A former Tennessee Valley Authority chairman wants the federal utility to scrap its plan to invest billions in scrubbing old coal-fired units. Instead, he recommends the TVA complete unfinished nuclear units and add a gas-fired plant via a public-private partnership.
Dennis Bottorff, a private-equity firm partner, proposes the P3 approach to finish TVA's 1,256-MW Bellefonte-1 unit in Alabama. TVA approved the $4.9-billion completion in 2011 but said work could begin only after the Watts Bar-2 unit in Tennessee was finished. Bottorff's plan would finish Bellefonte-1 in 2018 and Bellefonte-2 by 2020. Work halted in the 1980s, when Unit 1 was 90% complete and Unit 2 was 58% complete, TVA said.