By Timothy Gardner and Nichola Groom
On Monday, Washington (Reuters) environmental groups criticized the comments by the head of Tennessee Valley Authority belonging to the United States, suggesting that the four power plants on service could continue to operate after a closure scheduled for 2035.
The CEO of VAT, Don Moul, said last week that the public service evaluated the decrees signed by President Donald Trump last month which sought to save coal -fired power plants likely to be closed, to reduce regulations on coal -fired power plants and to reduce obstacles to coal extraction.
“We reassess the end -of -life study that we have made on our coal fleet and we are carefully examining our asset strategy with regard to the regulatory environment before us,” said Moul last week after a quarterly financial call.
Moul said that two of the factories, Shawnee, in Kentucky and Gallatin in Tennessee, have a “strong potential to continue working in the foreseeable future as long as we have the regulatory allocation”. He said that the other two factories, Kingston and Cumberland, both in Tennessee, are more limited by the regulations, but there are more decisions to be made in the future.
The four VAT factories have a capacity of 7,000 megawatts, enough to supply more than 4 million houses. In 2021, TVA said that he planned to close the plants by 2035, because they would have reached the end of their life cycle by then. The year 2035 was also the time when the president of the time, Joe Biden, wanted the electrical network to be decarbonized to combat climate change.
Public services rush to guarantee the production of electricity as the demand for American electricity increases for the first time in decades on the growth of data centers for artificial intelligence.
Scott Brooks, a VAT spokesperson, said on Monday that public service prospects include additional electricity production needs in 2050. “We explore all the options to meet these needs.”
Bonnie Swinford, an organizer of the Sierra Club, said that her organization would fight any extension.
“These expensive and unreliable coal power plants are not used by Tennessean than a wallpaper on a submarine,” said Swinford. “We deserve a clean and affordable energy that opens the way to a healthier future for our community.”
Howard Crystal, the legal director of the energy justice program at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that he hoped that any extension of the plants would not be a precedent.
“It absolutely sends the bad message … to the world on our nation's commitment to attack climate change and to clean polluting energy forms.”
(Report by Timothy Gardneding by Marguerita Choy)
