RELEVANT HISTORY:

THE TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY (TVA) provides top-quality power and energy to consumers throughout the Tennessee Valley. Today, TVA provides electricity and other services to more than 9 million people spanning over 80,000 square miles.

Citizens in Tennessee, as well as millions of others in parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia, are directly served by the TVA. While TVA is a federal government entity created by Congress in 1933 through the TVA Act, it is a fully self-sustaining utility provider, completely supported by the millions of ratepayers it serves.

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

Most notably during the Trump presidency, they have proposed or attempted to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) by selling its transmission assets. These efforts aimed to shift the nation's largest public power provider to investor-owned utility status, sparking significant union opposition over potential job losses, higher electricity rates, and reduced public accountability.

(a) A total privatization would be a corporate wealth transfer controlled by the greed of billionaires with no moral obligation to Tennesseans' financial hardship and energy burden. Tennesseans are struggling financially due to high utility bills, especially in urban and rural communities.

(b) Turning TVA over to private, for-profit interests would mean higher electricity rates, destruction and loss of access to outdoor recreation areas, and other devastating consequences.

(c) The worst option would be TVA staying in its current form, but with one notable difference: Trump could use the utility as a tool for his “energy dominance” agenda, ensuring that TVA continues to ramp up fossil fuels and begins construction on nuclear reactors across the state. TVA recently became the nation’s first utility to ask federal regulators for a construction permit to build a small modular reactor at its Clinch River site near Oak Ridge. 

(d) Full privatization may also negatively affect TVA’s 10,000 employees and the local power companies that purchase power from the utility.

Aspects of Privatization Efforts:

• Proposed Asset Sales: Reports indicated plans to sell off TVA's generation and transmission infrastructure.

• Management Changes: The Trump administration was reported to have pressured the TVA board to fire its CEO and installed new board members, raising concerns about pushing privatization.

• Opposition: Unions, including the IAM, have strongly opposed these measures, with Stop the Privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) being a major focus of labor efforts to protect public power.

• Concerns: Critics argue that privatization would result in increased consumer power bills and the loss of the agency's regional development mission.

• Political Context: While some, including Rep. Tim Burchett, argued for exploring sales to improve efficiency, others, like former Sen. Lamar Alexander, called the idea "loony".

The AFL-CIO has formally called to reject any attempt to privatize the TVA.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is in an unusual spot. Public opposition has been mounting from diverse sources, ranging from environmentalists and U.S. senators to a country music star. Recent gripes include the utility’s fossil fuel expansion, million-plus-dollar executive salaries, a glacial pace in building new nuclear reactors, unjust burdens of pollution, and a general lack of transparency.

Control and the takeover fight are coming from the top of this present Presidential administration: Tensions culminated in a cancelled gas project, a threat to fire TVA’s new CEO, and speculations that President Donald Trump may privatize or seize control of the nation’s oldest and largest public utility.

“In my 30 years of tracking TVA, I have never seen TVA in such a destabilized position as it is now,” said Stephen Smith, the longtime director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. 

The Tennessee Valley Authority has been rapidly expanding its system of gas plants, which use fracked methane to produce electricity.

Atwater's Goal and Strategies:

• I stand firmly to work with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to secure its relationship in the State of Tennessee and is 100% against any privatization.

• As the next Governor of the State of Tennessee, I stand with the Unions of the AFL-CIO, which believe that the logic used to support the privatization of the TVA is fundamentally flawed. We further believe that any effort to privatize the TVA will diminish the critical role that it plays not only as a provider of inexpensive electricity and economic development, but also as an environmental steward of the Tennessee River watershed. We believe it was the New Deal policies of labor protections, like those included in the Wagner Act, and investment in our nation’s infrastructure through the passage of landmark legislation like the TVA Act of 1933, that are the very foundation that not only helped our nation recover from the Great Depression, but has also helped to build America’s vibrant middle class. Unfortunately, these very worker, wage, and retirement security protections, along with an effort to privatize critical public services like the TVA, are now unjustly under attack.

• In the efforts of assisting Tennesseans regarding any utility burdens and financial hardships, as the next Governor of the State of Tennessee, I would implement the Tennessee Green New Deal "Grid to Golden Sun". With my travel across the State of Tennessee, many Tennesseans have suggested numerous options for alternative energy usage that would be beneficial to their families and communities, such as solar panel installation, windmills, corn-burning stoves, rain barrels,