Yolonda Spinks knows Memphis, Tennessee, like the back of her hand. She was born and raised in the Riverside neighborhood of South Memphis and attended the historically Black college LeMoyne-Owen, which was just 3 miles from her childhood home. Spinks is committed to being what she calls “a good ancestor.” She wants to leave the majority-Black community of South Memphis better than when she found it. 

“We have a duty to each other,” Spinks said. 

Many people are familiar with Memphis’ role in shaping the Civil Rights Movement or how the 1968 Sanitation Worker Strike created seismic shifts in labor organizing. Then there’s the history most outside of the region are largely unfamiliar with. Memphis was redlined starting in the 1930s, and the effects of those efforts—namely disinvestment and the placement of toxic facilities in Black communities—are still felt today. Ozone pollution and high asthma rates are common concerns, Spinks said. The Memphis Light, Gas, and Water Division has marked 14,000 of the city’s water lines as contaminated with lead or unknown, and progress to replace them is moving slowly. There are at least 66 polluting facilities within Memphis’ borders, including two Superfund sites, which can leach chemicals like arsenic, chromium, and nickel. 

Spinks still lives in her hometown, where she organizes with Memphis Community Against Pollution. Born in 2021 out of a fight against the construction of a crude oil pipeline, the grassroots organization has continued to shift its focus because as one fight comes to a close, another begins. 

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced plans in 2021 to decommission most of its coal infrastructure used to generate electricity and replace it with technologies that could support fracked methane gas, often referred to as “natural gas” by the energy industry. The goal, TVA authorities said, was to eventually fully decarbonize its energy sources that are sold to local utility operators. They argued that the transition to methane gas would bridge the gap between coal power generation and renewable energy, like wind, water, and solar. 

TVA, a federal agency that generates power sold to 10 million customers across seven states, has a monopoly on the energy market in the region. Customers have no choice but to keep opening their wallets to the agency—even when TVA raises the cost of fuel to the benefit of its bottom line. What some residents aren’t buying is the excuse officials have parroted in recent years—that methane gas will serve as a transition to renewable energy—as plans for what will be the country’s largest methane gas buildout in the country come into the forefront. 

Spinks and others challenging the greenlighting of the buildout see the federal government’s plan as a sheep in wolf’s clothing that will further support the fossil fuel industry at the expense of Black and brown communities—all under the guise of environmental stewardship. It’s especially concerning because climate change, brought by burning fossil fuels like methane into the atmosphere, has already come for Memphis and the Tennessee Valley. In recent years, the region has suffered repeated severe rains, flooding, and extreme heat. 

It’s confusing, Spinks said. On one hand, the Biden administration has championed the electrification of the country’s grid system through bills like the Inflation Reduction Act as a way to address the impacts of energy consumption on climate change. The White House put forward an initiative called Justice40, which mandates that 40% of investments go to historically marginalized communities in the interest of environmental justice. The White House climate goals put the country on track to decarbonize by 2035 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. More recently, Tennessee Valley Authority officials said the agency is “focused and committed to environmental justice for historically underrepresented communities.”

And yet, TVA “continues to go against the people,” Spinks said. And in many ways, the gas buildout contradicts what the administration is advocating for. Instead of taking into consideration the ways that the energy agency has harmed marginalized communities in the past, Spinks said, it looks like TVA will simply be allowed to perpetuate more harm. As she sees it, Justice40 exists to undo the harm that TVA’s plans for a gas buildout will expand. Why is Tennessee spending money to invest in an energy scheme that will further entrench the environmental racism that Biden has positioned himself as the enemy of? 

As a federal agency, TVA’s board is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Local utility companies sell the power that TVA generates from its hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, solar, and wind facilities. Ratepayers—customers in the Tennessee Valley and those living across six other states in the South—pay the salaries of TVA officials. Unlike investor-owned utility companies, which must go through lengthy processes to approve a rate change, TVA is allowed to adjust the cost of fuel as the market changes, increasing the price of utilities overall.

The agency boasts that it offers some of the lowest energy rates in the country, when in reality the Tennessee Valley suffers one of the highest energy burdens, meaning that residents spend a disproportionate amount of income on their energy bill. For contrast, Jeff Lyash, TVA’s president and chief operating officer, is the highest-paid federal employee. He took home $10.5 million last year. 

