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The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) quarterly meeting in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, began with a triumphant video tribute to their work during Winter Storm Fern. The energy had arrived, once again, to defeat the extreme cold. The montage attributed this to the company’s “coal workhorses” and then noted that nuclear power provided “uninterrupted power” and “hydroelectric responded instantly.” The list ended there, despite years of promises that the agency would boost renewable energy and battery storage. The message was clear: Solar power had been unceremoniously removed from the mix and coal, which the agency had been phasing out, had returned.
What the video hinted at, the board made official. Its seven members unanimously abandoned renewable energy as a priority, ended diversity programs and granted a reprieve to two of the agencies’ four remaining coal plants. The decision followed the appointment of four appointees selected by President Trump, breaking months of paralysis that followed the firing of three Biden appointees.
The changes, made during the Feb. 11 board meeting, signal more than a routine policy reset for the country’s largest public energy provider. They will slow TVA’s shift away from fossil fuels just as demand for electricity is surging, raising questions about future costs, pollution and the role of federally owned utilities in the country’s energy transition.
For years, TVA planners had mapped out a coal-free future. That is now on hold. The Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, was scheduled to retire in 2027, and its nine units were scheduled to be demolished and replaced by an “energy complex” of gas generation and battery storage. All of them will remain in operation along with the gas plant, but renewable energies are no longer part of the picture. The board also shelved plans to sink the Cumberland fossil plant in Stewart County, Tennessee, in 2028.
These moves come despite the agency’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan, which called for removing the two facilities due to Kingston’s “high cost and challenging condition” and Cumberland’s “lack of flexibility.” The Kingston coal plant was also the site of a devastating coal ash disaster in 2010, the largest industrial spill in U.S. history.
The board defended its decision by citing energy affordability for the Tennessee Valley.
“As demand for energy grows, TVA is exploring all options to bolster our generation fleet to continue providing affordable, reliable electricity to our 10 million customers, create jobs and help communities thrive,” agency spokesman Scott Brooks said in a statement.
What wasn’t said was the fact that a coal-fired power generation unit at the Cumberland Fossil plant failed during last month’s storm.
Much of TVA’s load growth comes from the rise of artificial intelligence, CEO Don Moul said, and data centers account for 18% of its industrial load. During the same meeting, the council allowed the company xAI, owned by Elon Musk, to double the amount of energy it draws from the grid.
For former board member Michelle Moore, one of the Biden-era appointees President Trump fired in March, the change aligns perfectly with the administration’s priorities. It also indicates, he said, that the utility is no longer fulfilling its mission of providing affordable energy, economic development and environmental stewardship in the seven states of the Tennessee Valley. “Politics in Washington can change,” he said. “But TVA’s mission is not like that.”
That independence has at times put the Tennessee Valley Authority at odds with presidents of both parties. The utility resisted pressure from the Trump administration to keep coal plants open and continued to retire facilities for economic reasons. But it also failed to meet President Biden’s decarbonization goals.
Moore is concerned that ordinary taxpayers are no longer an active part of TVA’s decision-making. Normally, a change as monumental as the move away from renewable energy would have been subject to a lengthy review with input from communities across the region, something that simply won’t happen now. “This is one more indicator that the public power model is being eroded and is at risk,” Moore said.
Last month, the TVA said it would simplify how it reviews the ecological impacts of its projects, allowing some to move forward with much less scrutiny, if any. The move follows a broader rollback of the National Environmental Policy Act under President Trump that gives greater discretion over such considerations to entities like the TVA. For nearly 60 years, the law required an assessment of the environmental impacts of federal projects. “Over the past several years, the TVA board has faced pressure to make decisions based on strict environmental regulations,” said board member Wade White.
The TVA’s willingness to join the Trump administration’s push to revive the coal industry has irritated locals and environmentalists. In the first year of his second term, President Trump lifted Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on industry, used emergency executive orders to keep aging coal plants open, expanded mining, and ordered the Pentagon to buy electricity from coal-fired power plants. The president has since received an award from industry executives calling him the “Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal.”
From a public health point of view, it is a nightmare. “Coal is one of the worst things you can imagine for the environment,” said Avner Vengosh, a professor of environmental quality at Duke University who leads a research group on coal and coal ash. Mining destroys ecosystems and poisons groundwater, contaminating rivers and streams with sulfuric acid. Burning fossil fuel releases fine particles, affecting the health of nearby residents. A 2023 study in the journal. Science found that coal plants caused nearly half a million excess deaths between 1999 and 2020, and a Sierra Club report notes that TVA’s coal plants were the deadliest in the country.
“People are upset, they feel like we’re going backwards,” said Amy Kelly, Sierra Club campaign director. “The fact that these plants are from the ’50s and ’60s, and we’re just going to prop them up with Band-Aid solutions to appease the current administration, is going to cost people.”
Even some coal plant operators agree. A Colorado utility is suing to shut down a facility, calling a federal emergency order to keep it online “unconstitutional.” For those who live near the two plants that the TVA just saved, the decision is, in the words of Joe Schiller, “a betrayal.” Schiller, a retired college professor, has lived near the Cumberland plant for 30 years. “This contradicts everything we’ve been told about plants in the past,” he said. Precisely, he added, it is a beautiful area. Moments earlier, his wife had called him outside to admire the sandhill cranes in flight.
“It’s not like you look around every day and say, ‘Yeah, that Cumberland plant is slowly killing me,’” Schiller said with a laugh. “Although it probably is.”