Wow, I wanted to share my excitement about SACE’s 40th anniversary. This 1978 quote attributed to cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has,” serves as a ‘north star’ for SACE’s work. Mead is describing what I call a catalytic community, people with passion and vision working together to change their world for the better.
SACE is a catalytic community: a community of people drawn to a vision infused with passion – that people can shape their future by changing the most fundamental choice a society makes: how we produce and consume energy. We refuse to leave this fundamental choice to major corporations that readily sacrifice our long-term health and well-being for short-term financial profit.
The Early Days: Activists Laying the Groundwork
In the late 1970s, a small group of dedicated individuals in East Tennessee came together to challenge the nation’s largest public power utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), to listen to and be responsive to the people they serve. Calling themselves the Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition (TVEC), everyday citizens began organizing to speak truth to power. In the mid-1980s, TVA was a massive bureaucracy struggling to find a mission. Having tamed the Tennessee River, built an expansive electric power system, and ridden the growth of the midsouth, TVA had overbuilt its nuclear power program and was facing serious rate hikes on its power customers.
TVA’s massive size bred arrogance. TVEC empowered the public to hold TVA accountable to its public power mission. In 1985, TVEC gained official 501(c)3 status, laying the foundation upon which, over the next four decades, and with the work of many important players, we would eventually build the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
For Four Decades, We’ve Been Fiercely Committed to One Mission…
In the 1990s, TVEC was renamed the Tennessee Valley Energy Reform Coalition (TVERC) with a focus on reforming TVA planning and power choices. We successfully advocated for TVA to conduct public planning in the form of an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) that forced the utility’s planning assumptions and internal biases into the open. We have activists and passionate advocates who, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, laid the groundwork for us to build upon.
Becoming SACE: Expanding Our Geography and Focus
Understanding and engaging utility planning upstream, before decisions harden and become virtually impossible to stop, has become and remains core to our mission. Climate policy, clean air advocacy, and promoting renewable energy became central to our mission in the 1990s.
In 1999, TVERC expanded its footprint beyond the TVA region and became the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), joining forces with other regional groups. Together, we demanded controls on air pollution that was endangering people’s health and threatening treasured places across our region while also promoting clean, renewable energy choices.
From TVA to the Southeast’s Fossil Fuel Industry
From the forested Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, our parks and beaches are diminished by electric power generated from fossil fuels, and our precious places are in peril. From cradle to grave, these fuels — coal, oil, and methane gas — have scarred our lands. Two of the largest fossil fuel industrial disasters in history have happened in our region: the massive coal ash spill at TVA’s Kingston, Tennessee, Fossil Plant in 2008, and the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster of 2010 in the northern Gulf of Mexico. These catastrophes took a significant toll on our people and the environment.
That same year, SACE celebrated its 25th anniversary, continuing our commitment to building a cleaner, safer, and healthier environment for everyone in our region.
SACE’s pioneering work in the late 1990s and early 2000s set the stage for growing clean, renewable energy, such as solar, wind, energy efficiency, and electrification technologies to counter these negative impacts from fossil fuels. We first worked with utilities to offer customers a clean, renewable energy choice (even if the customers had to pay a little extra for it in the form of utility green power pricing programs), and later moved to forcing those same utilities to recognize that solar, wind, and storage are the lowest-cost electric power generating choices and the cleanest and safest to deploy.
Going ‘All In’ On Electric Transportation
As we placed serious pressure on utilities to lower their carbon emissions and adapted our advocacy again, it became clear that transportation and mobility emissions would surpass utility emissions, which they did in 2016. After working on sustainably produced biodiesel, SACE went ‘all in’ on electric transportation and pushed utilities to produce clean, renewable energy for the grid, enabling electric vehicles (EVs) to reduce their emissions.
SACE has become a leading voice for expanding electric mobility options to all populations across our region. Today, our Electrify the South campaign is a leader in education and outreach, bringing folks together to gain real experience with electric vehicles through “ride and drives” and basic EV education. We have collaborated with local governments to secure electric school buses, thereby protecting children, while also partnering with utilities and local and state governments to prepare their infrastructure for the transition to electric mobility.
Standing On the Shoulders of Those Who Came Before Us
I must highlight the amazing people I have been blessed to work with and who have been the cornerstone of SACE’s success. First, the staff members of our organization have been outstanding. Their dedication, creativity, and grit in challenging some of the world’s largest energy companies never cease to amaze me.
Our Board has been a great source of wisdom and insight in some of our toughest battles while trusting our staff to lead. Our supporters, both large and small, have been great partners over the years, making us stronger and raising their voices with ours, allowing us to focus more on the work than on chasing money. These are the members of the catalytic community that are making the change happen.
Why We Do What We Do
The transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy is an ongoing battle, but it’s critical to ensure clean, safe, and healthy communities throughout the Southeast. We are finally seeing some real progress, especially as some of our regional utilities are beginning to truly scale solar by deploying amounts that counter fossil energy. It needs to happen faster, but the arguments in favor of the status quo and prolonging our reliance on fossil fuels grow weaker by the day.
Today’s accelerating climate catastrophes are the ongoing legacies of dangerous energy choices and a long-lived overreliance on coal, oil, and gas. These fossil fuels are the source of the polluting emissions that are raising sea levels and overheating our planet, resulting in increasingly intense climate disasters that are endangering the people and places we love. The massive destruction and tragic loss of life from Hurricane Helene in the Western mountains of North Carolina is but one recent example in our own region.
We are in this work because we know we can make a difference and shape our collective future. The severity of climate disruption can be overwhelming, and the shortsightedness and misinformation of corporate power, focused solely on financial returns, is maddening. However, clean energy technology is scaling at a pace never seen in human history.
The Future Is Bright
The world is making a choice about which countries are going to be electrostate leaders and which countries are going to be petrostate leaders. Our job, your job, is to be part of the greatest generational change in human history: the Clean Energy Generation. Together, we can make the next 40 years the change we need to secure a safe and healthy future for all life on this planet, our home. Join us!
