On November 10 of final yr, at a spot known as Paradise in western Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley Authority blew up the cooling towers of a giant coal-fired energy plant. The three stout towers, every 435 ft excessive, buckled on the waist in synchrony, then crumpled like crushed soda cans. Inside 10 seconds, they’d collapsed right into a billowing cloud of mud.
To anybody who watched the demolition occur, or noticed the footage on-line, the message was clear: TVA, a sprawling, federally owned utility created 90 years in the past as a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, is getting off coal.
Although some folks within the area remorse that transfer, it’s a win for the native atmosphere—and for the worldwide local weather. Previously few years, because the urgency of slowing local weather change has grown, one thing like a consensus has emerged on the right way to do it: Inexperienced {the electrical} grid whereas retooling as a lot of the financial system as potential—vehicles, buildings, factories—to run on zero-carbon electrical energy. The Inflation Discount Act, signed by President Joe Biden final August, is supporting that plan with $370 billion in subsidies. In a 2021 government order, Biden directed the federal authorities to “lead by instance so as to obtain a carbon air pollution–free electrical energy sector by 2035” and a net-zero financial system by 2050.
Given this technique, electrical utilities are essential to our future—and none extra so than TVA, the biggest public energy supplier in america. Its territory covers practically all of Tennessee; massive chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky; and bits of three different states. In some of the conservative areas of the nation, 10 million folks get electrical energy from a federal company that has no shareholders to reply to and no earnings to make.
“TVA is that this loopy unicorn—it’s not like the rest,” Stephen Smith, the manager director of the Southern Alliance for Clear Power, advised me. As a federal company accountable not only for selling the clean-energy transition however for constructing it, TVA is positioned to offer a nationwide mannequin—and TVA says it’s doing simply that.
However that’s not how Smith and different environmental advocates describe TVA’s conduct. They see a utility that’s changing coal vegetation, at Paradise and elsewhere, with gas-burning vegetation that may pollute the local weather for many years. They see a utility betting closely on small nuclear reactors that don’t but exist. Above all, they are saying, TVA is failing to embrace confirmed clean-energy applied sciences, comparable to photo voltaic and wind energy and energy-efficiency measures.
“TVA is a dwelling laboratory that might be a part of an outstanding push to alter to scrub vitality,” Smith stated. As a substitute of an company “on a warfare footing to get us to zero carbon,” he sees it changing into “an obstacle within the government department.”
TVA has reduce its carbon emissions by properly over half since 2005, way over the nationwide common for the electrical energy sector, whereas charging lower-than-average charges. It has carried out so by changing coal with fuel and by switching on a big new nuclear reactor. However like most American utilities, TVA has no plans to succeed in Biden’s purpose of a net-zero grid by 2035; it’s concentrating on solely an 80 % carbon discount by that date. “We aspire to net-zero by 2050, and we aspire to go farther, quicker, if we will,” Jeff Lyash, TVA’s president and CEO since 2019, stated at a gathering of the company’s board of administrators in November. With present expertise, although, he doesn’t assume that’s potential.
What’s the precise highway to net-zero? The Tennessee Valley is an illuminating microcosm of a nationwide debate, by which the crucial of addressing local weather change is pitted towards the large sensible problem of not solely sustaining a dependable electrical provide however dramatically increasing it to satisfy the wants of a decarbonizing financial system. “TVA is in a singular place to guide in delivering the clean-energy future,” Lyash stated in November. He and his critics agree on that a lot. However as for when that future will arrive, and what it would appear to be, they’re very far aside certainly.
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VA was born from one other international disaster. In 1933, when Roosevelt and Senator George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, persuaded Congress to ascertain TVA, america was on the nadir of the Nice Melancholy, and the Tennessee Valley, the place solely a tiny share of the properties had electrical energy, was one of many nation’s poorest areas. TVA reworked it. Beginning with the Wilson Dam, at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a sequence of dams managed flooding on the Tennessee River and its tributaries and electrified the entire Valley. Hydroelectric vegetation nonetheless produce about 10 % of the area’s energy, carbon-free.
