Hey y’all,

Skylar here. This week, we’re going to do things a little differently. You’re not going to hear my opinions, but rather those of some of my neighbors here in East Tennessee, which it turns out may be ground zero in the conflict between the need for cheap energy and the need to protect the environment. To understand why, we need to look at nearly a century’s worth of history and to unpack some assumptions about one of the most storied government successes of the 20th century.

Julie Bledsoe used to love the Tennessee Valley Authority. The nation’s largest utility, it has provided electricity to the people of the Tennessee Valley – including the Southern Appalachians – for the better part of a century. “I think TVA was created under a great man and for good reasons,” Bledsoe told me. “But the TVA has changed.

The nature of that change has ignited a debate on the left, with environmental groups and old-school Marxists squaring off against one another over the future of this cornerstone of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Last month, the New York Times reported that the TVA will invest $3.5 billion in gas-burning electric plants “despite President Biden’s commitment to swiftly move away from fossil fuels and eliminate greenhouse gasses from the power sector in a little more than a decade.” Currently the third largest producer of electricity in the United States, the TVA plans to add about 5,000 megawatts of new gas capacity, the Times reports.

That’s enough to power 3 million homes, but the addition of new fossil plants dismayed activists who pointed to alleged hypocrisy from an administration that claims to be on the side of the environment. The Southern Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit against the TVA in federal court, alleging that its public records request for the utility’s contracts with methane-gas companies were met with heavily redacted documents. “The public and ratepayers have a right to know what these contracts say,” SELC attorney George Nolan told the Tennessee Outlook. (The SELC declined to speak with 100 Days in Appalachia, citing scheduling conflicts.)

That should not surprise people, according to Ben Allen, an environmental scientist and lifelong Tennessean. “You assume by virtue of this thing being a public power operation that it is accountable to the public, that it is subject to some sort of public accountability,” Allen – an activist with the groups Science for the People and the Tennessee Valley Energy Democracy Movement – told me. “And it’s just not.”

Allen, like many on the left, have largely agreed with the SELC’s assessment that the TVA is reneging on a promise to go green – and that the Biden administration has abandoned one of its key pledges, at least in part. For its part, the TVA outright rejects this claim. “Our focus is having a diverse fleet of assets that will provide flexibility and ensure reliability as we accelerate our industry-leading transition,” Catherine Butler, a spokesperson for the TVA, told me. “We’ve committed to expanding renewables on our system as we transition and we’re actively doing so.”

This debate over whether the TVA is doing enough to adequately address the environmental concerns of activists and residents has now erupted into a debate on the left. On one side, activists like Allen and residents like Bledsoe see the TVA as destroying the natural world around them and contributing to climate change. Others, however, are slower to condemn what they view as one of the greatest leftwing achievements in American history. 

Writing in Jacobin, Matt Huber – a professor of geography at Syracuse University – and computer scientist Fred Stafford defended the TVA as a “historical achievement” which could serve as a model for future public control of utilities. “The problem with our current electricity system is not so much its industrial or centralized nature but the fact that capitalists mostly control it – in particular, investment in it – for their own profit,” Huber and Stafford write. 

With roughly a third of Americans struggling to pay their utility bills, they see the historical success of the TVA in providing affordable and public electricity to one of the most impoverished regions in the country as one worth emulating. Placing the blame for a lack of investment in renewable energy squarely on the private sector, which controls 99.98 percent of TVA’s renewable energy capacity to date, Huber and Stafford urged the left not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. “Though the environmental left may not want to accept it,” they write, “the small-is-beautiful approach of decentralized energy provides ideological cover for a ruthless form of renewable energy capitalism.”  

This is an argument Allen, who closely follows debates around the TVA, is familiar with. Advocates like Huber and Stafford, he says, “find the last time the United States went big on energy on some federal energy policy, which is the TVA.” Established by Congress as part of FDR’s New Deal in 1933, the TVA electrified the Tennessee Valley, bringing power to the people of Southern Appalachia – a first for many of them. However, as Allen points out, a lot of time has passed in the near century since its inception. “There’s a whole lot of history of the TVA,” he says, and Huber and Stafford “didn’t talk about that history at all.”

