Coal Wars

The Future of Energy and the Fate of the Planet

Palgrave Macmillan

Contents

THE TVA

Bill Pritchard had always worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, until he didn't. Pritchard grew up in Memphis, a few miles from the Allen Plant, a municipal coal plant that was leased and later purchased outright by the authority. He hunted and fished the river country of Tennessee, and in high school he wrestled ("In Memphis you either play basketball or you wrassle," he told me). He stayed home for college at Memphis State, now the University of Memphis. MSU was a basketball school, and it drew its players from the surrounding cities of the mid-South. One of the stars in Pritchard's freshman year was Dexter Reed, a smooth and graceful guard from Little Rock, my hometown, whom I'd grown up watching and a few times trying, unsuccessfully, to guard. Pritchard graduated in 1980, the same year I graduated from college, and he went to work for the TVA the next day. Except for a three-year Wanderjahr when he went off in search of himself and attended graduate school, he's worked there ever since. In those days, when you went to work for the TVA you were usually signing on for life.

An electrical engineer, or double-E, Pritchard joined the authority's training program for engineers, in which he would rotate from plant to plant for three years. His first job was in Hollywood—Hollywood, Alabama, where the Bellefonte nuclear plant was at that time under construction. He was assigned to assist with the final design documentation for the two 1,256-megawatt reactors. This was in the early 1980s, at the peak of the nuclear power construction boom. TVA's nuclear program included Bellefonte plus the two-reactor Watts Bar plant, near Knoxville, as well as the Clinch River breeder reactor, conceived as the nation's first plutonium-based, self-sustaining nuclear plant—the future of power generation.

Things didn't go as planned. "They quickly found they didn't necessarily need all those people at Bellefonte," Pritchard recalls, "though they were still planning on building it at the time."

Reconsideration came quickly. Caught up in the wave of post–Three Mile Island, post-Chernobyl backlash against nuclear power, and plagued with the cost overruns and delays that afflict most nuclear power projects, Bellefonte was never completed. When it was officially abandoned in 1988, Unit 1 was 88 percent complete and Unit 2 half-finished. Six billion dollars and countless man-hours had been invested in the site, and not a kilowatt of electricity was ever generated. By that time Pritchard had moved on; he did a stint at Watts Bar as well, where the second reactor, also incomplete, was shut down in 1988. Pritchard's record of working on completed power plants was discouraging, but when he moved to the coal side of the operation he found his home for the next three decades. He specialized in instrumentation, minding the systems and gauges that kept the plant running and monitored its performance. Something in his voice changes when he talks about coal plants.

"I was lucky enough to get on the big project for Paradise, in central Kentucky," he recalls. "As a just-out-of-school engineer, I was working on the whole control system for them ID fans—they're still there."

"ID" stands for induced draft, and it was an early attempt to use technology to reduce some of the environmental damage, and the effects on nearby communities, of burning coal. Like a bellows on a forge, only in reverse, the giant fans pull air through the boiler, where coal is burned to create the steam that spins the turbines to produce electricity, and vent it to the outside. ID fan boilers replaced conventional pressurized furnaces, which tended to dump ash and coal dust over the nearby countryside. It was satisfying work: Pritchard was helping to clean up America's leading source of power. And the money was good, especially since the young and single Pritchard had little time to spend his salary. But he picked up and left. "I got tired of working 80 hours a week, and I went a little crazy." He quit the job, bought a pickup, and drove it across the country. He saw the West and fell in love with Colorado, but it was not enough to overcome the gravitational force of home. Eventually he made his way back to Memphis and picked up a master's degree, also in double-E, also at MSU. And inevitably, he went back to work for the TVA, doing instrumentation for coal plants. By 2012 he'd been at the John Sevier plant, in eastern Tennessee near Rogersville, for 21 years.

"I told my wife maybe we'd be here two or three years," he says, chuckling. "But it's home now. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere, all our kids were born here. We're stayin'."

By the time Pritchard reached his mid-50s his life seemed laid out, as far as he could see. He'd risen to be the plant manager. His kids were raised and going off to college. His pension from the authority was secure. He figured he would work another ten years or so, till Social Security kicked in, and then retire to fish and hunt. TVA had gone through plenty of changes in the last ten years, not all of them reassuring. But he figured it was a stable business to be in. People would always need power. And there was plenty of coal.

Then, one day in 2013, he and his fellow Sevier workers were called into the plant auditorium in the middle of the day for a special announcement.

