TVA coal ash cleanup to cost billions of dollars and decades to complete, officials say
TVA coal ash cleanup to cost billions of dollars and decades to complete, officials say
Times Free Press
September 14th, 2019
By Dave Flessner
The Tennessee Valley Authority is planning to spend billions of dollars over the next 20 years cleaning up the legacy of what was once its biggest source of power — coal.
TVA CEO Jeff Lyash, the grandson of a coal miner who briefly worked himself in a coal mine growing up in Pennsylvania, said coal helped power America and will continue to play a role in future power supply for TVA. But there is a now a price to pay for cleaning up the coal ash and other residuals left after the coal is burned and many of the fossil plants are shut down.
...But as power demand stagnates and renewable sources become more cost competitive, coal-fired generation of electricity is expected to continue to decline, especially if more carbon controls are put in place to help limit greenhouse emissions linked with global warming. Even without tighter carbon controls, TVA expects to generate only about a third of the amount of power from coal this year that its did a generation ago.
TVA is doing more to ensure dykes and earthen dams are safe so the utility doesn't have another accident like the Kingston coal ash spill in 2008. More than 1.1 billion gallons of coal sludge spilled into the Emory River and nearby properties when a wall in the coal ash pond near the plant collapsed in the worst such spill in American history. TVA has spent $1.2 billion cleaning up and compensating injured property owners from that disaster and TVA is spending at least that much again on converting other coal ash ponds to dry ash storage to avoid any other such spills....think of coal ash spending in the $3-$5 billion range over 20 years," Lyash said. "The important thing here is to do what the best science informs and directs us to do...”
....Former TVA Chairman S. Davis Freeman, who worked at TVA for two decades as both an engineer and an attorney before President Jimmy Carter named him to head the utility in 1977, said TVA has lost its pioneering mission and should return to its roots by helping America move away from fossil fuels...."We face an unprecedented challenge from climate change and the low cost power of the future is going to come from the sun and the wind and the batteries that back them up, not from burning coal," he said. "The costly cleanup from these coal ash spills and leaks is just another reason we have to move away from fossil fuels to power our country."
Comprehensive long article
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/aroundregion/story/2019/sep/14/tva-coal-ash-cleanup-cost/503399/
Beautiful clean coal right?
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