Lee Davis: This isn't your grandfather's Tennessee Valley Authority

Lee Davis: This isn't your grandfather's Tennessee Valley Authority

by

Lee Davis

The Tennessee Valley Authority was created to serve the public, not to enrich executives or gamble with ratepayers' money. That simple truth is worth repeating right now.

After months without a quorum, TVA finally has a functioning board. The U.S. Senate has confirmed four of the five members nominated by President Donald Trump, allowing the agency to resume business that had effectively been frozen. What happens next matters a lot to families and businesses across the Tennessee Valley.

TVA is not just another utility. Since 1933, it has been a public trust, charged with delivering reliable, affordable power to a seven-state region. But in recent years, that mission has drifted. Costs have risen. Accountability has weakened. And ordinary ratepayers are being asked to shoulder the burden.

Consider this: Under former CEO Jeff Lyash, TVA paid a salary of more than $10 million a year. His successor earns less, but still an exorbitant amount. Meanwhile, TVA employees are sharing $260 million in performance bonuses this year, an average of more than $8,000 per worker, even as customers have seen base rates jump nearly 10% in just two years.

At the same time, roughly 600 employees took voluntary buyouts, including TVA's former chief nuclear officer, who received $3.3 million in compensation despite the fact that three of TVA's nuclear plants spent much of last winter offline. That is not a formula for public confidence.

TVA leadership insists big spending decisions are necessary to meet future demand. Data centers like Elon Musk's xAI are lining up for power in the Valley. Federal officials and Tennessee's senators are pushing TVA toward new nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors. On paper, these projects promise innovation and growth.

But TVA has been down this road before. In the 1970s, it embarked on an ambitious nuclear expansion plan that ballooned into more than $20 billion in debt. Seventeen reactors were planned. Only seven were completed. Ratepayers are still paying for those mistakes decades later.

Today's small modular reactors have yet to prove they can deliver power at a competitive cost. Low-income Tennesseans relying on government assistance to cover energy bills are still waiting on help halted during the federal shutdown. That disconnect should trouble anyone who believes a public utility exists to serve the public first.

TVA says it will make sure the cost of new generation doesn't land on ratepayers. But local power distributors are already being told to prepare for another rate increase. Groups like the Tennessee Utility Consumer Alliance and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy are watching closely — and so should Congress.

Both Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty have called for changes at TVA. They're right to ask hard questions. Voters may argue about many things, but they understand one reality very clearly: When the electric bill goes up, families feel it.

That's why this new board matters. Its first responsibility should be affordability and accountability. Continuing to hand out large bonuses while warning customers to brace for higher bills and potential blackouts isn't just bad optics — it's tone-deaf.

People are still grappling with inflation. Small businesses are operating on tight margins. A public utility cannot behave like a private corporation.

The path forward isn't complicated. The board must scrutinize executive compensation, demand transparency in major projects, resist unnecessary rate hikes and insist that new technologies make financial sense before ratepayers are asked to fund them.

TVA is at a crossroads. The measure of success won't be how many data centers it attracts or how big the next reactor looks on a rendering. It will be whether families and businesses across the Tennessee Valley can rely on affordable, dependable power.

That was TVA's original promise. The new board should remember it — and honor it.

Lee Davis is an attorney and mayor of Walden, Tennessee.