Cofiring at the Tennessee Valley Authority: A program perspective
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was created in 1933 as a public power agency with a mission to achieve resource and economic development in the Tennessee River Valley. It initiated control of the river, and development of the hydroelectric resource base, as a means of electrifying the valley and bringing industrialization to the region. In the original economic development of the Tennessee River Valley, TVA had a significant responsibility for developing the coal resource base. Its 11 coal-fired plants in Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky, constructed largely between 1935 and 1975, generate over 92 million kilowatt-hours annually. Today, as new forces of deregulation and associated demands of the marketplace emerge, TVA is addressing those forces by strengthening its public power roots. The TVA commitment to evaluating cofiring was initiated to help customers dispose of biomass waste in an environmentally friendly way, but they soon identified that cofiring could extend the economic life of coal-fired generation by improving the environmental impacts of coal while developing a low-cost renewable resource. TVA sees biomass cofiring as an appropriate approach for a public power agency and is continuing to expand its knowledge by evaluating advanced cofiring technologies as a highly cost-effective approach to marketplace requirements. This paper provides a view of the TVA cofiring program from an overall public power perspective. It analyzes cofiring as a return to the fundamentals of economic and resource development to meet the modern demands of an economically and environmentally sophisticated marketplace.
- Research Organization:
- Tennessee Valley Authority, Chattanooga, TN (US)
- OSTI ID:
- 20082210
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Tennessee Valley Authority annual report, 1980
Student history of TVA