TVA’s costly mission drift
The Tennessee Valley Authority isn’t just going through a rough patch. Its recent problems reflect something much larger and perceptibly much more fundamental than that. After three toxic spills in three weeks — including one of over 1.1 billion gallons, the largest toxic spill ever in this nation — and a federal judge’s order to TVA to clean up continuing air pollution at four of its coal-fired plants, critics would say it looks like the wheels are starting to fall off at TVA. That may be an overstatement, yet it is undeniable that some long-standing problems — problems that reflect a long history of TVA’s desultory management style regarding major environmental issues — are coming home to roost. Taken together, these recent events ought to challenge TVA’s tired devotion to its standard operating procedure. That is no longer good enough. In reality, it never was. Main focus on cheap power Each of the recent problems owes to a mindset in TVA’s hierarchy that for decades has deferred — indeed, preferred to let slide — the remediation of known and major environmental problems in favor of business as usual; more specifically, in favor of a myopic focus and exalted priority of producing the cheapest power possible. Burdened by the staggering cost of its grand but failed nuclear power strategy of the 1970s, TVA’s management approach the past 20 years has simply been to say that TVA doesn’t have to bother with fixing its environmental problems as soon as possible; fixing them later is OK, never mind continuing damage to human health and the environment. Stretching out clean-up work Like the dirty dozen of other big, polluting electric power utilities in the South and the Ohio Valley by which it has come to measure its performance, TVA’s leaders since 1988 have been much too content to stretch out the schedule for installing air pollution scrubbers and improving disposal of coal’s toxic fly-ash waste as long as possible. Or as long as it can get away with it through legal strategies and joint lobbying with the dirty-dozen cabal of electric utilities doing the same scheming. In fact, since former chairman David Freeman left more than 25 years ago, the agency has virtually abandoned its national leadership role and historical mission as something far more than just another big electric utility. TVA’s leaders, of course, still like to pay public homage to TVA’s broad charter mission of environmental stewardship, integrated resource management and economic development in its Tennessee Valley territory, a region that covers Tennessee and parts of six surrounding states. But the agency’s underlying strategy and business model has been to operate like a for-profit, investor-owned utility that puts the bottom line well above other public interests. An abandoned mission Time was, TVA honored its founding charter as a public agency, a nationally unique mission forged in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal era. Pieces of its 1933 charter goals — forestry management, agricultural innovation, fertilizer production — have naturally fallen away in recent decades. But as an integrated resource agency at heart, TVA still should be as responsible and accountable for energy conservation and clean power production as it is for river management and overall electrical generation. That sense of mission evaporated in 1988, when new board chairman Marvin Runyon took over. Under him, TVA immediately began shedding its nation-leading energy conservation program — a program developed at the behest of President Carter in the wake of the 1973 oil embargo — in favor of low-priced, high-volume sales of electricity. That suited its 160 local power distributors — their goal also was to sell electricity, not conserve it — and TVA never looked back. That changed a bit only last year, when electric demand finally strained capacity and its board allocated $20 million to develop — surprise — a viable energy conservation program. In the interim, TVA kept overhauling its old, horribly polluting, coal-burning plants. Those plants, built mainly from the mid-1940s to the 1960s, couldn’t keep going without being rebuilt. TVA did that work with faint regard for the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Air Act amendments of 1977, which required the installation of modern pollution-control technology when old power plants were rebuilt. Clinging to slow schedule That led directly to a lawsuit by the EPA toward the end of the Clinton administration, and again to the federal court order in the North Carolina lawsuit last week, among others. The recent lawsuit could have been avoided had TVA abided by the consent decree it had reached in 2000 with the Clinton administration’s EPA to quickly finish installing air pollution scrubbers. Instead, when the Bush administration took over in 2001 and stalled the EPA’s push to make the nation’s dirtiest utilities at last comply with the Clean Air Act, TVA returned to its foot-dragging schedule on pollution control. TVA is now likely to appeal the latest federal court ruling and continue to drag out its installation of air pollution scrubbers. It shouldn’t get by with that. Its huge emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide cause respiratory disease, acid rain and plant death and contribute mightily to Tennessee’s ubiquitous toxic smog. But the agency has a track record of resisting pollution-control upgrades that should have been budgeted decades ago. Similarly, it should proceed, at last, with an aggressive policy of shifting its unrecyclable coal-ash wastes to dry, lined landfills — the method the EPA proposed in 2000, but pulled under opposition from the electric power industry. Ratepayers bear burden Ratepayers, of course, will have to bear the cost of new pollution controls, just as we must now pay the million-dollar-a-day cleanup cost for the gigantic ash spill at the Kingston coal plant, and the cost of clean-ups at the Widows Creek plant spill and the inexplicable Ocoee spill of toxic bottom sludge from the top Ocoee dam. None of these spills should have occurred. Corporate attention to the life-cycle of sludge ponds and the need to shift to safer disposal would have precluded the first two spills. A common sense analysis of the bottom sludge at the Ocoee dam, the residue of many prior decades of copper mining in Copper Hill not far upstream from the dam, would have prevented that spill. Alarm at TVA drift The cost of TVA’s environmental negligence, at least, has prompted the concern of Gov. Bredesen and Rep. Zach Wamp. Gov. Bredesen has ordered more stringent environmental oversight by state officials and endorses a return to TVA’s charter ethic. Rep. Wamp agrees. “If TVA devolves into a super-duper private power company without a mission of land and water stewardship and economic development for the region, then they are not carrying out their original charter,” he says, “and that’s the fear for me.” In fact, it’s amply apparent that TVA has been “devolving” that way for years, without stirring much concern. The question is, what are our state and federal officials, and TVA’s directors, going to do about it.