Personal utilities hated TVA, and complained bitterly about what they noticed as unfair competitors. They challenged the company’s existence earlier than the Supreme Court docket and misplaced, twice. As late because the Fifties, President Dwight Eisenhower wished to unload the company, which he noticed for instance of “creeping socialism.” The company survived by changing into quasi-independent of the federal authorities. The president appoints and Congress confirms TVA’s board, however since 1959, TVA has principally carried out with out federal appropriations. It pays its personal method by promoting electrical energy—not on to shoppers (except for just a few dozen industrial and federal properties), however to the 153 municipally or cooperatively owned native energy firms, or LPCs, that distribute energy to the folks.
From the beginning, TVA’s technique was to make electrical energy low-cost and accessible sufficient that individuals would use it for every thing. The company succeeded so properly that demand quickly outstripped what even a totally dammed river may provide. Within the ’50s, TVA started counting on coal as its predominant vitality supply, finally constructing 12 massive energy vegetation. Over the previous decade, it has closed six, however big piles of poisonous ash stay. In 2008, a dike ruptured on the coal plant in Kingston, Tennessee, spilling greater than 5 million cubic yards of ash into the Emory and Clinch Rivers.
Environmentalists have lengthy had motive to mistrust TVA. Within the ’70s, when the newly created Environmental Safety Company started regulating air air pollution, TVA resisted. Accustomed to creating its personal engineering choices, it argued that investing in scrubbers for its coal stacks made no sense—in any case, it was about to interchange most of them with nuclear reactors. However the company accomplished solely seven of a deliberate 17 reactors—demand for electrical energy grew slower than forecast—and as we speak, unfinished reactor hulks lie scattered across the Valley. The fiasco left TVA constrained by debt, which nonetheless totals practically $20 billion.
Nonetheless, TVA is happy with its nuclear fleet. Though Georgia Energy is predicted to carry a brand new reactor on-line quickly, TVA has been the one U.S. utility to have managed that previously three many years. It started development on the 2 reactors at its Watts Bar plant, in Tennessee, in 1973; mothballed them for years; then accomplished them in 1996 and 2016. Within the first half of 2023, they and the company’s different reactors helped it generate practically 60 % of its kilowatt-hours with out emitting carbon—considerably increased than the nationwide common. However it has “fumbled, failed, and flopped” into that enviable place, Stephen Smith advised me. The local weather disaster calls for transformative change, Smith stated, and TVA has deserted its historic mission to offer exactly that.
In downtown Chattanooga, the folks instantly answerable for delivering electrical energy to the Valley’s 10 million residents sit in TVA’s system-operations middle. It’s a big, hushed, dimly lit room, by which curving rows of workstations face a wall full of an illuminated schematic of TVA’s sprawling transmission grid. The primary rows of operators observe the bodily situation and voltage of the transmission traces. The operators behind them “dispatch” energy as wanted from lots of of mills across the grid, matching provide to demand minute by minute. That complicated job is simplified by having a lot of “dispatchable” energy, which is what coal, fuel, nuclear, and hydro vegetation present, at the least in precept: energy that’s obtainable any time of the day or yr.
In a convention room overlooking the management room, I met Greg Henrich and Aaron Melda, TVA’s vp and senior vp for transmission and energy provide. Melda had helped formulate the company’s decarbonization technique, and he grabbed a marker to sketch out the numbers on a flip chart. The technique’s central ingredient is the closure of TVA’s final 5 coal vegetation, all greater than 50 years outdated, by 2035. “Over the identical interval, we’ll add 10,000 megawatts of photo voltaic,” Melda stated. To retailer vitality for when the solar isn’t shining, TVA will even add 1,000 megawatts of battery capability.
Over the following decade, although, the company’s predominant carbon-reduction technique is to construct extra fuel vegetation—7,000 megawatts’ price, roughly the capability of the present coal fleet. After I visited the system-ops middle final fall, TVA was finalizing plans for the newest addition: a 1,450-megawatt fuel plant in Cumberland Metropolis, Tennessee, on the web site of its greatest coal plant, whose two producing items are scheduled to retire in 2026 and 2028. Environmentalists strenuously opposed the fuel plant—even the EPA questioned it—arguing that it will commit TVA to emitting carbon long gone 2035 and even 2050. Within the close to time period, although, the change from coal will considerably scale back emissions of carbon and different pollution. “You change coal with fuel, you’ve now taken each a type of megawatts down 50 % in its carbon depth,” Melda stated.
