A Controversial Model for America’s Climate Future
Photographs by Morgan Hornsby
On November 10 of last year, at a place called Paradise in western Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley Authority blew up the cooling towers of a large coal-fired power plant. The three stout towers, each 435 feet high, buckled at the waist in synchrony, then crumpled like crushed soda cans. Within 10 seconds, they’d collapsed into a billowing cloud of dust.
To anyone who watched the demolition happen, or saw the footage online, the message was clear: TVA, a sprawling, federally owned utility created 90 years ago as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, is getting off coal.
Though some people in the region regret that move, it’s a win for the local environment—and for the global climate. In the past few years, as the urgency of slowing climate change has grown, something like a consensus has emerged on how to do it: Green the electrical grid while retooling as much of the economy as possible—cars, buildings, factories—to run on zero-carbon electricity. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden last August, is supporting that plan with $370 billion in subsidies. In a 2021 executive order, Biden directed the federal government to “lead by example in order to achieve a carbon pollution–free electricity sector by 2035” and a net-zero economy by 2050.
Given this strategy, electric utilities are crucial to our future—and none more so than TVA, the largest public power provider in the United States. Its territory covers nearly all of Tennessee; large chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky; and bits of three other states. In one of the most conservative regions of the country, 10 million people get electricity from a federal agency that has no shareholders to answer to and no profits to make.
“TVA is this crazy unicorn—it’s not like anything else,” Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told me. As a federal agency responsible not just for promoting the clean-energy transition but for building it, TVA is positioned to provide a national model—and TVA says it is doing just that.
But that’s not how Smith and other environmental advocates describe TVA’s behavior. They see a utility that is replacing coal plants, at Paradise and elsewhere, with gas-burning plants that will pollute the climate for decades. They see a utility betting heavily on small nuclear reactors that don’t yet exist. Above all, they say, TVA is failing to embrace proven clean-energy technologies, such as solar and wind power and energy-efficiency measures.
“TVA is a living laboratory that could be part of a phenomenal push to change to clean energy,” Smith said. Instead of an agency “on a war footing to get us to zero carbon,” he sees it becoming “an impediment in the executive branch.”
TVA has cut its carbon emissions by , far more than the nationwide average for the electricity
