“To amend the Tennessee Valley Authority Act to provide for further transparency of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section establishes an Office of Public Participation within the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to engage the public through outreach and education on TVA processes and to solicit broader public participation in TVA matters. Hiring authority for the office rests solely with the TVA Board and may not be delegated to TVA staff. The office must (1) serve as a liaison to the public by providing information on TVA proceedings and technical assistance; (2) coordinate with TVA program offices to improve processes based on public input, ensuring they are inclusive, fair, and navigable; and (3) within one year of enactment, create with public input a process for engagement in TVA's integrated resource planning (i.e., long-term planning for power generation, transmission, and related resources), including intervention, discovery, comments or testimony, and an evidentiary hearing. That process requires a public comment period beginning no later than 100 days before release of a draft integrated resource plan and ending on the last day of the evidentiary hearing, plus responses to intervenor discovery requests within 15 days.
This section directs the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Board of Directors, in drafting an integrated resource plan (IRP) pursuant to section 113 of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (16 U.S.C. 831m-1), to (1) oversee public engagement in the IRP process under new section 12b of the TVA Act of 1933 (as added by this Act), including any required evidentiary hearing; (2) include a long-term sales and peak demand forecast under various scenarios, a summary of planned electrical transmission investments, resource portfolios evaluating demand-side and supply-side technologies and services, and sensitivity analyses for fuel costs, environmental regulations, electrification, distributed energy resources, and other risks; (3) provide modeling assumptions, including costs and constraints, to the public no later than 100 days before releasing a draft IRP; (4) detail in the draft how public input shaped the plan; (5) evaluate the draft's compliance with section 113(b)(2) requirements; and (6) approve, deny, or require modifications to the draft based on that evaluation and public input. (As background, an IRP is a utility's comprehensive plan for meeting future electricity needs through balanced evaluation of supply- and demand-side resources.) The section also amends section 113(b)(2)(A) of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 to expand factors for TVA's least-cost planning program by inserting "resilience, extreme weather risk, impacts to public health" after "dispatchability."