“Why is a millionaire CEO of a public utility making decisions that affect working families [and] Black and brown communities throughout the Tennessee Valley?” said Gabi Lichtenstein, an organizer with the grassroots environmental protection group Appalachian Voices.

Memphis Community Against Pollution has written a petition outlining its arguments, and the group plans to send it to the White House in mid-July. The president appoints TVA board members and can hold them accountable. There are three board nominations coming up later this year, which is an opportunity for the president to demonstrate his commitment to the Justice40 initiative, Spinks said. 

“We have to be intentional about making sure that we’re not waiting until the damage is done,” Spinks said. The organization’s ask for the administration is simple: “to make sure executives are for the people and not for gain, not for profit.” 

Ignoring the risks and the economics 

Over the past three years, the Tennessee Valley Authority has proposed the construction of eight gas plants to replace its fleet of coal facilities. Only two, the Colbert Fossil Plant and the Paradise Fossil Plant, are operational. Six others are either partially operational, under construction, approved, or proposed. Some gas projects will retrofit coal plants to process methane, as is the case with Colbert. Others, like the Cumberland proposal, will demolish the existing coal plant and build a gas plant on the same land. The most recent proposal for the New Caledonia combustion turbine project will be built on TVA-owned land that’s polluted from previous projects. The overall gas buildout and construction also includes pipelines, peaker plants, and regulation facilities. Under the proposed plan, the plants would be owned and operated by TVA, while the pipelines would be owned by private corporations Enbridge, Inc. and Kinder Morgan. 

Thanks to federal investments in coal mining, for years, coal was cheap to source and extremely profitable. But in many states, coal is long past its heyday. In Tennessee, coal production has been in decline since the 1970s. The average coal plant is running at less than 50% of its capacity. This production decline, coupled with advancements in other technologies, means that most coal facilities are more expensive to operate than renewable facilities. 

Now, political expediency and financial viability have given energy producers the cover needed to shutter coal plants. The extraction and energy industries claim that methane is more environmentally friendly or less polluting than coal, an attempt to turn conversations about the next major fuel source toward fracking. Across the country, gas plants are seeing a level of expansion that “ignor[es] the economics and the risks,” with 49 companies planning to build facilities with a combined total of 53 gigawatts of capacity by 2030—just five years before the federal goal of a fully decarbonized power sector. 

Both the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Energy Information Administration claim that methane gas is “clean,” despite a growing body of evidence that says methane is just as harmful as coal. In fact, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after its release. Currently, the U.S. is the top methane emitter from oil and gas operations in the world.

In the South, utility companies and power generators like TVA claim that as more people move into the region, energy use will increase. Opponents of the gas buildout say there is no way of verifying those claims or the assertion that increased methane capacity is the magic bullet to bridge coal and renewables.

TVA officials have said that reliability is one of the biggest challenges in fully transitioning to solar power generation and battery storage. But critics have the opposite opinion—that a diversified renewable energy system will increase reliability. Consider that the continuous burning of fossil fuels will protract and intensify climate impacts, including storms that gas-powered energy systems have a tough time overcoming. For example, the TVA system failed in the winter of 2022 when a deep freeze caused rolling blackouts. 

Meanwhile, wind, water, and solar energy generation—all of which are a part of the current TVA portfolio—are more energy efficient. Customers would pay less for utilities because it takes less renewable energy to do the same tasks, like running a washing machine or heating a house. Battery storage for solar power can reduce the need for peaker plants and distribute power during peak use times to lower overall cost. Renewable energy production would also create 20-30 times more long-term jobs than the proposed gas buildout would.

What stands in the way is politics. 

The thumb on the scale of the methane gas buildout 

According to Jonathan Neal-Thompson, an organizer with the Nashville, Tennessee, hub of the Sunrise Movement, a national environmental movement that was the first to champion the 2018 Green New Deal, what makes the fight against TVA uniquely challenging is how the agency operates and who it reports to. 

“TVA occupies this surprising gray area where it has a direct impact on your day-to-day life. However, nothing is direct,” Neal-Thompson said.  

