August202009
Green Power (Bait and) Switch
I’ve been hearing this ad on the radio for TVA’s “green power switch” program. The idea behind the program is pretty simple, and the radio ad makes it sound pretty good: a TVA customer—any ordinary person—can install solar panels or wind turbines on their house and generate their own energy. TVA buys back the power they generate, at about twice the retail rate. So the more you generate on your own, the lower your overall energy costs.
The funny thing about this ad is the narrator. He’s recorded to sound like an old-timey radio announcer talking up a new appliance, circa 1933. In other words, circa the time TVA was founded. At the time, the Authority was lauded as the greatest progressive force to reach the Tennessee Valley. As one of the state’s senators put it when the TVA Act was passed, “By this act the Tennessee Valley is started on its way to a full development as a great industrial and agricultural empire.”
David Lilienthal was more responsible than anyone for popularizing the progressive image of the TVA. Through a strong publications campaign of magazine articles, movies, photo essays, and museum exhibitions, Lilienthal religiously convinced the public that the Valley deserved cheap electricity, especially its rural farmers, who until then had gone unserved by the power companies of the Southeast. Lilienthal’s TVA was going to save the valley with cheap power.
The radio ad looks to me like an attempt by TVA to align its present with its mythic past. But ironically, it points out the biggest problem with TVA’s myth: cheap power can never be clean power. David Lilienthal’s insistence on providing power at the lowest rate possible meant that costs like the environmental impact of producing that power could no longer factor in TVA’s decision-making. As soon as TVA’s top priority became cheap power, the regional-planning aspect of TVA’s original mission went out the window as fast as air conditioning in the summer.
The real problem, however, is that the green power switch program is that I doubt it will ever be much more than a public relations ploy to make TVA look green. A few people using solar power won’t change the fact that TVA is the nation’s largest coal consumer. It won’t clean up TVA’s forty-year-old coal and nuclear plants. It won’t change the fact that TVA has been resisting clean air and water regulation for the past thirty years. But I’ll have to find some numbers on its actual impact.
