Note: This article was originally shared in SACE’s free newsletter, “Wired In,” which includes relevant articles, media clips, and actions to take. Join us to receive Wired In once a month in your inbox, and see May’s full newsletter here.
Power — who betrays the public trust with it and who’s building something better with it — runs through the features in this month’s newsletter.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, a public utility created to serve the region, is carrying out the Trump administration’s fossil fuel agenda alongside the coal industry, reversing planned plant retirements and whitewashing coal ash as clean and safe. TVA’s own history should have settled any debate long ago: the 2008 Kingston coal ash disaster killed more than 50 cleanup workers exposed to toxins like arsenic in coal ash, with several more still battling illness. Yet TVA is choosing profit and political pandering over public health, deceiving the very residents it exists to serve — again.
That betrayal extends to Washington, where EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is systematically dismantling the protections that stand between fossil fuel profits and our families’ health. A landmark investigation by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elizabeth Kolbert reveals how far this dismantling has gone, and what it means for communities across the Southeast, where the burden falls hardest.
These fights echo in every statehouse and utility regulatory board in our region. In the Carolinas, a single commissioner has moved to halt solar and battery storage projects already approved as the low-cost, reliable path forward for Duke Energy customers. Without those projects, customers face higher bills and a less resilient grid — the predictable cost when utility profits and political pressure take precedence over people.
And yet. Farmers are generating clean energy alongside their crops, diversifying income, protecting land, and keeping family farms viable for generations with agrivoltaics. In southeast Georgia, Hyundai’s Metaplant, the state’s largest economic development project, is proof that clean transportation, advanced manufacturing, and community investment are present-day realities, not distant pipe dreams.
The contrast is stark. On one side, utilities and regulators are bending to fossil fuel interests and passing the costs to families in skyrocketing electric bills, dirtier air, and poisoned water — all while blocking the very transition that would free us from all of it. On the other hand, farmers and manufacturers are embracing proven solutions that are cleaner, cheaper, and already delivering benefits the utilities won’t.
Willful regression and commonsense transformation are happening in the same moment, in the same region, sometimes in the same county. That’s not a reason for despair — it’s the reason to stay in the fight for a better world and speak truth and common sense to power and greed.
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