Why not simply construct extra batteries and extra photo voltaic, and take the depth right down to zero? It could price much more, Melda stated, and batteries discharge inside a number of hours. Just a few wet days may depart you unable to satisfy demand. Neither is photo voltaic an enormous assistance on darkish winter mornings, that are the moments that TVA worries about most. Nearly all of properties within the Valley have electrical warmth. A spokesperson for TVA, Scott Fiedler, later stated that fuel is “the one mature expertise that enables us to rapidly add renewable vitality and preserve the low price and reliability” wanted.
I visited the system-ops middle on a cold November day per week earlier than Thanksgiving. Early that morning, as folks cranked up their thermostat, TVA had seen a reasonably typical winter peak within the load on its grid. Hotter climate was coming that may drive down demand, Henrich stated, however it will rise once more on Thanksgiving morning, as folks roasted turkeys. That afternoon, the load would plummet. “All people’s asleep on the sofa,” Henrich stated. “It’s superior to look at—it’s actually societal conduct driving your load.”
He opened the blinds on the conference-room home windows so we may see into the management room itself. It seemed fairly quiet, with a number of the workstations empty. “When does it ever get thrilling?” I requested. A month later, my query was answered.
On December 23, folks within the Tennessee Valley awoke to temperatures that had plunged 40 levels or extra in a single day. Worse, each items of the Cumberland coal plant had shut down, as a result of thick ice from an enormous storm had encased devices on the uncovered boilers. Within the morning, the Bull Run coal plant wouldn’t begin, and a few natural-gas vegetation failed too. As demand soared to an all-time winter document of 33,427 megawatts, the operators in Chattanooga discovered themselves about 8,000 megawatts brief. Neighboring utilities couldn’t assist; the storm had affected half the nation.
For 2 hours that morning, TVA needed to instruct its 153 native energy firms to chop demand by 5 %. On Christmas Eve, it requested for a ten % reduce for greater than 5 hours. To conform, the LPCs shut off energy neighborhood by neighborhood for quarter-hour or extra at a time. The rolling blackouts had been the first in TVA’s 90-year historical past. At Christmas dinner, Fiedler advised me, his mom required him to elucidate why his storied group had reduce her energy on the vacation. “She wore me out,” he stated.
TVA likes to boast of its reliability, and environmental advocates seized on the Christmas failure. “The emperor has no garments,” Amanda Garcia, the director of the Southern Environmental Regulation Heart’s Tennessee workplace, advised me. “The winter storm to me supplied an ideal instance of why TVA wants to alter”—by displaying that fossil fuels aren’t any assure of reliability and that it needs to be transitioning to renewables quicker. The Sierra Membership ranks TVA among the many very worst American utilities for its vitality transition. The Heart for Organic Range calls it a “local weather laggard.” Each need the company to interchange all its coal vegetation as quickly as potential with renewable vitality, not fuel.
A modeling examine launched in March by the Heart for Organic Range and by GridLab, a nonprofit consulting group, concluded that TVA may certainly cease burning each coal and fuel by 2035. To do this, it will must construct the equal of about 145 massive photo voltaic farms, with a complete capability of 35 gigawatts, in its territory, together with the transmission traces wanted to import about 12 gigawatts of wind energy from the Midwest. (The Valley isn’t windy sufficient to provide cost-effective wind energy.) Then, by 2050, it must practically triple that enlargement once more so as to electrify and decarbonize the Valley’s financial system. The targets are formidable, given the delays that now plague many renewable and transmission tasks—however the advantages to society would dwarf the prices, the examine discovered. Customers would save greater than $250 billion, principally from switching to vehicles that run on TVA’s electrical energy moderately than gasoline. Carbon emissions would drop by lots of of thousands and thousands of tons.
Step one towards a clean-energy future, advocates agree, could be to cut back vitality waste within the Valley. A few quarter of properties there depend on resistance heating—the strategy employed in electrical furnaces and area heaters. Many warmth pumps additionally fall again on it at freezing temperatures, Huntsville Utilities’ president and CEO, Wes Kelley, advised me. “That’s principally the equal of turning on a bunch of huge hair dryers to warmth your own home,” Kelley stated.
In response to Nationwide Renewable Power Laboratory estimates, effectivity measures, together with extra and higher warmth pumps, may save roughly as a lot electrical energy because the Cumberland fuel plant will generate. “When you scale back that resistance heating, you’re serving to the system as an entire”—by lowering the height load—“in addition to the shopper,” Maggie Shober, the analysis director on the Southern Alliance for Clear Power (SACE), advised me. As a result of folks within the Valley use a lot electrical energy, month-to-month payments are excessive although charges are low, creating an particularly heavy burden on the poor.
