NES plots future for solar, beyond TVA

The Nashville Electric Service supplies electricity to Middle Tennessee.

Virtually all of that electricity is generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. This is by design, encoded in the federal utility’s evergreen contract with NES.

Under this contract, debuted back in 2019, NES can get 5% of its electricity needs from outside of TVA.

The power company now has a plan for this allowance.

“We’re committed to getting all of that from renewable sources,” NES CEO Teresa Broyles-Aplin told a crowd at the State of the Environment conference at Vanderbilt University last week.

For most of that 5%, which has been calculated at 175 megawatts, NES is developing a utility-scale solar project with Silicon Ranch, a solar company based in Nashville.

The project is expected to reduce costs to ratepayers.

“It’s at a rate that’s cheaper than what we pay TVA currently,” Broyles-Aplin said.

NES will fill the remainder of the 5% through rooftop, ground mount and canopy solar being deployed by the city.

After the power company finishes these projects, Broyles-Aplin said she plans to go back to TVA to ask for a greater renewable allotment.

“I would like 15%,” she said.

Jim Rossi, a Vanderbilt law professor, compared this limit on renewables to the rolling blackouts during the Arctic storm in December.

“TVA asked you to curtail customer usage by 10% in December, and yet they’re not willing to allow you to produce 10% of the energy for your own customers,” Rossi said to applause at the conference. “(TVA is) basically precluding us from having the resilience and reliability that every other distribution utility in the US is allowed to invest in.”

Broyles-Aplin said NES is also about to undertake a promotional campaign to educate customers on how they can use the Inflation Reduction Act for rooftop solar projects.

The power company does not offer net metering, which is a system that allows customers to sell excess electricity that a home or building doesn’t use back to the grid. NES has a monthly fee on residential customers with rooftop solar.