Like many power plants, the John Sevier Power Station is tucked away, hidden well enough that, unless you're looking for it, you're not going to see it. Burning coal to make electricity is like choosing a presidential candidate: the less the public sees of the actual process, the better. John Sevier sits on the Holston River, in eastern Tennessee, a tributary of the Tennessee River, which rises in the limestone escarpments of the southern Appalachians and curls far to the south, across northern Alabama, before snaking back north to join the Ohio near Paducah, Kentucky. Known as the Mountain Empire, stretching from Roanoke in the northeast to Knoxville in the southwest, these deep forests are intricately threaded by the headwaters of the Tennessee, a labyrinth of hollows and sloughs and sluggish streams walled with dense underbrush: the Clinch, the Powell, the Nolichucky, the French Broad, the Holston. The banks of the Holston, which must be described as "sleepy," bear the traces of past industry like the remnants of a former civilization: ramshackle barns, fallow fields, the ghostly concrete stanchions of a vanished bridge.

In fact, the Sevier coal plant itself is now officially a remnant. Named for John Sevier, a tavern keeper who helped lead the frontier wars against the Cherokee and Chickamauga in the decades following the American Revolution and became Tennessee's first governor, the plant was first fired up in 1957. The coal boilers at Sevier operated continuously for 55 years and were shut down for good in 2012, to be replaced by a sparkling new combined-cycle natural gas plant that sits, literally, next door. It's hard to find a more obvious example of America's energy past confronting its future.

That's especially appropriate here in the Mountain Empire, because this region is served by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the iconic New Deal federal agency that, beginning in the 1930s, brought light and air conditioning and refrigeration to some of America's most benighted communities. For decades the TVA was the economic engine of much of the Southeast and, in the case of villages like Rogersville, the nearest town to Sevier, the only significant place of employment other than fast-food joints and retail chains. Sevier embodies the enlightened transition from coal to low-cost, low-emissions, high-tech power generation fueled by natural gas—but it also epitomizes the wrenching changes the TVA, which operates 11 coal plants across its six-state service territory and is one of the largest consumers of coal in the country, is undergoing. For decades the TVA got the majority of its power from coal. Now, driven by the EPA and the governments of the states in which it operates, the authority is being forced out of the coal power generation business. When I arrived in the fall of 2013, the ripples of that change were spreading in expanding circles across the hill towns to river ports, office parks, county courthouses, statehouses, and corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Nashville, Richmond, and all the way to Washington, D.C.

I was staying in Kingsport, which sits at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Holston, 30 miles east of Sevier. Along with Johnson City, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia, Kingsport makes up the Tri-Cities area on the Tennessee-Virginia border; around half a million people live in the three cities and their surrounding suburbs and villages. From their earliest days, the fortunes of these communities have been tightly bound up with the coal that comes from the rich fields of Central Appalachia to the northeast. Kingsport got its name not from George III but from the boatyard at the confluence of the two forks of the Holston, which served for most of the nineteenth centuryas the head of navigation on the Tennessee and which was founded by James King, a colonel in George Washington's Revolutionary Army who was present at Cornwallis's surrender. Among Colonel King's accomplishments was the establishment of the region's first ironworks at the mouth of Steele's Creek, one of the numberless creeks that fed the Holston and, in turn, the Tennessee. Built in the 1780s, King's forge was fueled not by coal but by charcoal baked from lumber harvested from the surrounding forests. The first known use of coal to forge iron in Tennessee was not until years later.

Standing guard at the confluence, the Long Island of the Holston was an important staging post for travelers headed across the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky. In the nineteenth century, by mule and wagon and barge, and later by rail and trucks, coal from Kentucky and West Virginia was moved through Kingsport to be loaded onto bigger barges and floated downstream to the cities to the east.

As small southern cities go, Kingsport has a legacy of progressivism dating back to the early twentieth century. It's one of the "garden cities" designed by the Harvard landscape architect John Nolen, who advocated a balance of open space, greenbelts, and office buildings to limit urban sprawl. One of the largest black high schools in the United States, Douglass High, opened here in 1930 and, despite Jim Crow laws that prevented black teams competing against whites, became an athletic powerhouse in the 1940s and '50s. Douglass was closed in the desegregation movement of the 1960s.

Driving in on Interstate 26, past the usual lineup of fast-food franchises, strip malls, and sprung-up churches, it wasn't easy to detect Nolen's influence; but Kingsport's core, set along the wooded river bluffs, has a certain pre-1960s graciousness about it. This was the boyhood home of the southern historian John Shelton Reed, who famously remarked, "Every time I look at Atlanta I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent."

