America’s largest public utility is reviving coal, with little public input
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s quarterly meeting in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, opened with a triumphant video tribute to its work during Winter Storm Fern. The energy was there, once again, to overcome the extreme cold. The montage attributes this to the utility’s “coal workhorses,” then notes that nuclear provides “uninterrupted power” and “hydropower responds instantly.” The list ends there, despite years of promises that the agency would boost renewable energy and battery storage. The message was clear: Solar power had been unceremoniously excluded from the mix and coal, which the agency had been phasing out, was back.
What the video alluded to, the board made official. Its seven members unanimously dropped renewable energy as a priority, ended diversity programs and granted reprieves to two of the agency’s four remaining coal plants. The decision follows the appointment of four appointees selected by President Trump, breaking months of paralysis that followed the firing of three Biden appointees.
The changes, made at the board’s Feb. 11 meeting, signal more than a routine policy reset for the nation’s largest state-owned electricity provider. They will slow TVA’s shift away from fossil fuels just as demand for electricity rises, raising questions about future costs, pollution and the role of federal utilities in the nation’s energy transition.
For years, TVA planners had mapped out a coal-free future. It is now on hold. The Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, was scheduled to be decommissioned in 2027, with its nine units to be demolished and replaced with an “energy complex” of gas production and battery storage. All will remain online alongside the gasworks, but renewables will no longer be part of the picture. The board also scrapped plans to scuttle the Cumberland fossil plant in Stewart County, Tennessee, in 2028.
The decisions come despite the agency’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan, which called for the removal of both facilities due to the “high cost and challenging condition” of Kingston and the “lack of flexibility” of Cumberland. The Kingston coal plant was also the site of a devastating coal ash disaster in 2010, the largest industrial spill in U.S. history.
The council defended its decision by citing energy affordability for the Tennessee Valley.
“As demand for electricity increases, TVA is exploring all options to strengthen our generation fleet to continue providing affordable, reliable electricity to our 10 million customers, creating jobs and helping communities thrive,” agency spokesperson Scott Brooks said in a statement.
Not mentioned was the fact that a coal-fired power generation unit at the Cumberland fossil plant failed during last month’s storm.
Much of TVA’s load growth comes from the rise of artificial intelligence, CEO Don Moul said, and data centers account for 18 percent of its industrial load. During the same meeting, the board authorized Elon Musk-owned xAI to double the amount of electricity it draws from the grid.
For Michelle Moore, a former board member and one of the appointees fired by President Trump in March, the change aligns perfectly with the administration’s priorities. It also indicates, she said, that the utility is no longer fulfilling its mission of providing affordable electricity, economic development and environmental stewardship in the seven-state Tennessee Valley. “Politics in Washington could change,” she said. “But that’s not TVA’s mission.”
Trump keeps coal on life support. How long can this last?
This independence has sometimes put the Tennessee Valley Authority at odds with presidents of both parties. The utility has resisted pressure from the Trump administration to keep coal plants open, continuing to close its facilities for economic reasons. But it also doesn’t live up to President Biden’s. decarburization goals.
Moore is concerned that ordinary taxpayers will no longer actively participate in the TVA decision-making process. Typically, a change as monumental as moving away from renewable energy would have undergone a lengthy review with input from communities across the region, which simply won’t happen now. “This is yet another indicator that the public power model is eroding and is in danger,” Moore said.
Last month, TVA announced it would streamline how it assesses the ecological impacts of its projects, allowing some to move forward with far less, if any, oversight. The move follows a broader rollback of the National Environmental Policy Act under President Trump, which grants greater discretion over such considerations to entities like the TVA. For nearly 60 years, the law required an assessment of the environmental impacts of federal projects. “Over the past several years, the TVA board has been under pressure to make decisions based on strict environmental regulations,” said board member Wade White.
TVA’s willingness to join the Trump administration’s efforts to revive the coal industry has angered residents and environmentalists. In the first year of his second term, President Trump lifted Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on industry, used emergency executive orders to keep aging coal plants open, expanded mining, and ordered the Pentagon to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants. The president has since received an award from industry leaders dubbing him the “Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal.”
From a public health perspective, it’s a nightmare. “Coal is one of the worst things imaginable for the environment,” said Avner Vengosh, a professor of environmental quality at Duke University who leads a research group on coal and coal ash. Mining destroys ecosystems and poisons groundwater, polluting rivers and streams with sulfuric acid. The combustion of fossil fuel releases fine particles, which has an impact on the health of nearby residents. A 2023 study in the journal Science found that coal plants caused nearly half a million additional deaths between 1999 and 2020, and a Sierra Club report noted that TVA’s coal plants were the nation’s deadliest.
“People are upset, they feel like we’re going backwards,” said Amy Kelly, campaign manager for the Sierra Club. “The fact that these factories are from the ’50s and ’60s and we’re just going to prop them up with band-aid solutions to appease the current administration is going to be expensive.”
Even some coal plant operators agree. A Colorado utility is suing to shut down a facility, calling a federal emergency order to keep it online “unconstitutional.” For those who live near the two factories that TVA has just saved, the decision is, in the words of Joe Schiller, “a betrayal”. Schiller, a retired college professor, has lived near the Cumberland plant for 30 years. “It contradicts everything they’ve told us about plants in the past,” he said. Despite this, he added, it is a beautiful area. Moments before, his wife had called him outside to admire the passing sandhill cranes.
“It’s not like you look around every day and say, ‘Yeah, that Cumberland plant is slowly killing me,'” Schiller said with a laugh. “Even though it probably is.”
