Cortney Piper, TAEBC’s executive director, spoke to the TVA Board of Directors at its February 2025 board listening session in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her comments are below.

My name is Cortney Piper, I serve as the executive director of the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council (TAEBC). Our mission is to champion advanced energy as an economic development and job creation strategy. We also serve as a member of TVA’s IRP Working Group, and are grateful for the opportunity to help TVA develop its compass for meeting energy demand in the Tennessee Valley.

My comments today are related to the draft Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) and to express our members’ interest in engaging further with TVA to develop programs and funding mechanisms that will deploy needed energy resources in the Valley, without unnecessarily contributing to TVA’s debt ceiling.

First, I want to clarify our definition of advanced energy. Advanced energy is technology neutral, anything that makes energy cleaner, safer, more secure, or more efficient is in the tent– and includes electricity and transportation.  

TAEBC recognizes the critical role the IRP plays in shaping Tennessee’s energy landscape and its economic future. 

We commend TVA’s commitment to decarbonization, advanced energy technologies, and grid modernization and are pleased to provide recommendations to enhance the IRP’s alignment with Tennessee’s growing advanced energy sector, which currently generates $55.9 billion in state GDP, employs over 420,000 Tennesseans, and includes more than 22,000 businesses in all 95 counties.

Overall, TAEBC endorses Strategy C in the IRP which looks at deployment of commercially ready carbon free technologies.

But we recommend TVA also consider an enhancement to that strategy, one that puts equal emphasis on deployable technologies (solar, wind, battery storage and long-duration storage) while also focusing on nuclear resources. This enhancement would account for the early work TVA has done on new nuclear technology, such as SMRs at Clinch River, and its partnership with Type One Energy on fusion. 

Additionally, TAEBC encourages TVA to consider how to better integrate large corporate demand for carbon-free energy with its IRP. TVA’s draft IRP views industry electrification mainly through a regulatory lens – that is to say, if not for regulations, industry would not electrify. And that simply is not the case. 

The IRP should align more closely with industry-driven targets used by TAEBC members, like the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). Many utilities view corporate demand for advanced energy as siloed off from their resource planning processes, creating missed opportunities to align this market demand towards the highest value system resources.

TAEBC fully supports TVA’s investment in emerging technologies identified in the draft IRP and recommends TVA pursue public-private partnerships to accelerate deployment. The Flexibility Option was a good start for commercially ready technologies. However, a sizable private-equity/industrial partnership opportunity exists to alleviate TVA’s debt burden and allow for emerging technology deployment with shared cost/benefit.

Thank you.