Compared to other federal agencies, President Donald Trump’s dealings with the Tennessee Valley Authority haven’t drawn much attention outside the giant utility’s service area, but they have been stormy.
Begun in 1933 at the dawn of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, TVA provides electrical power to some 10 million people over most of Tennessee and parts of six other states, including the northwest corner of Georgia. Southern Co., which includes Georgia Power, Alabama Power and Mississippi Power, serves about 9 million.
In his first term, it came to Trump’s attention through an ad financed by the union representing TVA employees that the utility had been outsourcing information technology jobs to foreign-owned companies. Trump pounced. He signed an executive order forbidding outsourcing in federal agencies and fired the chairman and another TVA board member, leaving the board without a quorum.
Trump wanted to fire TVA’s CEO, Jeff Lyash, but under the law, only the TVA board can do that. The highest-paid federal employee, Lyash’s total annual compensation is about 25 times that of the president, which drew Trump’s ire. TVA no longer receives any taxpayer funding but relies entirely on electricity sales.
The second term has been a speeded-up repetition of the first. In March, Trump fired the board member most friendly to environmental causes, Michelle Moore, and the board chair, Joe Ritch, again leaving the board without a quorum.
The central issue this year has been nuclear power, spurred by Tennessee’s two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, who are impatient with the board’s efforts to develop a small modular reactor program. They encouraged Trump to shake up the board, but the lack of a quorum leaves it without the ability to move forward on the reactor project until Trump nominates some new members and the Senate confirms them.
Lyash announced his intention to retire at the beginning of the year, and earlier this month, the board, just before it lost its quorum, approved TVA’s chief operating officer, Don Moul, as its new CEO. Moul has extensive experience in nuclear power — he’s actually been the chief operator at several nuclear plants — and should be more to the senators’ liking.
Could there be a story about governmental turmoil without an Elon Musk angle? Not this month, anyway.
Grok, Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot, is powered by what sounds like the granddaddy of all data centers, the xAI Colossus supercomputer facility in Memphis. Last year, hard on the heels of Trump’s election, the TVA board approved a request for an additional 150 megawatts of power for the facility, which Musk wants to double in size.
These plans have stirred up community and environmental groups in Memphis. Opponents have accused xAI, Musk’s company, of breaking environmental regulations in the construction of the facility and raised concerns about water use and electricity bills. The TVA agreed to look at creating a new rate structure for data centers, but that idea was put on hold after the latest board firings.
Against the backdrop of this exercise in paralysis, the energy think tank Ember reported that in March, for the first time on record, fossil fuels accounted for less than half of the electricity generated in the United States, with nuclear energy and renewable sources like solar and wind accounting for 50.8 percent of the total.
It was the perfect Goldilocks month for such a benchmark — not too hot, not too cold, just windy enough — and it may not come again soon. But it shows the remarkable growth in renewable energy over the past few decades and the difficulties Trump is going to have in turning back this trend.
Last week Trump signed several executive orders in line with his drive to revive coal in an age of environmental worries. One of these actually sets up a process in which the president could order coal-fired power plants to stay open, even if utilities want to close them. Another gives the Interior, Energy and Commerce departments 60 days to identify places where coal-fired infrastructure could be used to support AI data centers.
TVA, once the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s plan for national recovery, is being reimagined as the cockpit for Trump’s dramatic change of direction in energy policy.
Great!