Electrical Generation

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the U.S. TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. TVA is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the U.S. In 2021, MDN told you that TVA is spending over $1 billion to replace six coal-fired plants with natgas-fired turbines (see TVA Investing $1B to Build New Natgas-Fired Electric Plants). As part of the overall plan, in 2023, TVA proposed to build a new gas-fired plant at the site of a former privately operated power plant in Mississippi (see TVA Proposes New 500 MW Natural Gas Power Plant in Mississippi). Last Friday, TVA pulled the trigger and made a final investment decision to move forward with the project. Read More “TVA Green Lights New 500 MW Natural Gas Power Plant in Mississippi”

In a separate post today, MDN deals with the issue of dispatchable and on-site power plants in Ohio (see OH Legislators, New Bill, Encourage More Gas-Fired Power Plants). We spotted an article about the rise of on-site power generation (mostly natural gas) to power AI. It does a great job of discussing the various models for on-site powergen. For example, the local utility company could build a special power plant that services only a particular data center. An independent power provider could build such a plant for a data center. Some O&G companies are getting into the game of building power plants, like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Or the data center could build and operate its own power plant, but then, that’s not the business they are in. Each option has advantages and disadvantages. Read More “A Better Understanding of AI Data Centers & On-Site Powergen”

This post goes along with our other post today about a better understanding of on-site power generation (see A Better Understanding of AI Data Centers & On-Site Powergen). Last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published a post looking at who owns natural gas-fired power plants in the U.S. by type of owner: utility companies, independent power producers (IPP), and commercial/industrial. The post notes that natural gas, with a 43% share, is the number one source of energy used to produce electricity in the U.S. Who owns the means of producing it is important to understand. Read More “Who Owns All Those Gas-Fired Power Plants?”

If it weren’t for burning oil and coal in New England, the lights would have gone out during the recent cold snap in January. We read a startling statement from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in a post from yesterday: “…on January 21, 2025, thermal plants that burn oil provided more electricity to the ISO-NE electricity grid than plants that burn natural gas.” It is angering and humiliating. For years, MDN and others have repeatedly made the case that a couple of new pipelines from the Pennsylvania Marcellus into New England (just a few hundred miles long) could eliminate New England’s power-generation problems and dramatically lower the cost of electricity for everyone throughout the region. Yet the Democrat left that controls New England’s politics like the Mafia refuses to allow natural gas pipelines, claiming it would create global warming. So, burning oil and coal is better for the environment? You see how two-faced these people are. Read More “New England Burned More Oil Than NatGas for Power During Cold Snap”