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The Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal retirement reversal led utility to violate federal law.
CUMBERLAND CITY, Tenn. — The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of Appalachian Voices, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club, has notified the Tennessee Valley Authority of the groups’ intent to sue the federal utility because the construction and operation of its newly-built Cumberland Gas Plant alongside the nearby coal plant violates the federal Clean Air Act.
In 2023, TVA finalized plans to shutter its coal plant known as the Cumberland Fossil Plant and replace it with a multi-billion-dollar methane gas power plant. The closure was long overdue—the aging coal plant is one of the dirtiest, least reliable, and most expensive power plants in the federal utility’s fleet. However, the gas plant TVA proposed to operate in lieu of the coal plant threatened to continue saddling nearby communities with harmful air pollution, including formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, fine particulate matter and smog-forming nitrogen oxides.
Despite this threat of continuing the site’s legacy of pollution, TVA avoided many of the Clean Air Act’s most important protections by characterizing the new methane gas plant as a “minor modification” to the retiring coal plant. The utility did this by promising the switch from a coal plant to a gas plant would not cause a significant increase in pollution.