Because TVA isn’t investor-owned, as is the case for other major utility operators, construction of the proposed facilities would come from the utility bills paid for by customers. Even though their money would fund the gas buildout, many residents say they aren’t given the opportunity to offer input regarding the future of the public agency. If they wanted to raise concerns, knowing whom to direct them to would be a challenge. Local representatives might be most accessible, but it’s actually members of Congress who have the power to influence a federal agency like TVA. Still, TVA is partnered with oil and gas corporations, giving the agency the ability to leverage federal laws to usurp private land for the buildout. 

“It’s not normal,” Neal-Thompson said, for a utility company to be able to do eminent domain. The organizer further explained that the Sunrise Movement plans to influence board members directly and encourage them to take on their regulatory duties—even if they don’t always think of themselves as a regulatory body. The Nashville chapter of the Sunrise Movement has found inroads with some board members, like Beth Geer, whose day job is chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore. 

Liechtenstein agrees that creating inroads to board members is a good strategy. “TVA board could stop this in its tracks,” she said. “They have a responsibility to take action [and] to listen to the calls coming from the communities they serve, or their legacy will become overseeing the largest gas buildout in this decade.”

A government agency that operates like a private company

While the industry took decades to read the writing on the wall about coal, Lichtenstein said the TVA gas buildout and coal plant retirement are happening at rapid speed. Residents can hardly keep up. Even though many of the projects are still awaiting necessary permits, some landowners whose properties would be implicated in pipeline construction have said that it appears the buildout is a done deal. Other residents living near proposed generating stations, peaker plants, and pipeline easements only found out about TVA listening sessions by chance. 

Organizers Brig Ortner and Moss Keith, two of the founders of Safe, Affordable, Good Energy for Tennessee (SAGE TN), said they’ve been figuring out ways to challenge the lack of transparency surrounding the gas buildout. Because of Tennessee’s critical infrastructure law that criminalizes some forms of climate protest and a 2022 law that prevents cities from enacting bans against fossil fuel infrastructure, SAGE TN is exploring other ways to build a coalition across middle and eastern Tennessee and convince residents that it’s a foregone conclusion that TVA will side with industry. 

There’s a long history behind that concern. Former President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration created the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 to bring electricity to rural areas and to “modernize” the region through consumption. As concerns increased regarding war preparedness, the ability to generate enough fuel for weapons, and new technologies like nuclear bombs, TVA became the development arm of the federal government. TVA led mining and dam projects across the region, devastating and displacing whole communities. Federal representatives helped bend environmental laws in favor of TVA construction projects, and statutory rules afforded TVA the ability to use eminent domain to evict residents to complete its projects.

“[TVA] essentially yanked generational wealth away from whole families,” Ortner said. They added that instead of the wealth-by-modernization TVA promised, the agency’s actions kept families “in a cycle of poverty.”

For Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, many of the issues with TVA boil down to the fact it’s allowed to operate with a low level of accountability and oversight. 

“They’re like a private company when it suits them, and they’re like a government agency when it suits them,” Garcia said. 

Her law center has made several legal claims challenging the authorizations related to the pipeline. In one such case, Garcia’s organization drew attention to the fact that TVA entered into a contract with Tennessee Gas Pipeline, the legal liability company owned by Kinder Morgan, before the agency completed an environmental review that is mandated by the National Environmental Protection Act. These reviews are a critical opportunity for the public to understand the environmental risks of a project and, when warranted, to challenge proposals.  

“From a community standpoint, the people who live and work and recreate where these projects are going to be built are the ones who have the best knowledge based on lived experience about what is at stake,” Garcia said. 

The murkiness of TVA’s approach to collaborations with pipeline companies shows up in other ways, too. Pipeline companies need to acquire a certificate of public convenience and necessity from the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee (FERC). Garcia explained that because TVA committed to the pipeline project already, it gave the appearance on paper that an appurtenant gas plant would be needed.

“The thumb has been heavily on [the scale of] the gas plant,” Garcia said. “Without having oversight, whether that comes from their local power company, customers, or from the Biden administration, I think TVA is not going to change of its own volition.”