New TVA contract could prevent municipal utilities, co-ops from pursuing local renewable energy, storage
By ALIPL Steering Committee Member Daniel Tait
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the largest public power agency in the country, is attempting to quickly rewrite the power contracts it has with its local power companies in an effort to cement its monopoly control while locking the local utilities into lopsided agreements that would curtail their hopes of generating their own lower-cost renewable energy.
TVA is a federal agency that was founded to electrify Appalachia as part of the New Deal in 1933. It generates and transmits electricity to 154 LPCs, all municipally owned utilities and electric cooperatives, under all-requirements contracts. Those contracts prohibit the LPCs from buying electricity from anyone other than TVA. That prohibition is causing new tensions as, for the first time, options to generate their own energy or buy from other sources are becoming cheaper for LPCs than TVA’s rates.
Read more at the Energy and Policy Institute