Utilities typically have little incentive to spend money on energy-saving measures, which solely scale back their income. However TVA needs to be totally different: It doesn’t must make a revenue. Since 2018, it has run an admirable program, known as Residence Uplift, that gives warmth pumps, weatherization, and different measures to low-income owners, all without cost—however to this point, solely to five,000 of the lots of of 1000’s of Valley residents who is perhaps eligible. TVA may do rather more, SACE and different critics say, particularly now that the Inflation Discount Act is subsidizing energy-efficiency packages. For its half, TVA says it’s planning extra of a majority of these investments, together with rebates to interchange older and fewer environment friendly warmth pumps. Fiedler, the TVA spokesperson, stated the company will decrease vitality prices in underserved communities by $200 million over the following 5 years by means of Residence Uplift and different packages.
The environmental advocates I talked with had been all suspicious of TVA’s clean-energy intentions. SACE’s Stephen Smith, an in depth observer of the company for greater than three many years, thinks TVA is constructing fuel vegetation now and planning nuclear for the long run as a result of massive energy vegetation are what it’s comfy constructing, and it has a monopoly on constructing them within the Valley. The way forward for the {industry} ought to lie in “shifting from central stations to a extra distributed mannequin that opens up an entire new highly effective toolbox for fixing the local weather disaster,” Smith stated. “However TVA shouldn’t be going there.”
He and different advocates see a “quickly closing window of alternative to safe a habitable and sustainable future,” to cite the newest United Nations local weather report, and in that stark mild, TVA’s present fleet of renewables seems insufficient, particularly should you put aside the hydroelectric dams and deal with what it has achieved these days. It buys about 1,200 megawatts of wind from the Midwest; it has put in about 1,000 megawatts of photo voltaic capability within the Valley. That’s far much less solar energy, Amanda Garcia identified, than deployed by utilities within the Carolinas or Georgia. Although she acknowledged TVA’s plans to broaden photo voltaic over the approaching decade, “actions communicate louder than phrases,” she stated.
However TVA is definitely making an enormous effort nowadays, Gil Hough, the manager director of TenneSEIA, the state solar-industry affiliation, advised me. Hough labored for SACE from 2000 to 2010, selling photo voltaic with Smith. Now he helps ship it to TVA.
Within the mid-2010s, he advised me, the company did certainly stroll away from photo voltaic as a result of it was targeted on paying down its nuclear debt. Underneath Lyash, although, TVA has modified, Hough stated. It could have only one,000 megawatts of photo voltaic on-line—however it has greater than 2,200 underneath development or contracted. “TVA needs each megawatt we will present them proper now,” Hough stated. “It’s us who’s holding them again.” Provide-chain disruptions have slowed photo voltaic tasks and raised costs. However Lyash introduced in Could that TVA would award contracts this yr for six,000 megawatts of solar energy, to be introduced on-line between 2026 and 2029. “We’re constructing as a lot photo voltaic as we will get panels for,” he stated.
What received TVA’s consideration was the demand from massive firms, says Reagan Farr, the CEO of the Nashville-based Silicon Ranch, which owns and operates photo voltaic farms for TVA and different utilities. Farr advised me that firms like Google and Meta, by insisting on renewable vitality, satisfied TVA that it may not fulfill its mission of financial growth with out increasing its photo voltaic capability. “The ability of those massive firms—their procurement choices drive actions,” Farr stated.
Native resistance to photo voltaic farms is a rising drawback, each TVA and the {industry} say. On the November TVA board assembly, Chief Working Officer Don Moul introduced a $216 million plan to construct a 100-megawatt photo voltaic plant on high of the coal-ash pile on the Shawnee energy plant, in Kentucky. If it really works, Moul stated, as a lot as 1,000 megawatts of photo voltaic would possibly at some point rise from ash piles across the area—poetic justice, and a technique to “alleviate a few of the land challenges that we’ve heard about from so a lot of our stakeholders,” Moul stated.
