Trump, McConnell urge TVA not to close two of its oldest coal-fired plants - Entrepreneur Generations

The Paradise Fossil Plant near Drakesboro, Ky. (Photo by Kathleen Cole)

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are trying to convince to the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority not to close two of its oldest coal-fired power plants. "Coal is an important part of our electricity generation mix," said Trump in a Feb. 11 tweet, and implored TVA to "give serious consideration to all factors" before deciding to close the Bull Run Fossil Plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Unit 3 generator at the Paradise Fossil Plant in Western Ky., which was made famous by John Prine's eponymous anti-strip mining song. McConnell tweeted in support of Trump, saying that "Coal has helped fuel our country's greatness & it needs to be part of our energy future," Will Wade reports for Bloomberg.

"But even though the TVA is a federal government agency rather than an investor-owned utility, their ability to sway the board may be limited," Wade reports. "That’s because the agency doesn’t receive any taxpayer money and has to make its revenue through sales of electricity, just like a private generator."
Despite the opposition, TVA released final environmental assessments on the evening of Feb. 11 concluding that both plants should be shut down by 2023 because of the projected expense of maintenance and complying with environmental laws, as well as a high forced outage rate and stagnating or declining power demand in the seven-state region it serves, Dave Flessner reports for the Times Free Press in Chattanooga. The assessment also noted that natural gas is cheaper than coal and likely to remain so, and that more customers are using energy-efficient appliances and furnaces as well as generating their own power with renewable sources such as solar panels and windmills.

Coal has been a declining part of TVA's energy mix for some time; it once supplied more than two-thirds of TVA's energy in the 1980s, but has now shrunk to 20 percent.

"The TVA board, which meets Thursday in Chattanooga, is scheduled to discuss the future of the two aging coal plants and could vote to phase out the fossil units over the next four years," Flessner reports. "TVA has already either shut down 32 of the 59 coal-fired units it once operated and has been considering since last August shutting down Bull Run by 2023 and shuttering the final coal unit at Paradise by 2020."

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2BzdQD5 Trump, McConnell urge TVA not to close two of its oldest coal-fired plants - Entrepreneur Generations

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