TVA reports solid financial results, acknowledges resource plan delays

By Alton Wallace
The Center Square

The Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors held its quarterly meeting Thursday, with its new interim CEO moving to establish operational stability after a period of leadership turnover.

During the session, the board reported that the federal utility generated $6.6 billion in operating revenues for the first half of fiscal year 2026. The figure beats financial projections by $122 million, despite a historic drought currently affecting 71% of the Tennessee Valley watershed.

The extreme weather caused water levels at the Chickamauga and Watts Bar reservoirs to drop to near 40-year lows, according to Senior Vice President of Generation Allen Clare.

Interim CEO Mike Skaggs said the strong financial performance will continue to support a push to “modernize the grid, increase reliability, improve resilience, and ensure our investments align with valley and national needs” while expanding capacity.

The nine-member TVA board is appointed directly by the president, and it has not had quorum for nine months after a series of directors were removed and the Senate confirmations of replacements were delayed – effectively preventing the routine operational votes for most of 2025.

Skaggs took the CEO position in April after the sudden retirement of Don Moul, whose tenure was the shortest in modern TVA history. Moul announced his retirement directly after President Trump signed a memorandum imposing a $500,000 salary cap on all TVA employees. Moul, who had served as TVA’s executive vice president and chief operating officer since 2021, had a compensation package totaling almost $6 million.

When the Board voted in early April to promote Moul to CEO, the move irked some of the president’s closest congressional allies in Tennessee. In a joint opinion editorial published in POWER Magazine, Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty demanded that the board stop its internal search and instead appoint an “interim CEO trusted by the president.”

Beyond weather-related strains on the grid, Director Randy Jones reported that supply chain bottlenecks are driving up infrastructure costs for local power distribution companies. Jones, who chairs the External Stakeholder and Regulations Committee, noted that a transformer delivered Wednesday to Guntersville Power cost $900,000 – a near-quadrupling over the last 36 months.

To help speed the delivery of these critical transformers, Jones pointed to a newly announced expansion at a plant in Muscle Shoals by Roanoke-based Virginia Transformer, a project expected to create 1,100 local jobs.

The push to expand the grid’s capacity comes amid intensifying public scrutiny over the board’s transparency and long-term planning. Clean energy advocates point out that while TVA’s nuclear performance showed strong marks during the first half of the fiscal year, those figures are heavily inflated by a low baseline from the previous year.

“TVA’s nuclear generation looked so good this year because the nuclear plants were plagued by issues last year, leading TVA to rely on neighboring utilities,” said Maggie Shober, research director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

A primary point of contention remains delays to the utility’s Integrated Resource Plan. Under its own internal guidelines, TVA is committed to finalizing a new comprehensive plan at least every five years. The last integrated plan was finalized in 2019, and a new one is now years overdue.

Consumer defenders and clean energy advocates like Shober argue the delay represents a systemic dismantling of public oversight.

“It’s imperative that TVA integrate feedback from stakeholders and valley residents into the critical IRP process,” said Shober. “But to do that, they would have to hold venues for us to review their work and discuss our views. That risks an illegitimate IRP if one ever gets publicized.”

Appalachian Voices, an environmental advocacy group, echoed those concerns, warning that closed-door decisions are already impacting local communities.