrument of the ruling party in the White House.

Seven members, for example, currently serve at the pleasure of George W. Bush. This board has decided to rekindle dormant nuclear reactors to meet rising demand, a decision the Bush administration supports.

But in the 1970s, during the last major energy crisis in America, President Jimmy Carter used his appointments to TVA’s board to signal a different course, one emphasizing energy conservation, efficiency and land reclamation of strip-mined areas. Later, with Ronald Reagan’s appointments in the 1980s, TVA again changed course to streamline the massive bureaucracy and narrow the company’s focus on energy production. The new board dispensed with much of the conservation work as outside its mission.

It could be thought of as the Supreme Court of Energy — minus, of course, the lifetime tenure and flowing black robes. While it’s hard to conceive of nominees to TVA’s board ever engendering the controversy Supreme Court nominees often do, litmus test questions for a TVA nominee might go something like this: Would you, if appointed, work to see the 1990 Clean Air Act overturned? Do you support a traditional marriage of energy forms like coal and gas? Would you broaden that to include alternative forms like wind and solar?”

Likely? No.

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