April 23, 2007

How Green is My Tennessee Valley Authority?

The Tennessee Valley Authority, the big government-owned utility that provides electricity to 158 retail power distributors across a large swath of the southeastern United States, isn't selling as much "green" power as it has the capacity to produce.

UPDATE: I have received clarifying information from TVA spokesman Gilbert Francis and am extensively updating this post. Francis: "The AP story that shows TVA's green power use going down is absolutely wrong."

Last week, representing the Ecotality blog, I emailed TVA's news media contacts and asked for data about its Green Power Switch and Generation Partners programs. TVA provided me the data - and also apparently issued a press release which resulted in an AP story out today.

TVA's power-service area covers 80,000 square miles in the southeastern United States, including almost all of Tennessee and parts of Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. In all, TVA power serves more than 8.7 million customers.

Green Power Switch is a TVA program which allows customers of participating power distributors to purchase blocks of "green" power generated from wind or methane, for an extra $4 per 150-kilowatt-hour block. Green Power Switch is offered by 98 of TVA's 158 power distributors across a broad area of the southern United States.

Generation Partners is a TVA program which allows customers of participating power distributors to sell back to TVA any "green" power they generate from their own solar panels or wind-turbines.

In the AP story today TVA spokesman Gilbert Francis says TVA sold 69 percent of its green power from March 2006 to February 2007.

According to numbers Francis provided me via email late last week, the Green Power Switch program currently has 9,845 residential customers and 484 commercial customers - that's less than one percent of the 8.7 million total residential and commercial cusomters served by TVA (through its distributors). Francis says TVA currently sells 45,747 blocks of green power per month. Those 45,747 blocks of green power equal 6,862,050 kilowatt-hours, or 6.86 megawatt-hours.

Francis says TVA's maximum generation capacity for Green Power Switch is 37.5 megawatts, and "less than 1 percent of TVA's power generation capacity is green power."

(A megawatt or kilowatt is not the same as a megawatt-hour or a kilowatt-hour. A kilowatt-hour is a unit of energy equivalent to one kilowatt of power expended for one hour of time. So, while Green Power Switch's maximum power generation capacity is 37.5 megawatts, at any given time it often is less than that due to cloud cover affecting solar, lack of wind for the wind turbines, etc.) The bottom line is that TVA's green power customers currently purchase about 69 percent of the "green" power that TVA generates.

"The participation in Green Power Switch is going up," Francis said. "It is growing over time."

The AP story says TVA "used to sell more renewable energy than it could produce, but now that situation has reversed." Francis explained that in the beginning there was more demand for green power than TVA had generating capacity, but recently TVA's green power production capacity increased with the addition of 15 more wind turbines at its Buffalo Mountain wind energy farm.

I also sought data on TVA's Generation Partners program - which allows customers to sell "green" power to TVA. Francis said TVA's maximum power production capacity from its Generation Partners is 0.18 megawatts. TVA's total power production capacity from all sources - hydroelectric plants, nuclear plants, coal-fired power plants and "green" sources - is almost 35,000 megawatts.

Update: The largest single purchaser of "green power" from TVA is Middle Tennessee State University, buying 55,000 blocks - 8.25 megawatt-hours - annually. The figure comes from a story in Sidelines, the MTSU campus newspaper, which was reporting how students at the University of Memphis has followed MTSU's lead in endorsing a new student fee that would pay for renewable energy and other environmental projects Also, the Knoxville News Sentinel reports that students at the University of Chattanooga have likewise voted to pay an additional fee to buy "green power" from TVA, to fund recyling efforts on campus and to pay to install energy-efficient lightbulbs.

Charging students an extra fee to pay for installing energy-efficient lightbulbs - compact flourescent lightbulbs, no doubt - is clever way to use rising environmental concerns to rip off students. CFLs will save the university money over time - probably a lot of money given the sheer number of lightbulbs on a university campus. No university should charge its students an extra fee to do something that not only is good for the environment but will save the university money too.