Ed Wood "The Right Stuff" Published May 22, 2002

Time to tackle the TVA

Since I am now into controversial subjects, let's try another Tennessee icon -- the Tennessee Valley Authority. Like most government bureaucracies, the TVA started off on the right foot in 1933, with the enactment of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act.

Its purpose was to "Improve the Navigability and to Provide for the Flood Control of the Tennessee River; to Provide for Reforestation and the Proper Use of Marginal Lands in the Tennessee Valley; to Provide for the Agricultural and Industrial Development of Said Valley; to Provide for the National Defense by the Creation of a Corporation for the Operation of Government Properties at and Near Muscle Shoals in the State of Alabama, and for Other Purposes." To accomplish this feat, TVA was to build a series of dams across the Tennessee River, and it tributaries, and use the impounded water to generate cheap electric power. Of course a side benefit was to provide tens of thousands of jobs for Tennesseans during the heart of the Depression - a Roosevelt administration benefit for which there are still allegiances to the Democrat party.

But it was that last sentence in the TVA Act, "or Other Purposes," that got them in trouble. Typical of government bureaucracies, TVA either lost its vision, or expanded it out of recognition. They moved into community development, fertilizer production, eldercare centers, child care centers, and the offering of environmental consultation, while becoming the No. 1 consumer of coal and the No. 1 polluter of air and water in the Southeast. In the process they forgot their primary mission, the production of economical electrical power.

When I moved to Putnam County in the early 1970s, houses were heated with TVA power. When I moved back to White County in the '90s, electrical rates were higher than those I had been paying to GA Power, and natural, or even LP, gas had replaced the electric home heaters.

During the '60s and '70s, TVA plunged headlong into nuclear power production. Then in the '80s reality caught up with governmental excess, and most of these nuclear facilities were abandoned, writing off literally hundreds of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars. If memory serves, I believe a total of nine such facilities were scrapped. (I have to rely on memory since there is nary of mention of their demolition in any of the historical records I researched in preparation for this article.) But many of us here can recall the abandonment of the Hartsville, TN nuclear facility, just east of Nashville, and the closing of the Watts Bar nuclear reactors at Spring City. (Watts Bar shut down both its units, and then reopened one of them about five years ago.) The Brown's Ferry, AL facility, consisting of three reactors, was built in 1974, and shut down entirely in 1985. Then they subsequently recommissioned two of their reactors, and just this week announced plans to restart the third one, at a start-up cost of $1.9 BILLION dollars!

Also announced in this week's news is a TVA sponsored symposium at the Black Enterprise/Microsoft Entrepreneurs Conference at Nashville's Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center (formerly known as the Opryland Hotel). The program is geared to "help small, disadvantaged and minority businesses in the federal electric utility's seven-state region to grow," and to "help businesses get bank loans." Its goal is to "increase access to capital through innovative financing opportunities." The agenda will include "a panel discussion on the business of sports in Tennessee, such as the NFL Tennessee Titans, NBA Memphis Grizzlies and NHL Nashville Predators" - all financial losers! Folks, I am not making this up. Check it out in the Tennessean of Friday, May 17.

May I kindly suggest to those 1,392 disadvantaged and minority persons said to be in attendance at this conference, that the first thing they should do is check out of the Opryland Hotel! Their $250 per night hotel bill won't look too good on their loan applications!

Then I would suggest they question the credentials of their TVA advisors. You know, the same ones who priced themselves out of the electric utility market, while squandering hundreds of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars in the process! They must be the same TVA bureaucrats, because I'm certain nobody got fired over their financial debacle.

Wasn't there another electric utility that recently became involved in "innovative financing opportunities?" Wasn't its name Enron?

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Ed Wood is a resident of Sparta, TN. His column is published each Wednesday in the Crossville Chronicle.