By Kennedy Maize
On March 27, President Trump fired Michelle Moore from the board of directors of the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority. On April 1, he followed up by firing TVA board chairman Joe Rich, leaving the already-depleted nine-member TVA board with only four members, lacking a quorum.
All the TVA current board members were Biden administration appointees. While the White House offered no explanations for the board firings, politics was clearly at the core. Moore had been the head of Groundswell, an organization pushing solar energy in four states and the District of Columbia. She had served in the Obama administration.
Rich is a well-known Huntsville, Ala., lawyer whose term was set to end May 18. He was serving his second term on the TVA board. He was Obama appointee from 2014 to 2017 and a Biden pick for a term beginning in 2022.
Trump fired the TVA board members just days after Tennessee’s two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, attacked the board in a POWER magazine commentary. They wrote, “The presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed, TVA Board of Directors lacks the talent, experience, and gravitas to meet a challenge that clearly requires visionary industrial leaders. The group looks more like a collection of political operatives than visionary industrial leaders.”
After the firings, Blackburn and Hagerty said they would vote to confirm Trump TVA board nominees.
The Trump firings came as TVA’s CEO Jeff Lyash retires on Wednesday (April 9). Lyash announced his pending retirement on Jan. 31, 11 days after Trump’s inauguration. Trump had announced in his first administration that he intended to fire Lyash, the highest-paid federal employee by a wide margin. The president is paid $400,000/year, while Lyash was making $10,500,000 in salary and non-salary benefits.
During his first term, Trump derided Lyash’s pay as “ridiculous.” As with many of his first-term vows, Trump never followed up on his threat to fire Lyash.
On March 31, while it still had a quorum, the TVA board approved the promotion of TVA’s chief operating officer Don Moul as the new CEO. He will have a base annual salary of $1.2 million, but an unstated additional amount in non-salary compensation, such as retirement benefits.
Moul is a nuclear engineer and served at Ohio’s scandal-ridden FirstEnergy Corp. from 2004 to 2019, working on management of power generation. He was not implicated in the bribery conspiracy surrounding FirstEnergy’s uneconomic nuclear plants that tarnished Ohio politicians, company executives, and regulators, resulting in fines, criminal charges, and, in the case of the then speaker of the Ohio House, a jail term. TVA hired Moul in 2021 from Next Era Energy, where he was chief nuclear officer.
The leadership chaos at TVA won’t necessarily impact its daily operations, as the board is a forward-looking policy body, not an arm of day-to-day management. The giant power generation and transmission agency that serves municipal and rural electric distribution utilities in all of Tennessee and parts of Alabama and Mississippi will largely continue as normal. But the public power agency’s future prospects will be in doubt.
TVA has long pretended that its operations are insulated from Washington politics, as it receives no congressional money. It finances all its operations as an essentially unregulated entity through its charges to its distribution customers, who pass those cost onto ordinary consumers.
While it doesn’t receive congressional money, TVA is moving to get access to taxpayer dollars through the Department of Energy’s resuscitated small modular reactor subsidy program, left over from the Biden administration. TVA had applied for $800 million first phase of the $900 million subsidy Congress appropriated at the tail end of the Biden reign. Energy Secretary Chris Wright reissued it with minor changes to reflect what the White House views as politically incorrect provisions – community involvement and “DEI.” TVA has said it will reapply, with the filing due April 23.
TVA has put together a consortium that includes, according to a TVA news release, “Bechtel, BWX Technologies (BWXT), Duke Energy, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH), Indiana Michigan Power – an AEP Company, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, Sargent & Lundy, Scot Forge and North American Forgemasters, the State of Tennessee and other utilities and advanced nuclear project developers.”
TVA wants to build up to four 300-MW GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 boiling water reactors at the site of the failed 1980s Clinch River Breeder Reactor. 300-MW is at the top end of what most would consider a “small” modular reactor, and modularity is at this stage an entirely unformed aspiration.
For its 2024 fiscal year ended Sept. 30, TVA reported $12.3 billion in revenue on 163 billion KWh of electricity sales, a 2% increase over fiscal 2023. Net income (AKA profit) was $1.1 billion, an increase of $635 million over 2023.
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