That history is not all pleasant, as Bledsoe knows firsthand. Her husband was part of the crew responsible for cleaning up the 2008 Kingston coal ash spill, the largest industrial spill in United States history. Bledsoe remembers clearly his concerns while working that job. “He came home and said ‘they won’t let us wear dust masks. It’s really dusty down there. The ash is everywhere. You can’t keep it off.’” Bledsoe says the ash was stuck in her husband’s mustache, saying “it was dry and cold and like a powder” and that she used Q-Tips to get the residue out of his facial hair.

At the time, Bledsoe believed that because government agencies were on the scene, it must be fine. “The [Environmental Protection Agency] came and took control of the site,” she told me, also listing the TVA itself and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation as agencies she thought would ensure the safety of her husband and his fellow workers. However, the TVA did not use their own employees for the Kingston cleanup. Instead, “they hired a government contractor called Jacobs Engineering,” Bledsoe says, and “… these workers fell through the cracks bigtime.” 

Bledsoe’s husband developed COPD, which she says both his doctors – including one she says he has visited for 25 years – attribute directly to his exposure to the coal ash at Kingston. “We’ve had over 50 workers die that worked on that job,” she told me, including her husband’s brother. “He was a cigarette smoker. It really screwed him up bad,” she says.

Jacobs Engineering is currently being sued by Kingston cleanup workers and their families. For its part, Jacobs is arguing that because it was contracted by TVA – which is not party to the lawsuit – that it is entitled to immunity from lawsuits. “If [the courts] say Jacobs has immunity,” Bledsoe says, “none of these workers will ever have justice.”

The TVA itself maintains it has followed all applicable laws and regulations and done no wrong. Pointing to this 2010 study from the Tennessee Department of Health, Butler says that the TVA, the EPA and other federal and state organizations “worked together transparently to protect public health in the aftermath of the Kingston coal ash release.” She claims that “TVA’s recovery plan was informed by the best available science on how to perform the work safely.”

Bledsoe isn’t buying that explanation. “TVA does its own testing,” she says. “They make their own rules. They are the government – the United States government. You don’t tell them what to do.” She believes that the reason her husband and his fellow workers were not permitted to wear respiratory protection is that these agencies did not want to alarm the community. 

Someone else who is skeptical of the TVA’s environmental record is Sharon Todd. She lives near the Bull Run Fossil Plant in Clinton, Tennessee. “It’s been a part of our lives,” she explains – and not always a pleasant one. “Before they put the scrubbers on [the plant] about 12 years ago, they had a car was there because the particulate matters from the ash would get on the car and eat the paint off. It’s sulfuric.”

At the time of the installation of the scrubbers in 2008, the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that the “Bull Run plant, completed in 1967, gobbles up 7,300 tons of coal a day to produce enough power to run 430,000 homes.” According to the News-Sentinel, fumes from the burning coal are “forced through a shower of water laced with ground-up limestone and stored in a 1 million gallon tank.” From there, the sulfur dioxide can combine with the limestone to form gypsum, which can be stored on site or sold to be used as wallboard.

“Since they have put in the scrubbers, the air quality is not as affected” by the presence of the Bull Run Plant, Todd concedes. And she is quick to stress that she is grateful for the improvements the TVA has brought to life in East Tennessee. “I won’t be a hypocrite. I love my electricity. My mom moved down here, and I think they probably had one of the first homes in the community in the 1950s that had air conditioning,” she tells me. “At the same time, we pay a price for this.”

Todd points out that even if the air quality has improved, the storing of gypsum on the premises continues to cause concern for the groundwater in the area. The Bull Run Fossil Plant is directly across from Melton Hill Lake, which runs into the Clinch River. “Those are sources of water for hundreds of thousands of people,” she says. 

Despite the continued concerns about the Bull Run Fossil Plant, Todd says that a lot of residents are afraid for the TVA to even attempt to relocate the ash piles. “Honestly, they don’t think TVA will do it correctly and they don’t want the exposure.”  

Bull Run Fossil Plant is scheduled to close at the end of 2023, and Catherine Butler insists that the TVA will do what is required of it to clean up the site. “TVA has pioneered new technology and uses the best science, data and research to ensure our coal ash sites are safe and secure,” she says, claiming that the TVA adopted “best practices” around the removal of coal ash “years before they were required...” 

