“It was a busy year,” says Bryan Williams, TVA senior vice president for generation projects and fleet services. “We’re seeing tremendous growth, so we’re building a lot of new generation that’s reliable and flexible and cleaner than what we’re replacing.”

TVA, which partners with 153 local power companies through mostly long-term contracts, is in the midst of several large power projects totaling more than 5,500 MW of new generation capacity, he says.

Williams, an employee since May 2000 when he took his first TVA job at age 18, says it’s a great place to work; it is driven not by shareholders or quarterly profits, but by a mission to keep electricity affordable, reliable and resilient for some 10 million people across seven states. As the agency’s centennial approaches in 2033, it is one of the last New Deal-era organizations still in operation. Established by the TVA Act, the authority's mission includes Tennessee River flood control and Tennessee Valley reforestation, development and revitalization efforts.

Operating entirely on its revenue, TVA also is not subject to the ebbs and flows of congressional budgeting. although its nine-member, part-time board appointed by the U.S. president also must be confirmed by the Senate. In late March and early April, the Trump White House terminated two board members with no successors announced. That leaves the board short of a full voting quorum to weigh expenditures of more than $200 million or projects that add 100 MW or more to the grid, says a TVA spokesperson. The agency named Don Moul as president and CEO to succeed the retiring Jeff Lyash, effective April 9.

Work at TVA’s Cumberland Combined Cycle Plant in Cumberland City, Tenn., includes the installation of two 636,507-lb steam turbine generators.
Photo courtesy Tennessee Valley Authority

Handling Helene

In September, Hurricane Helene inundated the region with record rainfall, filling TVA reservoirs to the brim and threatening dams throughout the agency’s 49-dam system.

“Hurricane Helene was big for us and really showed the value of our river system and how we managed it,” Williams says. “We had record flows of water over several of our assets.”

That includes Nolichucky Dam in Greeneville, Tenn. The TVA lost sight of the dam in the middle of the night as water overtopped it on Sept. 26, leaving TVA in the dark, literally. Williams says the agency was fortunate to find it intact in the morning.

Quincy Anderson, Barnard Construction operations manager and vice president, remembers the firm’s work in emergency repairs at Nolichucky following the storm.

“It required close coordination,” he says. “When we first got there, we didn’t have a bunch of detailed plans and specs. It was an emergency response.” Open communication was key in successful completion of that work, he adds, an example of the agency’s ability to keep its mission in mind and its contractors in the loop.

TVA’s 10 largest tributary dams held back more than 400 billion gallons of water during the weather event, and multiple tributaries in its territory reached levels not seen in more than a century. The French Broad River in Newport, Tenn., topped 23 ft, more than 13 ft above flood stage and its highest point since 1867. The Pigeon River—which undercut large sections of Interstate 40 in North Carolina that required emergency shoring repairs that only allowed the roadway to open on a limited basis more than five months after the storm—reached a new record of almost 29 ft at Newport, more than 20 ft above flood stage.

At the relatively small Nolichucky Dam, 1.3 million gallons flowed through the 94-ft-high, 482-ft-long dam, almost double the flow of Niagara Falls. Douglas Lake in Sevier County, Tenn., rose almost 22 ft.

TVA estimates that roughly $406 million in damages were avoided thanks to flood mitigation strategies in six cities impacted by the storm, including $186 million in Chattanooga alone. Since its inception, TVA estimates more than $10 billion in potential regional flood damage has been averted.

Helene swelled the Tennessee River to some of its highest-ever flood levels. Drawn down ahead of the storm to catch new water, TVA’s 10 large tributary reservoirs stored 404 billion gallons during the event as two months’ worth of rainfall pummeled the Tennessee River watershed in three days.

But the agency says the deluge may have had a silver lining, with its hydroelectric power units generating an average of nearly 2.9 GW of clean energy per day between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5—1.6 GW greater than in the same time frame the previous year.

A 200-ton capacity vertical turning lathe is part of an ongoing expansion at the TVA Power Service Shop in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
Photo courtesy Tennessee Valley Authority

The New Normal

TVA also is reaching other heights, including its all-time peak for demand during Winter Storm Heather set at 8 a.m. on Jan. 17, 2024, at 34,577 MW and a summer peak demand record at 3 p.m. on Aug. 29 at 31,096 MW, according to the agency 2024 annual report. “We met our largest peak demand for electricity in our history,” Williams says, noting that the peak January demand grew a full 2% from the prior year. “We did that twice in one year ... and we did that without any interruptions to service.”

