TVA is officially building a massive gas plant in Middle Tennessee

The Tennessee Valley Authority has just chosen to burn fossil fuels for several more decades. Again.

On Tuesday, CEO Jeff Lyash signed off on a plan to build a nearly 1.5-gigawatt natural gas plant near Clarksville.

The decision comes less than three weeks after TVA ordered blackouts, following coal and gas failures during an historic Arctic storm. It also comes just days after six new people were sworn into the nine-person TVA Board, which acts as the only real check on the federal utility’s power.

TVA bet on gas for Arctic storms. It backfired.

This was the choice of Lyash alone, as a short-staffed, Trump-filled TVA board voted to give him this power in 2021, during the time that several Biden nominees to the board were left unconfirmed by the Senate. Lyash’s nearly $10 million salary, comprised largely of bonuses, in 2021 has been partially tied to the success of fossil fuel plants — though TVA has previously denied that this is a motivation for any particular type of generation.

“This decision is based on a thorough environmental and public review process that ensures we meet the growing energy needs of this region,” Lyash said in a statement.

TVA released the final environmental review last month for this gas plant. The utility did not provide the data needed to make its claims on costs or sustainability.

EPA scrutiny, 1,600 pages and secret math: TVA’s quest for more natural gas

It follows a pattern: TVA announces that it will retire a coal plant, then chooses to build a new natural gas plant. It happened recently in Memphis with the Allen Fossil Plant, a site that now has an operational gas plant, and TVA has three other gas projects being built in New Johnsonville, near Waverly; Drakesboro, Ky.; and Tuscumbia, Ala.

To build this new plant in Middle Tennessee, TVA will be tearing down its biggest coal plant, the Cumberland Fossil Plant, over the next five years.

A new, 32-mile pipeline will be constructed across Dickson, Houston and Stewart counties by Kinder Morgan, one of the largest pipeline companies in the nation, to feed methane to the new natural gas plant. TVA entered into a preliminary contract with the Texas-based company in 2021, before the gas plant was officially proposed the following year.

TVA is also planning on doing the same thing for its Kingston Fossil Plant, a coal plant near Knoxville. TVA has already begun the preliminary regulatory process with Enbridge to build a 117-mile gas pipeline to the coal site, and it has not released a draft environmental review for Kingston yet.