 Environmental Protection Agency, TVA agreed to either clean up or replace 18 of its 59 coal-fired units by 2018.
After four years of unprecedented declines in power sales, the utility is considering plans to close even more coal units.
"As the nation's largest and most important power company, TVA is in a position to be a real leader in controlling air pollution and climate change and we hope that TVA does pivot with respect to coal and look for cleaner sources of generation," said Jonathan Levenshus, the head of the Beyond Coal Campaign for the Sierra Club.
Falling natural gas prices over the past four years helped make gas-fired generation cheaper than installing costly scrubbers, selective catalytic reduction devices and other controls on coal plants to meet EPA air quality standards.
But coal backers say natural gas is likely to become more expensive over time and won't be as cheap as coal in the long run, even including more pollution controls.
"Natural gas has nowhere to go but up in price," said Luke Popovich, a communications director for the National Mining Association, the primary trade group for America's 805,000-employee coal industry. "If you continue to take away coal generation from the mix of electricity generation, you have a very worrisome situation in which you have a growing economy with a declining base of affordable energy."
Popovich said utilities have said they'll cut more than 20 percent of the nation's coal-generating capacity to meet EPA limits on mercury and carbon emissions. But coal still fuels more than 40 percent of U.S electricity generation and last year accounted for 38 percent of TVA's power, down from 80 percent in the 1970s.
TVA, which already agreed to shut down most of its Widows Creek, John Sevier and Johnsonville coal plants, is considering whether to idle or upgrade more units at its Colbert and Widows Creek plants in Alabama, the Allen plant in Memphis and the Paradise and Shawnee plants in Kentucky.
"We believe that TVA should and will ultimately close many more of its coal units," said Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and a member of the TVA Regional Energy Resource Council.
"There are huge environmental and health benefits that come from shutting down these units, but there are also economic benefits of letting those units go rather than spending so much on pollution controls and staffing to keep these old and inefficient plants going," Smith said.
Contact Dave Flessner at firstname.lastname@example.org or at 757-6340
Dave Flessner is the business editor for the Times Free Press. A journalist for 35 years, Dave has been business editor and projects editor for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, city editor for The Chattanooga Times, business and county reporter for the Chattanooga Times, correspondent for the Lansing State Journal and Ingham County News in Michigan, staff writer for the Hastings Daily Tribune in Nebraska, and news director for WCBN-FM in Michigan. Dave, a native ...