Tennessee Valley Authority should stop relying on fossil fuels and go 100% clean energy

There’s an uprising from the Tennessee Valley that President Biden and Congress should take seriously. Like the youth-led Earth Day protests last month and the tens of thousands of climate protesters who took to the New York streets last year, frontline communities in the Tennessee Valley are calling out a major polluting culprit — the country’s largest public utility.

The Tennessee Valley Authority — which generates electricity for 10 million customers in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia — is overwhelming Black, Brown and low-income communities with new gas plants and pipelines.

None of these new fossil fuel infrastructures will benefit the people, despite the repeated claims from TVA executives that gas is reliable, sustainable and affordable. It’s quite the opposite.

Communities living next to these new gas plants and along the 150-plus miles of new pipelines deserve better than a future of more dirty air, asthma attacks, higher cancer rates, power blackouts and rising utility bills.

President Biden should remake the TVA board

Families in my hometown of Memphis and across my district are struggling to pay their utility bills. The TVA board—which is made up of presidential appointees—rubberstamped its first rate hike since 2019 partly to pay for more gas plants.

Memphis has one of the highest energy burdens in the country, which means people spend a greater share of their income on energy bills than in most American cities. This burden will only get worse with more expensive gas plants.

It’s no wonder that the nationwide call to immediately end fossil fuels and take this dire climate crisis seriously is particularly loud in the Tennessee Valley. The planned massive Rally in the Valley in Nashville is just the start of an ongoing movement calling for an end to the dystopian fossil fuel future that TVA is trying to create and profit from.

We need the Biden administration’s help to remake this once-respected federal utility into a showcase for renewable energy. President Joe Biden should seek to fire any TVA board member who stands in the way of climate progress.

Not only is it cruel to charge ratepayers for the infrastructure that’s poisoning them, struggling communities are also paying for the massive salaries and bonuses to executives for more fossil fuel deployment. TVA CEO Jeff Lyash, the highest paid federal employee in the country, is pocketing $10.5 million a year, including bonuses tied to fossil fuels.

Our country’s largest public utility is building more new gas infrastructure than nearly every other major U.S. utility, and that needs to change.

TVA should heed report showing great benefits from clean energy

Under Lyash’s leadership, the replacement of the Kingston coal plant with a massive gas plant and 122 miles of pipeline across Tennessee was recently approved. A new methane-gas plant has been proposed in my district which already has 17 toxic facilities that would lock in decades of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a national disgrace.

Fossil gas is unreliable, expensive and toxic. Two years ago, gas and coal plants failed during Winter Storm Elliot, forcing TVA to shut off power for thousands of customers in its first-ever rolling blackouts.

As we face skyrocketing utility bills and extreme weather, there’s an opportunity for TVA to become a model utility and finally embrace renewable energy. It’s not only the right thing to do, but also makes economic sense and can save lives.

A March 8 Synapse Energy Economics Inc. report shows that TVA could bring more than $250 billion in economy-wide savings every year, significantly reduce the energy burden on families, and create more than 15,000 new jobs by shifting to 100% clean energy.

TVA’s board needs to reverse policies that have restricted distributed energy like rooftop solar. The board can tap a deep well of new federal incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act to greatly expand the reach of solar, storage and energy efficiency, especially in communities of color and low-income communities.

The people in the path of TVA’s disastrous mistakes won’t take anything less. I stand with them and all the other climate champions demanding transformation. We should have never allowed TVA to profit off fossil fuels and now it’s time to stop.

State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, D-Memphis, represents District 86 in the Tennessee House of Representatives.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Clean energy: TVA should stop fossil fuel use for a healthier Memphis