TVA Announces $3B in Fourth-quarter Revenue as Investigation into Blackouts Continues
By Jon Styf (The Center Square)
The Tennessee Valley Authority announced Tuesday it made $3 billion in operating revenue in the final three months of 2022.
The revenue came as TVA faced what it called the first temporary blackouts in the energy company’s 90-year history in late December, something the company apologized for and has vowed that it is fully investigating.
President and CEO Jeff Lyash discussed the storm and the outages on Tuesday’s first quarter earnings call, saying temperatures dropped by 40 degrees in a “matter of hours” accompanied by gale force winds.
“The intensity of scale and duration of this event was significant,” Lyash said.
Lyash noted power demand records were set December 23, 2022, with 740 gigawatt hours of energy, enough power to serve 70,000 homes for an entire year.
“We’ll be highly self-critical and we’ll identify all the actions we can take to minimize the likelihood of this again,” Lyash said of the investigation. “Or if it does occur, which is always a possibility, that we perform better and that we coordinate better with our local power companies.”
The TVA power issues led it to demand local power companies reduce electricity load by five percent for two hours and 15 minutes on Friday and then five percent to 10 percent reductions on Saturday for five hours and 40 minutes.
TVA is the largest public power corporation in the country, generating 90 percent of the state’s electric generating capacity and three-fifth of its power plants. It is federally owned and serves 10 million by providing electricity to 153 local power companies.
The top source of electricity generation in Tennessee is nuclear power plants, which provide 47 percent of the state’s electricity while 20 percent comes from natural gas and 18 percent from coal. All three of the TVA nuclear plants — Brown’s Ferry (Alabama) and Sequoyah and Watts Bar (Tennessee) — were generating power at 100% capacity during the cold snap, according to data from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Meanwhile, the fourth-quarter revenue numbers were a 17 percent increase over the same timeline in 2021.
Lyash noted that TVA recently announced that it will be retiring the Cumberland Fossil Plant in two stages, with one unit shut down by the end of 2026 and the other by the end of 2028.
TVA will replace the first unit with a 1,450-megawatt natural gas facility by 2026 and will announce a replacement for the second unit in the future.
The Cumberland plant, in Stewart County, is the final coal plant operated by TVA. It currently powers 1.1 million homes.
“TVA selected gas to replace the first unit as the best overall solution because it provides low cost, reliable and cleaner energy to the system,” Lyash said, adding that the transition will reduce carbon emissions by up to 60 percent.
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