Meeting that “tremendous growth” in peak demand without service interruption has compelled Williams to look ahead. “We’ve been continuing work on future technology and generation,” he says. “We see nuclear power as a key piece of clean energy of the future.”

Part of that future will be small modular nuclear reactors. TVA has an agreement with energy start-up Type One Energy to scale up efforts to commercialize fusion energy. As ENR previously reported, Type One is working with TVA on a prototype stellarator fusion plant that could begin construction this year at its retired Bull Run coal-fired generating plant in Clinton, Tenn. TVA has been working on the small modular reactor project for more than five years, Williams says, adding that hydropower dams, which have served the region since the 1940s, play into its clean energy delivery as well. The agency's first nuclear power plant, Brown’s Ferry in Alabama, built in 1973, provides 20% of TVA total capacity. In 2024, TVA’s power mix included 39% nuclear, 34% natural gas/oil, 14% coal, 9% hydro and 4% solar or other renewables, per its annual report.

TVA’s reliability is among the best in the nation, and its residential power rates are lower than 80% of other U.S. utilities, even as TVA embarks on a building program to catch up with regional growth, Williams says. “That combination makes TVA a pretty attractive place for both people and industries,” he says. “TVA has to look to the future of its workforce and that of its contractor partners as well.”

For contractor Day & Zimmerman, 2024 marked 25 years of partnership, says Mike Millsap, fleet director of union operations. A $985-million contract extends for five years the firm’s TVA partnership for maintenance and modification across all power technologies. “We’re investing in the future of the union workforce of the valley,” Millsap says. “We have a self-imposed goal of 33% apprentice ratio, ensuring that one-third of our skilled workforce consists of young men and women gaining experience in the skilled trades.”

TVA, partner contractors and the North America Building Trades Union meet on the first Tuesday of every month to review those apprenticeship levels, among other things. “TVA is fully committed to it, [and] they’re certainly leading the pack,” Millsap says. He notes the authority’s involvement in project work and in its community, “and that’s good to see. TVA, I think, is unique just by its charter.”

 

Powering the Future

That big build program includes major projects to construct combined-cycle natural gas plants to replace coal-fired plants in Kingston, Tenn., and Cumberland City, Tenn., where TVA’s 1.45-GW gas facility is set to finish in 2026. For Kingston, TVA will spend $2.2 billion to build a 1.5-GW gas-fired facility and 122-mile natural gas pipeline with 100 MW of battery storage, all set for a 2027 completion. This rebuild is at a site well known for its 2008 coal ash spill that devastated a 300-acre outside area with toxic sludge and generated stiffer rules across the U.S. for ash cleanup and storage.

With its new power needs, Williams notes the pressure to “put assets online to serve that growing load.” But he emphasizes, “We cannot divert all of our money that way, we still have to invest in our existing assets to make sure they’re reliable to serve the load while we’re investing.” That’s a big challenge the agency faces daily, he says, the trade-off of spending billions on new assets while managing existing facilities to handle ever-growing generation demand.

In 2024, Barnard Construction completed site preparation for the Cumberland City project and started similar work at the Kingston site, Anderson says, among other ongoing projects for TVA. He describes the agency as “a good owner in terms of always putting the end product first,” adding that it seeks to “provide the solution [needed] at the most economical price,” but also with “the flexibility that I believe is required to be a good owner.”

One example of that flexibility, Anderson says, was devising a project team access approach at the Kingston site. After Barnard shared its experience, a decision was quickly made that a bridge could be built in a short period of time to provide access and keep work moving.

Related to TVA’s challenge to manage new asset investment and existing facility maintenance, Williams notes the need to “strike the right balance, because we are public power. That’s our big thing: making sure we have the power affordable and reliable and resilient for the ratepayers.” Making sure that happens over the next decade is laid out in detail in TVA’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan, which recommends that the authority continue to invest in the existing fleet while leveraging other solutions to add megawatts to the grid to handle the growing load, Williams says. “We’re certainly seeing growth, and we’re seeing it in a lot of different areas,” he says, stressing that the Tennessee Valley region is growing faster than the nation as a whole.

The plan outlines different growth scenarios, from flat to booming, leaving TVA to work out how to combine expanding renewables, investing in efforts like hydro generation and implementing new SMR technology with more use of natural gas to serve broader system needs. “Energy efficiency and demand response are two things that I think we’ve dived deeper into,” Williams says. “They are very affordable ways to really shave off some of these peaks, particularly between now and 2035.”