The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Board of Directors approved the nation’s first-of-its-kind pilot program to determine if closed coal ash storage sites are suitable for utility-scale solar projects. Pending environmental reviews and regulatory approval, the $216 million pilot project would explore an innovative approach to repurpose a closed coal ash site at the Shawnee Fossil Plant to advance TVA’s clean energy efforts.
“The space between execution and aspiration is where innovation lives,” said Jeff Lyash, TVA president and CEO. “Achieving a net-zero clean energy future is critical to our nation’s energy security goals and requires innovative thinking and exploring new technologies. TVA was created as an innovation company and is uniquely positioned to demonstrate these technologies for the rest of the industry – both in the U.S. and around the world.”
TVA has chosen Watershed Geo’s impoundment closure and solar mounting product for this project.
A rendering of TVA Plant Shawnee with PowerCap.
Watershed Geo’s PowerCap technology will be used in conjunction with ClosureTurf, a patented technology that has been used at multiple TVA sites to close coal ash impoundments in accordance with federal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state CCR mandates. The PowerCap patented system was developed to allow for solar energy production on previously un-developable land, such as impoundments, landfill brownfields and topographically challenging land. PowerCap is a non-ballasted racking system that directly attaches to the ClosureTurf surface with no penetrations of the closure system. Its unique patented design allows for high power potential per unit area and for installation on steep slopes for even greater utilization of space. This can provide as much as three-times the power output per unit area compared to a traditional racking system.
TVA’s Shawnee Fossil Plant is located on 1,696 acres approximately 10 miles northwest of Paducah, Kentucky. Shawnee has nine active generating units and one retired unit.
“TVA is outcome-focused and there is no single answer to reducing carbon emissions,” said Lyash. “Our path to a clean energy future may not always be linear, but our end goal is to follow a defined strategy to accelerate the process across the industry and expand carbon-free technologies that will power our nation’s sustainable clean energy economy without impacting reliability, resiliency or affordability.”
News item from TVA. Updated with mounting information on November 15.
“”“The space between execution and aspiration is where innovation lives,” said Jeff Lyash, TVA president and CEO. “Achieving a net-zero clean energy future is critical to our nation’s energy security goals and requires innovative thinking and exploring new technologies.””
Wow, after the Kingston Plant sludge pond breach and the flow into the nearby river that has caused great harm to the biosphere even after something that happened around 15 years ago, is NOT a “water under the bridge” consideration.
I submit, this has more to do with the IRA and a piece of a multi trillion dollar pie than environmental stewardship and “…energy security goals…”. IF TVA was all it claims to be with new technology, they would have lobbyists at the Congressional level and at all NRC sessions to get next generation SMR or MSR reactors certified for factory manufacturing of reactor modules to apply as distributed high energy density generation in all of their coal fired plants and some of their natural gas plants/partnerships. TVA would be a “leader” in sighting and constructing extremely large scale Regional redox flow battery technology along the transmission grid to allow a lot of alternative (non-commodity) electricity generation to be used by storage of overgeneration and time shifting to dispatch the energy later on in the day or night time hours.