Timeline August 6, 2009
TVA OIG report fails to stop TVA adventures
August 6, 2009
TVA’s a slick one alright, first they’ve conned the TVPPA, the organization of 158 distributors of TVA electricity, into financing construction of new power plants and now they’ve conned them into going “partners” in a “smart grid” scheme. All at no cost to the ratepayers; of course, that is a false statement.
Is there no end to TVA’s backdoor financing schemes to protect their outrageous bonus structure?
TVA has proved to be untrustworthy time and again; TVA’s own Office of the Inspector General flatly stated that TVA was more interested in protecting its legal flanks than their customers’ pocketbooks. The ink barely has dried on the OIG’s latest report.
Logically then, TVA has illegally entered into a scheme to let another newly formed entity of TVPPA* (Seven States Power Corporation) finance new power plant construction; and according to TVA itself, TVA wants to receive “stimulus” grants of $200 million from the DOE for a new “smart grid”**. The latter technology has not been proved to be cost effective but when and if installed, it would have to be financed by users of TVA electricity, not from DOE stimulus money. That is, unless federal TVA law is changed to permit swapping funds between the two agencies.
The way TVA presently is financially structured it cannot proceed without greatly increasing electricity rates much of which has been caused by their own negligence and inept management.
Even another federal agency, the EPA, has stripped away TVA’s authority to control the Kingston disaster cleanup. TVA must get approval from the EPA to proceed. The DOE now has some federal stimulus money for a program, “smart grid”, which has been applied for jointly by the TVPPA and the TVA. How does one federal agency, TVA, legally receive stimulus money from taxpayers through another federal agency, the Department of Energy?
The TVA Act says that TVA is to be “self-financing”; a phrase often used by TVA to describe its independence from congressionally appropriated funding. TVA has a debt of over $25 billion; so much for “self-financing”.
For decades, actually from the beginning, TVA has wanted to have it both ways; to have the “flexibility” of a private corporation with the power (eminent domain) of the federal government. TVA has not shown the attributes of a flexible corporation but it has greatly exercised its power to take private property through eminent domain.
Flawed from the beginning, TVA remains very badly flawed and continues its trickery and dissembling ways of extorting even more taxes (through electricity rates) from its 9 million customers. These captured customers pay $10 billion annually to the federal government through 158 TVA distributors and directly by large federal and commercial users.
There are ways to stop the nonsense, the mismanagement of a federal agency.
For some suggestions how, see http://norsworthyopinion.com
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net
*The Tennessee Valley Public Power Association; represents 158 distributors of TVA electricity; is the lobbying arm in Washington, D.C. of the TVA. http://www.tvppa.com/conferences/annual.htm TVPPA paid $70,000 to Morgan Meguire, a Washington lobbying firm, in FY 2008.
** A so-called smart grid would enable electricity providers such as the TVA, a federal government agency, to remotely control individual use of electricity.
P.S.
I’ve checked with the “Wizard” and he says the odds are that the TVA “as we know it” soon will be abolished – or further expanded into the nationalization of all electricity grids in the United States.
EN