One among TVA’s key constituencies are the native energy firms that distribute its electrical energy. Their perspective is commonly very totally different from that of environmental advocates. At a listening session earlier than a February 2023 board assembly in Muscle Shoals, a dozen of their representatives received as much as communicate—not about renewables or local weather change, however in regards to the blackouts. They had been a “black eye for all of us within the Valley,” stated Brian Solsbee, the manager director of the Tennessee Municipal Electrical Energy Affiliation and a former TVA worker. “How does TVA guarantee it by no means occurs once more?” It wants new era capability, Huntsville Utilities’ Wes Kelley advised me.
When it was Lyash’s flip to talk, he stated what he has stated repeatedly: that TVA plans to make use of all obtainable applied sciences to decarbonize. He promised a renewed deal with vitality effectivity and an aggressive enlargement of photo voltaic—but in addition of fuel and, in the long term, nuclear. “Don’t put all of your eggs in a single basket,” he stated. Renewables, in his view, are one basket.
The Tennessee Valley goes by means of a interval of financial enlargement that may make Roosevelt proud, and TVA, with its popularity for affordable and dependable energy, is partly accountable. The Valley’s new progress consists of electric-vehicle, battery, and solar-panel producers—the industries that may drive the electrification of America. After I first met Lyash in Chattanooga, the place he had simply offered TVA’s Engineer of the Yr award, he rattled off a few of the names. “Ford, GM, Toyota, Mazda, Volkswagen, LG, SK—these industries are going to decarbonize transportation,” he stated. “So we’ve to offer them the vitality now.” Demand is rising already, and Lyash expects it doubtlessly to double by 2050. A examine final yr by the Nationwide Renewable Power Laboratory (NREL), which mapped how the grid is perhaps decarbonized by 2035, in keeping with Biden’s purpose, assumed that demand would possibly even double by then.
The choice to construct a brand new fuel plant at Cumberland is available in that context in addition to that of local weather urgency. In TVA’s view, even when it may construct sufficient further renewables and transmission traces to interchange the Cumberland coal unit it plans to retire by 2026, which it says it will probably’t, photo voltaic and wind wouldn’t supply “agency, dispatchable energy”—energy that’s obtainable no matter climate or time of day. The fundamental drawback, because the NREL report explains, is “seasonal mismatch”: There’s not sufficient daylight to satisfy peak demand on chilly winter mornings and never sufficient wind on sizzling summer season afternoons; each may be minimal for days.
Given this actuality, is it cheap to construct a brand new fuel plant as we speak, although it would emit some carbon for years to return? I put the query to Paul Denholm, a senior analysis fellow at NREL and the lead writer of the current examine. “That may be a implausible query, and it’s one thing all people is making an attempt to determine,” he stated.
All visions of a decarbonized grid and of an electrified, net-zero society require enormous expansions of wind and solar energy. However the NREL examine foresees {that a} net-zero grid will even want some form of fuel to satisfy peak demand. In three of its 4 net-zero situations, generators are nonetheless burning substantial quantities of pure fuel in 2035, and the carbon is being captured moderately than launched into the environment. In all situations, many fuel generators are retrofitted to burn zero-carbon hydrogen.
TVA’s imaginative and prescient of the long run, as Lyash and Aaron Melda defined it to me, aligns broadly with the NREL examine. Any fuel vegetation that TVA builds now, they stated, will at some point both burn “inexperienced hydrogen” or contain carbon seize—neither is in broad use but, and TVA is investing in each. The explanation TVA gained’t promise a net-zero grid by 2035, Lyash stated, is as a result of “it’s going to take deploying applied sciences that aren’t presently obtainable at a value folks can afford and a scale that may be carried out.” The NREL examine assumes that these applied sciences will probably be developed in time to succeed in web zero by 2035; TVA doesn’t need to rely on that.
It’s no shock, Denholm stated, that utilities are struggling to determine the right way to reduce the final 10 to twenty % of their carbon emissions. NREL researchers haven’t figured it out both. “The truth that you could have conservative utilities saying they know the right way to [cut] 80 %—that may be a actually exceptional shift,” he advised me. “I feel we have to acknowledge that and applaud it.”
One other influential report, Princeton’s 2021 “Web-Zero America” examine, included a situation by which solely renewable vitality was allowed: By 2050, wind generators had been seen from about one-eighth of the world of the Decrease 48 states, photo voltaic farms coated an space the dimensions of West Virginia, and long-distance transmission traces mushroomed to 5 instances their present capability. Even when such services share land with different makes use of—Silicon Ranch, as an illustration, permits sheep to graze or pollinator gardens to bloom among the many photo voltaic panels—they’re a big industrial intrusion on the panorama.