A few hundred of those soldiers died, were wounded, or taken prisoner here, at the Battle of Kingsport, on December 13, 1864, in which 300 Rebels for three days heroically fended off a force of 5,500 marauders under General George Stoneman on their way to lay waste to the farms and towns of western Virginia. Eventually the Rebels surrendered, and the loss of the Kingsport landing essentially cut off Tennessee from barge-loaded supplies, including supplies of coal. Whatever you think those Confederate soldiers died to prevent, the results of the world the Civil War made are easy to see in Kingsport today. The most glaringly visible is the massive Eastman Chemical Company plant at the center of town, whose five massive smokestacks tower over an 800-acre facility where various industrial chemicals—including polymers, acetates, and methanol—are produced. Eastman Chemical has its own coal-fired power plant, a 197-megawatt station with 19 small boilers that emits more than 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Eastman is also the site of the country's first commercial coal-gasification plant, opened in 1983 to produce chemicals using synthetic gas, or syngas, from converted coal rather than petroleum.

The coal-to-chemicals facility was designated a national landmark in 1995 by the American Chemical Society, and Eastman has been a major customer for the struggling coal mines of Appalachia. In 2013, though, Eastman said that, like many industrial users across the country, it is getting off coal.

"We've been talking about that decision since about 2008," project manager Jim Amstutz told the Times-News of Kingsport. "We thought we'd be doing renovations to the coal facilities but as the price of natural gas has come down, that has made natural gas the preferred option."

Eastman will not forego coal altogether: the syngas plant will continue to operate. The changeover will reduce Eastman's carbon footprint at Kingsport by only about 20 percent. Like many businesses and utilities across the South, though, Eastman has come to the realization that shutting down its coal boilers is more economical, not to mention more politically acceptable, than continuing to run them. The coal shutdown will cost the company around $90 million, but Eastman expects to save money in the long run.

For the TVA, deeply intertwined as it is with the economic and political life of the region, the costs of kicking coal will be much harder to calculate.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is most famous for building dams. But its real story, its core business for most of its 81-year history, has been operating coal plants.

In the era of the Tea Party and House of Cards, it's hard to recall the level of idealism that fueled the creation of the TVA in the depths of the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt swept into office in 1933 on a tide of populist fervor and widespread belief that the government could save the economy and right the social injustices that brought on the Crash. Among FDR's first tasks was to overhaul the power sector.

"Never shall the federal government part with its sovereignty or with its control of its power resources while I'm president of the United States," Roosevelt declared in his first campaign for president, tapping into the wave of anticorporate outrage that crested in the 1930s, a time when largely unregulated private utility holding companies, mostly coal-powered, controlled more than 90 percent of the nation's electricity. Created by Congress in 1933, the TVA was to be more than a builder of dams and a supplier of electricity to poor communities across the Southeast; it was to be a vehicle of opportunity, a beacon of social justice, and a model for the development of backward, agricultural, largely lightless societies at home and abroad.

"TVA was, in effect, the first comprehensive and unified effort to harness natural and human resources for productive purposes, within an ideological context of renewal, conservation, and restoration," wrote historian Steven Neuse in an essay commemorating the authority's fiftieth year of operation.

It was also one of the few federal agencies that inspired folk music, paintings, and poetry; it even found its own Virgil in the writer James Agee, who on assignment for Fortune penned a 6,000-word prose poem to the new authority shortly after its founding.

The Tennessee Valley was "the laboratory for a great experiment," Agee wrote, and the authority was setting out "to fashion a civilization which, in a certain important way, is new and is significant to all the U.S." TVA's vision, in Agee's telling, was simple yet audacious: "The natural forces and resources in the valley will be developed with one eye on the long future and the other on the immediate welfare of the people."

Opponents countered that the very idea of the TVA—a government agency that would undercut established power providers and essentially take over the economic development of an entire region—was antithetical to American capitalism. The most vocal early critic was Wendell Willkie, the president of Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, one of the country's largest private utilities, which supplied power to much of the TVA territory. Wilkie, who was to become the 1940 Republican nominee for president, declared government-supplied power equivalent to socialism.

In some ways Willkie and his kind were right. The TVA was the epitome of a centrally planned economy, born fully formed from the forehead of technocrats like its first chairman David Lilienthal (later head of the Atomic Energy Agency), who believed that they, far better than local elected officials, could raise up a region that had progressed little since the end of the Civil War. Finally, the TVA represented the dawning of a nascent environmentalism that recognized, however dimly, that long-term prosperity could not be achieved without stewardship of the health of the land.

"Far and wide the opinion—sound, bad, and indifferent—grows that we are approaching a turning point in civilization, that among other things an ancient human habit must be corrected," Agee declared. "Man must learn to cooperate with his surroundings instead of disemboweling and trampling and hoping to discard them. On the crest of this wave of talk and overrapid action, TVA is the first American attempt to tackle the problem specifically and bit by bit to build at the pace which scientific advancement requires."