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If the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules that coal ash waste from utility plants should be classified as a hazardous material, the ripple effect could hit Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) customers right in the wallet.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is enjoying record-breaking sales of its energy, setting records in demand for the 7-day period that ended Sunday. Total weekly energy use throughout the TVA’s 7-state region was more than 200 gigawatt hours higher than the previous record, set August 12, 2007. Total weekly energy use was recorded at 4.633 gigawatt hours, another record for the nation’s largest utility. TVA serves more than 9 million customers in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
Fourty-four coal ash storage sites near communities in 10 different states have been targeted for inspection because they pose a “high hazard potential … (of) probable loss of human life if there is a significant dam failure,” according to Matt Hale, director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) office of research, conservation and recovery. Hale added that the high hazard rating is more a measure of what would happen if the dam failed rather than a measure of the stability of the dams.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) may have to lean on customers to relieve some of its financial pains, according to the Associated Press. The nation’s largest utility is spending $1 million a day to clean up the mess left behind when a coal ash impoundment pond at its Kingston, Tennessee coal-burning plant failed and dumped more than a billion gallons of toxic material on to an east Tennessee community and into the Emory River. The coal ash spill cleanup effort is expected to cost the utility between $525 million and $825 million.
Problems continue to mount for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). This week a federal judge upheld an order handed down in January that the TVA accelerate its billion-dollar program to clean up four of its coal plants in Tennessee and Alabama so the plants could stop polluting the air in North Carolina, according to the Associated Press/Forbes.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) may turn to its residential customer base to help pay for the escalating costs to clean up the widespread damage caused when one of its coal ash ponds failed last December, pouring more than a billion gallons of toxic ash and sludge onto 300 acres of rural east Tennessee, according to the Jackson Sun.
