Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Anyone who attended Wednesday’s “Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Lunch and Learn” came away from the virtual event no doubt feeling that the nation’s largest public power provider has a lot of challenges that it is facing.

Hosted by the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council (TAEBC) and moderated by Executive Director Cortney Piper, the annual event featured Joe Hoagland, TVA’s Vice President of Innovation and Research. He started his 45-minute presentation with a history of the utility and ended with a list of challenges that the organization is facing, particularly with rising demand as the seven-state region gets farther removed from the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of those areas is energy efficiency, which Hoagland noted did not make business sense when demand was flat during the pandemic, but now “makes a whole lot of sense” as demand is rising. TVA is approaching 38,000 megawatts of demand.

“We have lived through change over the last 100 years,” he said, citing four key periods for the utility. From the early days when the focus was on rural electrification and river management through what he called the manufacturing and information eras to today’s focus on the energy economy, Hoagland outlined seven signature transformative initiatives that are driving the agenda.

Those seven are:

• Advanced nuclear solutions;
• Decarbonization options;
• Storage integration;
• Future grid performance;
• Regional grid transformation;
• Connected communities; and
• Electric vehicle (EV) evolution.

Skipping to the latter item to illustrate just one of the challenges TVA is facing, Hoagland provided an interesting factoid about the new Buc-ee’s location at the Sevierville exit on I-40. Until June 10, it was the largest location among Buc-ee’s nearly 50 locations across seven states.

What is the data point? To replace the 120 gas pumps with EV chargers would create a 700 megawatt load demand, something Hoagland said would present a serious challenge.

He talked about the importance, but also the cost of Small Modular Reactors, and the fact that TVA is beginning to look at fusion, particularly with several companies coming into the region.

Hoagland said the utility had placed a priority on how to capture CO₂ from natural gas-powered plants and was investigating hydrogen as an alternative. Later, in answer to a question posed by Piper, Hoagland said TVA was working with Louisville, TN-based SkyNano on decarbonization and ways to make products out of the carbon removed from the atmosphere.

On the storage integration item, he explained that it is very important for renewables and added that TVA is looking at everything from Lithium-ion batteries to flow and rust batteries.

Future grid performance involves ensuring that TVA provides a stable and reliable grid as its generation portfolio evolves with increased renewable and distributed resources. On the matter of regional grid transformation, Hoagland noted that the utility’s 153 distributors must integrate their individual systems into TVA’s transmission system. That becomes a challenge as those distributors range from Chattanooga’s EPB that has one of the nation’s most advanced systems to others that are certainly not as advanced.

Hoagland described the connected communities component as being “really about the (individual) community and how they want to use (the program) to life themselves up. It’s our economic development mission.”

Finally, on the EV front, he said TVA’s focus for a long time had been about addressing “range anxiety,” but that is shifting to topics like the impact that might come in terms of long-haul trucking and the potential for electrically-powered tractors.

Overlay all of that with artificial intelligence and cybersecurity – the latter at the top of mind after last week’s CrowdStrike incident – and there’s a lot to consider for the nation’s largest public utility.

---