TVA provides power that keeps the lights on in homes and businesses across the region.
Having the right resources at the right time to meet customer demand requires continual planning.
For more than a year, TVA has been working closely with stakeholders on the 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) – a comprehensive study that will help shape TVA’s energy system through 2050. TVA also prepared an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to evaluate the potential impacts associated with the IRP.
On Sept. 23, 2024, TVA published the draft 2025 IRP and EIS.
So, what’s important to know?
“The IRP helps TVA think broadly about how energy needs could evolve between now and 2050 and what resources could be used to power the homes and businesses across the region,” Brian Child, Vice President of Enterprise Planning, said. “The plan will serve as TVA’s compass for power generation decisions as well as for long-term operational and financial planning.”
The planning direction established by the IRP will help ensure that the roughly 10 million people who use power supplied by TVA will have affordable, reliable, resilient and increasingly cleaner energy for decades to come.
TVA isn’t doing this work alone. Developing the draft IRP and EIS has been a collaborative effort with third-party participants such as national laboratories, stakeholder representatives on the IRP Working Group and the Regional Resource Energy Council, and the general public.
The IRP is a rigorous undertaking that entails evaluating future energy demand, evolving regulations, current power generation resources and new resource options, then determining what new power resources would work best to fill future capacity needs.
A few highlights from the draft IRP are:
- The draft IRP suggests that between now and 2035, TVA will need to add 9 to 26 gigawatts of new dependable capacity to meet the region’s growing energy demand and replace retiring capacity. For reference, 1 gigawatt supplies enough energy to power about 585,000 average homes.
- The draft results indicate that more renewables, gas, storage and demand-side resources will be needed to reliably meet growing demand.
- It also will be important for TVA to continue exploring and developing new, clean energy resources and grid-enabling initiatives for integrating distributed resources.
- The draft results indicate TVA would see a projected 75% to 90% reduction in carbon intensity by 2035 from its 2005 baseline and continued reductions beyond 2035.
The draft EIS informs TVA’s decisionmakers and meets TVA’s requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). It is a programmatic review that broadly assesses the relative impacts of the IRP on the natural and human environment.
“The IRP has the potential to impact every resident and business in the seven-state region that TVA serves,” Melanie Farrell, Vice President of Valley Engagement and Strategy, said. “We need robust and diverse opinions from employees, stakeholders and the public to broaden our lens and challenge our assumptions.”
Details on the draft IRP and EIS are available on the IRP webpage.