In some areas, folks could desire much less of these—and extra of the compact central energy stations that TVA is aware of the right way to construct. The NREL and Princeton research each embrace net-zero situations by which the enlargement of renewable services and transmission traces is constrained, maybe by “challenges with siting and land use,” as NREL places it. Each situations rely, as does TVA, on nuclear vegetation. “I can’t make the numbers work with out new nuclear,” Lyash advised me.
Like many nuclear engineers nowadays, he thinks the long run lies in small modular reactors, or SMRs. At a web site on the Clinch River, TVA is planning the primary of what it hopes will probably be a fleet of 20 or so an identical SMRs, utilizing a comparatively typical design. “Our purpose isn’t just to construct a plant, however to construct a plant that units the mannequin for the U.S. {industry},” Greg Boerschig, one of many engineers operating the TVA effort, advised me.
The best way environmentalists deal with TVA’s renewable capability or lack thereof frustrates Lyash. “The purpose is,” he stated, “what are your carbon emissions, and what’s your value, and what’s your reliability?” Completely different areas with totally different beginning factors—Arizona has a number of sunshine, Oklahoma has wind, TVA has a legacy of nuclear and hydro—would possibly attain their clean-energy targets in several methods.
Towards the tip of our final dialog, Lyash opened an app on his telephone that reveals real-time carbon emissions from electrical energy era. “One of many international locations that will get held up as having deployed enormous quantities of photo voltaic, and it’s an enormous share of their capability, is Germany,” he stated. “Germany’s carbon emissions proper now are 426 grams per unit of electrical energy. And as we speak, proper now, TVA’s is 247 … And our value is lower than a 3rd of theirs.”
That occurred to be a nasty day for Germany’s numbers and a superb one for TVA’s—however long-term knowledge affirm Lyash’s level: Germany will get a far increased share of its electrical energy from renewables than TVA, however emits considerably extra carbon per kilowatt-hour. Germany has made totally different decisions. It closed its final nuclear reactor in April.
Environmentalists are proper to be cautious of TVA. Previously it has carried out badly on a wide range of environmental points. It constructed an pointless dam, the Tellico, that drowned vital Cherokee cultural websites and lots of of farms and notoriously threatened to extinguish a little bit fish, the snail darter. (The darter has since recovered.) It stepped again from photo voltaic and energy-efficiency efforts when it may have led the best way. It was sluggish to cut back air air pollution from its coal vegetation—that are nonetheless deadly polluters—and allowed the most important coal-ash catastrophe in Kingston to occur. This Could, whilst Lyash was promising 6,000 megawatts of latest renewable vitality, TVA doubled down on its Cumberland resolution: It launched a draft environmental-impact assertion saying that it additionally wished to interchange the Kingston plant with fuel energy by the tip of 2027. That can lock in increased emissions for longer, environmentalists say.
Garcia and Smith assume TVA lacks public accountability. They level out that it has no impartial public-service fee to control it, solely a board that, like company boards, has no workers of its personal and thus is determined by administration. They want to loosen TVA’s monopoly and free native energy firms to purchase energy elsewhere, bridling the “unicorn” with market self-discipline.
However that may danger undermining the very factor that makes the company such a valuable unicorn: the public-power mannequin. TVA has retained political help, at the least in its sphere, for an lively authorities position in bettering folks’s lives. And in a area the place environmental causes are hardly unifying, TVA has stated, publicly and repeatedly, that it needs to cease emitting carbon as quick as it will probably. The way it does that needs to be debated—however in lots of conversations with TVA and its critics, I by no means heard a strong motive to doubt its good religion.
As I traveled the Tennessee Valley, I visited monuments from TVA’s golden age, together with Wilson Dam, in northwestern Alabama, with its lofty, sunlit turbine corridor and arches like a Roman aqueduct’s, and Norris Dam, in northeastern Tennessee, which closes off the slender Clinch River with a tall, sculptural curve. TVA engineers and the folks of this area constructed these marvels “for generations but unborn,” as Senator George Norris preferred to say, with no notion of how precious they might grow to be in an age of local weather change.
Now it’s time to construct extra.
This text is a part of the Atlantic Planet sequence supported by the HHMI Division of Science Schooling.
