TVA's Gas Pains in Context
TVA's Gas Pains in Context
Does TVA truly have the largest gas buildout in the country? Yes, but only if you pretend the electric sector looks like it did half a century ago.
The Clean Up TVA coalition held a rally in Nashville on Saturday to demand that the Tennessee Valley Authority stop its plans “to rush forward one of the largest gas buildouts of any utility in the nation,” according to the Sierra Club.
Clean Up TVA formed in 2022 in response to TVA’s announced plans to replace its massive Kingston coal plant with new gas plants, some fueled by new gas pipeline infrastructure to be developed by a private partner. The coalition appears to be led by the regional environmental nonprofit the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, or SACE. Joining them are fellow regional environmental groups Appalachian Voices and Energy Alabama; national environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sunrise Movement; social and racial justice groups like the Memphis NAACP and Interfaith Power and Light; and even local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America.
That claim of TVA developing “one of the largest gas buildouts” in the country has been repeated by various groups. Sometimes they even state it’s “the largest,” without the qualifier. Media has at times repeated the claim. But how true is it?
Well, if you ignore the decades-long restructuring of the electricity grid into utilities, independent power producers, and balancing authorities as distinct entities; yeah, it is narrowly true. But for all practical purposes it’s demonstrably false.
In this post, I use data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and from TVA to contextualize their planned new gas plants within the rest of the country’s power system.
In a recent pair of posts, I wrote about the importance of analyzing balancing authorities, the grid operators who keep electricity balanced and flowing in their section of the larger grid. In a follow-up I explained that the TVA isn’t just a utility that owns and operates individual power plants; it’s also a balancing authority. And as such, it actually operates one of the cleaner large grids in America.
As part of their decarbonization goals, TVA is retiring its remaining coal plants at the same time it replaces that capacity and builds new capacity to handle a huge increase in electrical demand for its region. In addition to solar, batteries, pumped hydro storage, and even new nuclear power — don’t forget to read my report in The Nation on that! — TVA is planning to build multiple new gas-fueled plants, on top of two new ones completed last year. Altogether this new gas capacity comes in at almost 7 GW of power. For the full list of these plants, check out the table here.
When environmental groups claim TVA is developing one of the largest gas buildouts in the country, this is true of TVA as a utility and plant owner. The following table lists the top 10 owners of power plants ranked by the planned change in gas capacity from 2020 to 2035.1 TVA is #1. Note that they also plan to retire some existing gas capacity over this timeframe, so the total planned change in gas is just under 5 GW.
In the table, I’ve emphasized the owners that are not electric utilities but rather independent power producers: each one competitively develops and sells power over wholesale markets. Unlike the three utilities in the table (TVA, FPL, DTE), the IPPs all have less overall generation capacity. Some even have zero capacity today because they’re just LLCs for individual plants set up for particular equity financing arrangements.
Eagle-eyed readers might be familiar with the Cricket Valley Energy Center LLC: it represents one of the three gas plants that was built in order to replace the power from the Indian Point nuclear plant outside New York City. If you haven’t read it before, check out my 2022 feature story on the rise and fall of Indian Point.
Each owner, though, falls within a particular balancing authority, also given in the table. TVA is the only plant owner on this list that is also a balancing authority. And what purpose does an owner’s gas plant serve? As I wrote in my previous post, it’s a resource managed by the balancing authority to keep the grid stable and balanced with respect to all the other resources and all the consumers. In short, TVA is developing gas plants because TVA as its own balancing authority needs them.
Comparing TVA instead to the other utilities and plant owners in the country is a key analytical misdirection by the environmental critics: of course TVA’s gas buildout looks outsized when most of the grid today, in the restructured markets, diffuses plant ownership into competing firms.
To really see the difference between the two organizations of ownership in the grid, I’ve prepared the following maps of today’s existing gas plants in the PJM, MISO, ERCOT, and TVA balancing authorities, each one colored by registered plant owner.2
The first three represent restructured areas of the grid with competitive wholesale markets, so their total gas capacity is decentralized into many different owners, or in this case, colors. But TVA mostly owns and operates its own gas plants, with a few third-party exceptions from whom TVA buys power.
When we look, then, at the top balancing authorities by planned changes in gas capacity, we see a completely different result: TVA is no longer the worst offender.
The PJM and ERCOT balancing authorities have larger changes in gas. If one looks only at the new additions, PJM, ERCOT, and MISO all have larger buildouts of gas than does TVA. It’s simply not true that TVA has the largest, when you consider balancing authorities instead of individual owners.
To be fair, those three other balancing authorities are much larger than TVA; I’ve included in the table the total installed capacity in each to show the relative sizes. The gas additions in TVA are therefore a larger share of TVA’s total capacity. But all this talk about the role of gas in the grid obscures the still-existing role of coal, a far more pollutant fossil fuel. And wasn’t that one of the whole points of TVA’s gas buildout — to replace their remaining coal plants?
The following table shows the largest balancing authorities’ planned changes not just in gas capacity but also coal capacity, as a share of total capacity. The balancing authorities are ranked by the combined share of coal and gas capacity that is currently planned for 2035, according to EIA data. Here, TVA comes in at #6, after PJM and MISO but before ERCOT.
In other words, despite TVA’s gas buildout, which will help retire its coal plants, it will still have a lower share of fossil-fueled power than some competing balancing authorities are planning to have in 2035.
2020 is taken as the starting year since that’s what environmental groups have used to describe TVA’s plans, and 2035 is taken as the ending year since it covers TVA’s planned coal retirements.