That may be, Allen says, but it may also be too little too late. “We’re already at 420 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere,” he tells me. In order for the TVA to truly reckon with its environmental obligations and to combat climate change, an entire rethinking of how the utility operates is needed. “The cost-benefit analysis as far as price being the dictator being what’s good or not for people in the valley is not adequate,” he says. “That is, of course, the way TVA is going to understand things because it’s a bottom-line type organization that mostly focuses on its own costs… it works like a corporation does. It has a bottom line that it has to meet.” 

Receiving no taxpayer funding, Allen insists that the TVA operates with the mindset of a private, for-profit corporation. “It’s not responsible to the community’s needs because it is organized like a corporate entity,” he says. “It is no different than any executive c-suite, CEO-driven energy corporation with the exception of its extraordinarily vast protections from liability because it’s a federal entity. It is run completely from the top.” 

Indeed, the “rather ordinary commercial nature” of the TVA’s operations and activities is why the Supreme Court ruled against it in 2019, when the government asked for “broad policy immunity to shield choices by” the TVA regarding its safety measures, according to the website SCOTUSBlog. Essentially, the Supreme Court found that because the TVA operates more as a corporation than a government agency or organ, “the simple and unqualified statute allowing this government corporation to sue and be sued should be read liberally when the corporation is engaged in commercial rather than governmental conduct.”

This, Allen says, is where Huber and Stafford’s Jacobin piece misses the mark. The TVA, far from being a model public utility, is essentially a “quasi-public entity” that “operates with its own budget and is able to use interesting financial mechanisms to sometimes raise funds for its capital investments.”

Bledsoe is blunter in her analysis. “They’ve got the name ‘Tennessee Valley’ in there, but they occupy this area. They do not represent the people of the Tennessee Valley.” She argues that the utility and its employees are more focused on their own financial gains than serving the people of the Tennessee Valley. “The people of Tennessee have paid a huge price for them to come here and make their bonuses,” she says.

Those bonuses are not insubstantial. In 2017, the TVA’s year-end bonuses averaged $10,970 for each of its more than 10,000 employees according to the Tennessee Journal. Last year, the TVA broke even that record, paying its employees a collective $180 million in performance pay. The TVA’s CEO, Jeff Lyash, took home nearly $9.9 million in 2021 alone – a 35 percent increase on the previous year.

When asked whether the TVA and its employees were pocketing profits made off its customers that should instead be invested in renewable and clean energies, Butler – the TVA spokesperson – was unequivocal. “Absolutely not,” she told me. “TVA is actively working a plan to reduce carbon emissions across our footprint.” She claims that TVA is “working towards our aspirational clean energy targets – all rooted in our values, particularly integrity.” 

It should be noted that while TVA employees may have made record bonuses, the cost was not passed on to consumers. Lower fuel costs and rebates offered to customers to assist with the pandemic helped decrease utility rates in 2021. TVA has also pledged not to increase its base rates of power over the course of the next decade, claiming they are already “below the residential rates charged by 80% of U.S. utilities and are below the industrial charges by 95% of the U.S. utilities,” the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported in February.  

That article quotes a letter Lyash wrote to Congressional leaders earlier this year, in which he claims that TVA “aspires to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and is actively pursuing and researching the technologies needed to get there.” However, for the people affected by the TVA’s current operations, that is simply too little, too late. 

“They like to say they’re stewards of the environment,” Julie Bledsoe says. “Not this environment. They’ve polluted this state from one end to another.”

Sharon Todd is more circumspect. “I like my electricity,” she says, though she would like to see TVA take more responsibility for water quality and water testing. “They talk about the cost, but what’s the cost of human lives and health?”

Until next week, y’all be blessed.

- Skylar

• The Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee, will host a celebration of life for its late founder, John Rice Irwin, on April 24 at 2:00 p.m. The service will begin with a reception, with memorial service to follow, WVLT-TV reports.
   

• In the mood for some old-time mountain music? Music on the Porch is returning to the Appalachian Women’s Museum in Dillsboro, North Carolina. According to the Sylvan Herald and Ruralite, the event will be held at the Old Monteith Homestead from noon to 6 p.m. on April 30.
   

• Environment 360, a publication of the Yale School of the Environment, brings us this report on how a plastics boom in the Ohio River Valley offers potential economic rewards – with large environmental risks – to the region.
   

• NPR reports on a new study which links silica dust with an uptick in severe black lung disease among coal miners.
   

• WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, reports on a Starbucks in Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, which has become the first in that state to unionize. This follows a Knoxville, Tennessee, Starbucks voting to unionize earlier this month.