In May 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act establishing the nation’s largest public utility and setting in motion an ambitious New Deal policy to provide electricity and jobs to some of the poorest Americans in the midst of the Great Depression.
Nearly 86 years later, a new proposal aims to sharpen the Tennessee Valley Authority into the speartip of a so-called Green New Deal, a nascent push to radically shrink greenhouse gas emissions and give good-paying clean energy jobs to every American who wants one.
The idea comes amid fierce debate over how a patchwork of legislation could culminate in a Green New Deal that mobilizes the entire United States economy to all but end fossil fuel use over the next decade and prepare for the violent storms, droughts and sea-level rise already happening as a result of centuries of burning oil, gas and coal. Zeroing out emissions from the biggest federally owned utility in the country cannot alone comprise a Green New Deal, but it offers a starting point as Democratic lawmakers begin drafting bills.
“The grand vision is for the Tennessee Valley Authority to decarbonize its electricity generation for its current service area, then go out across the country and decarbonize electricity generation elsewhere,” People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig, who authored the report, said by phone.
Yet the proposal stands out not only as one of the first to repackage aspects of the original New Deal into a new climate-focused one but also as an idea just wonky and specific enough to gain traction at a time when policies like pricing carbon dioxide emissions and subsidizing renewable energy development face criticism.
The heart of the proposal is a call for 100 percent carbon-free electricity before 2030, the date by which United Nations scientists said the world must halve global emissions or face cataclysmic global warming. But the paper goes beyond that goal, proposing lifting the geographical limitations on the TVA to create what would essentially function as a national power company and suggesting a means by which to pay for what would likely be a costly overhaul.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses a joint session of Congress on Jan. 3, 1936, to defend the New Deal against financial and industrial critics.
Bruenig picked 2027 ― the next date in the TVA’s 10-year internal planning cycle ― as the year by which the TVA should go carbon-free. In 2007, the TVA produced 58 percent of its electricity from coal, 26 percent from nuclear power, 10 percent from gas and 6 percent from hydroelectric dams. In 2017, the TVA generated 40 percent of its power from nuclear, 26 percent from coal, 20 percent from gas, 10 percent from hydro, with renewables such as wind and solar commanding just 3 percent of its output. The TVA projects only modest shifts by 2027, with 43 percent of electricity from nuclear, 22 percent from coal, 19 percent from gas, a steady 10 percent from hydro, and 5 percent from wind and solar power.
But the extent and the speed of the emission cuts required to keep the planet from warming beyond a catastrophic 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels gives pragmatic appeal to a policy that embraces nonrenewable sources, said Jesse Jenkins, a postdoctoral environmental fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The other pillar of Bruenig’s paper is the proposal to authorize the TVA “to operate all over the country, not just in its current service area” of about 80,000 square miles, encompassing most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.
Current rules, put in place in the 1950s, restrict the TVA from operating outside its current coverage area. Bruenig argued that “the TVA should not be more restricted than any of these other electric generation companies,” comparing the utility to the Houston-based investor-owned power giant NRG Energy.
Activists demanding a Green New Deal staged protests in the offices of top Democratic lawmakers late last year.
He pointed to municipalities like Boulder, Colorado, which in 2010 decided to cut ties with Xcel, the Minneapolis-based, investor-owned utility that long supplied its electricity, and form its own public utility in hopes of forging ahead with the city’s climate goals. It’s been a difficult process of the past few years, amounting to what the environmental magazine Grist called a “bad breakup.” But Carlock said that any policy to broaden the TVA’s mandate should consider how sudden competition from the federal government could upset municipal-level plans for public-owned electricity generation.
“We can’t ignore the pitfalls of expanding federal authorities to where it didn’t exist before and ignoring the goals of the justice movement for energy and democracy,” he said.
The grand vision is for the Tennessee Valley Authority to decarbonize its electricity generation for its current service area then go out across the country.
In 2017, the second-hottest year in history, the U.S. suffered a record $306 billion in damages from climate-related disasters. That figure could balloon under a 2.7-degree warming scenario, in which United Nations scientists predict global losses of $54 trillion.
Yet even if the TVA remains focused on its current location and implements a plan to decarbonize its electricity production, the agency could have a huge regional impact. The utility giants that dominate the Southeast ― Southern Company, Duke Energy, Dominion Energy and Florida Power & Light ― “have been some of the last to decarbonize,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute, which tracks the utility sector.
Either way, Bruenig said, “at a minimum, you have to do something about the TVA,” whose legacy of a toxic coal ash spill in 2008 left more than 250 workers sick or dying.