MUSCLE SHOALS, Ala. — The Tennessee Valley Authority is piecing together a plan it says will shape the "energy system of the future." As it compiles its ideas putting the region into 2024 and beyond, officials are calling for your input.
TVA's 2024 Integrated Resource Plan, or IRP, "will shape TVA’s energy system of the future, ensuring that those who live and work in the Valley region have affordable, reliable, resilient and clean energy for decades to come," according to an official statement. The plans the team have come up with include hypothetical scenarios reaching as far into the future as 2050.
An Environmental Impact Statement will also be published which evaluates how those plans may affect your land, water, and energy resources. These plans already take into account feedback from a previous public inspection period, where concerns including decarbonization, increasing energy demands, and public transparency.
Public engagement, they stress, is crucial to the process.
“TVA is a public power provider and this is our region’s collective IRP,” Brian Child, vice president of TVA Enterprise Planning, said. “Stakeholder engagement is so important to this exercise. There are bright folks at TVA who run models, make recommendations, do systems planning. But we also need stakeholder input and engagement to challenge our assumptions and ensure our IRP meets the needs of the region.”
To that end, TVA is hosting two webinar sessions, Dec. 12 and 14, allowing the public to hear the scenarios and strategies the TVA have come up with. The Dec. 14 session will also feature questions posed by the public for officials to answer.
Both webinars require prior registration; click here to learn more.
TVA currently operates based on a plan structured in 2019.