TVA green power demand exceeds supply

TVA green power demand exceeds supply
By Duncan Mansfield
Associated Press

Demand is exceeding supply for the Southeast's largest green power program.

A year after its launch, the Tennessee Valley Authority's Green Power Switch program has attracted 3,260 residential customers and 150 businesses willing to pay a little more for power from the sun and the wind.

"I think there are always going to be doubters," said Jim Keiffer, TVA senior vice president of marketing.

"But I think this has shown that customers want a choice and some are willing to pay extra to advance a cause that they believe very strongly in," he said.

Nearly half of all residential Green Power Switch users came from one distributor - the Knoxville Utilities Board, which aggressively promoted the program in advertising, at community events and even in schools.

"This is something that customers have been asking us about for a long time," KUB spokeswoman Kelly Lane said. "We actually had 25 to 30 people on a waiting list before we were even in the program."

Customers weren't the only ones signing up at KUB. Lane said more than 100 KUB employees enrolled in the program personally.

TVA, the country's largest public utility, which gets most of its power from 11 coal-fired generating stations and three nuclear plants - expected to sell around 9,000 blocks of renewable energy the first year.

Instead, TVA sold 12,603 blocks.

Each block represents 150 kilowatt hours - about 10 percent of an average home's monthly electric usage. TVA charged $4 extra per block per month to offset the costs of setting up renewable energy systems.

TVA expected most people would buy just one block. Instead, customers bought nearly two blocks apiece.

A dozen of TVA's 158 municipal power distributors and electric cooperatives agreed to offer Green Power Switch to their customers in the first year. More than 40 are now waiting in line.

"They are the only utility in the Southeast that has a program of this size and scale," said Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

In the first year, TVA set up eight photovoltaic solar generators at museums and schools across the valley, three large wind turbines on Buffalo Mountain near Oliver Springs, and within weeks will open a landfill-gas-to-energy plant near Murfreesboro that should handle immediate demands.

Together, they will generate about 5 megawatts — enough to supply about 3,000 households a month.

TVA serves more than 3 million households and 8 million people in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

How many will want green power is unknown, but TVA already is looking ahead. At least three more solar facilities are planned and TVA is scouting a second landfill gas site.

Significantly, the agency also is seeking proposals to add 20 megawatts of wind generation capacity - a tenfold increase - by 2003 or 2004 when the program will be open to all TVA distributors.

"We found that the market has at least exceeded the expectations that we had for the first year, and TVA is committed to expanding this program," Keiffer said.