Nashville and its surrounding area are growing and attracting industrial development faster than most of the country, straining the region’s power infrastructure. Now, the Tennessee Valley Authority and others are weighing which power sources will best meet the growing need.
While Tennessee ramps up its investment in nuclear energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority — a federally owned public utility that services all of Tennessee and parts of six other states — is plotting its course for the next 25 years through its Integrated Resource Plan. Among other things, the IRP will give some insight into which energy sources TVA will invest in and what that means for stability and environmental impact of the region’s growing power consumption.
The IRP is not a concrete plan or even a set of guardrails for the utility. Instead, it’s a look at several possible outcomes and ways forward over the next 25 years, with projections based on variables like how much governments regulate or deregulate power companies, whether population growth will continue, stall or even decline, and which industries will grow or wane in the region.
“What it’s meant to be is a compass, not a road map,” TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks told the Banner. “It’s meant to be a general look at all the various potential scenarios we might see over the next 25 years.”
Broadly, Brooks says the IRP, a 600-page draft of which was published in September and will be finalized in the spring, shows TVA is focused on growing to meet the power demands of the region through an intentionally flexible plan, not one that “dictates” what the utility “shall” do.
Critics say the loose planning document is too broad to be helpful to the public.
“I get you can’t be too prescriptive about exactly what you’re going to do. But I think that in TVA’s case, especially with the 2019 IRP, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction,” said Maggie Shober, research director for the Southern Alliance of Clean Energy, of the most recent IRP.
The problem with that, Shober said, is it leaves TVA too broad a target, rather than holding the authority accountable for specific goals in areas, like ramping up the region’s solar power supply. In 2019, Shober says the IRP was vague enough to allow TVA to roll out its current investment in natural gas power, including five new proposed gas plants, three of which require new gas lines.
“That was not the base case in that IRP, but it technically falls within the really broad set of possibilities that they included,” Shober said. “So there’s no way to really tell what they’re going to do.”
Shober is critical of natural gas being presented by TVA as a cleaner energy than coal — which the authority is planning to retire completely by the mid-2030’s — noting that while burning gas emits less carbon dioxide than coal, the release of methane throughout the gas process contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and is prone to leaks.
“And this is industry-wide, but electric utilities have oversold the reliability of these gas plants,” Shober said, noting that rolling blackouts from TVA in 2022 were caused, in part, by 10 gas plants failing during winter storm Elliot.
The cost of gas, of course, also varies with the world market, and increases are also often passed on to the consumer, which would burden TVA customers who saw a 5.25 percent rate increase this year after a 4.5 percent increase in 2023.
“We now have 4,000 megawatts of solar electricity either under contract or already on the grid, moving toward up to 10,000 megawatts by 2035,” Brooks said. “We think that’s certainly sustainable and an important part of the mix, but when the sun’s not shining, the fact of the matter is you need something else that keeps the lights on.”
“For us, that general direction is using natural gas,” he added.
Shober argues that TVA could be more aggressive in its transition to solar, contending that the utility could “easily” add 1-2 gigawatts of solar per year.
Beyond the philosophical differences around the best energy sources, TVA also has to anticipate what politics, population and industry will do to regulations and demand.
TVA’s load demand increased in 2019 for the first time in about a decade, adding an urgency to improving the region’s supply. The growth was driven in part by population growth in the region, especially the Nashville area, but also by an influx of companies moving to states with lower operating costs and fewer regulations.
Among those growing industries are data centers for major tech companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft, which, especially with the growing use of AI and cryptocurrency, are rapidly increasing the global power demand.
“So if we invest this much in one industry that’s growing so fast, what if the data centers don’t all materialize or are only around for a couple of years?” Shober asked. “Then the rest of the consumers still have to pay for that infrastructure.”
Brooks said TVA is not actively seeking data centers or other tech industry developments in the region and is focused instead on incentivizing electric vehicle manufacturers and other auto industry jobs.
“Data centers are certainly one of the things that we have to consider, but it’s not an industry that we recruit or target,” Brooks said. “But certainly, these data centers are locating here again for reliability and affordability.”
One bright spot in the tech industry is that larger companies do enough business in more strictly regulated areas that they are incentivized to operate in more sustainable ways, even in the Southeast, where it’s not required.
As for how politics will impact regulations, Brooks said even the recent presidential election offers little clarity.
“This is a 25-year plan, not a 4-year plan,” Brooks said, noting that even experience working with the previous Trump administration doesn’t provide much clarity for what regulations will look like long term. “We’ve worked with elected officials for 91 years and that’s why we take the long view instead of just looking at an upcoming administration.”
TVA has hosted 10 public meetings so far to take input on the draft plan and will continue to accept written feedback through Dec. 11. Members of the public can find more information on TVA input sessions here. Shober says SACE will host a webinar on Dec. 4 to share their feedback with the public ahead of TVA’s deadline.
The TVA board will likely vote on accepting the final IRP in May or August 2025.