TVA may build gas-fired power plant in Tullahoma

Wall Street up

Chattanooga Times Free Press

Business

Thursday, March 8, 2001

TVA may build gas-fired power plant in Tullahoma

BY DAVE FLESSNER
BUSINESS EDITOR

The nation's biggest producer of electricity, which has battled for home heating customers against natural gas for decades, is increasingly turning to gas itself to power its future.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is proposing to build its first new baseload power plant in nearly three decades at the Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tullahoma, Tenn. The proposed $300 million plant would use natural gas to generate up to 510 megawatts of electricity.

Although the Tullahoma plant would be the first gas-powered plant

$300 million plant would be cleaner than coal or nuclear plants and would be TVA's first natural gas-powered facility to run year 'round.

to generate electricity throughout the year, TVA already has built or planned 24 smaller gas-powered turbines to help meet the growing peak demands for electricity. The gas-fired units are quicker and less expensive to build and have fewer environmental problems than new coal- or nuclear-powered plants.

Environmentalists generally fa-

vor natural gas over other fuel sources, but they are still critical of TVA building so many new plants without promoting energy conservation.

"Our demand for electricity in the Valley continues to grow at 50 percent above the national average ... and it is critical to our economy to meet that demand and keep the lights on," TVA Executive Vice President Terry Boston told TVA directors earlier this week.

TVA will conduct a public hearing on the Tullahoma plant tonight at 7 p.m., CST, at the University of Tennessee Space Institute auditorium in Tullahoma. The TVA board must still decide whether to proceed with the project and the plant would not begin generating electricity until the year 2004.

TVA spokesman John Moulton said the Arnold Engineering plant was chosen because it is close to a natural gas line, a 500-kilovolt transmission line and near the Woods Reservoir for water supplies. The plant would generate enough power for a city the size of Chattanooga, or about half as much as TVA's nuclear reactors generate.

Greg Vincent, one of TVA's top vice presidents in charge of power load planning, said the Tullahoma plant would help diversify TVA's power generation sources. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in 1933 to harness the power of the Tennessee River. The utility began adding coal-fired units to its hydroelectric dams in the 1940s and began building nuclear power plants in the 1960s.

TVA has used oil- and gas-fired combustion turbines for decades to meet peak electricity demands. But the higher fuel costs at such units has discouraged TVA from activating such units other than during hot summer days or cold winter mornings.

The proposed Tullahoma plant would be a combined cycle plant which would generate electricity by two combustion turbines and a steam turbine powered by heat energy recovered from the combustion turbine exhaust system.

Dr. Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said he and other environmentalists applaud TVA for turning to the cleaner-burning natural gas for new power plants, instead of either coal or nuclear power. But Dr. Smith still challenged TVA's penchant for building more power plants.

"TVA is chasing demand and they are falling behind," he said. "You can rush out there and build, build, build or you can try to encourage some reasonable efficiency to help avoid the staggering costs of adding more capacity."

Tennesseans rank No. 1 in the country in per capita residential consumption of electricity, using more than 40 percent more electricity than the national average.

"There's not an energy shortage; there is an efficiency shortage," Dr. Smith said.