Guest post by Jim Willis of Marcellus Drilling News.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. 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). In late 2022, TVA recommended moving forward with replacing one of the six — a coal-fired plant located near Cumberland City — with a natural gas combined-cycle power plant (see TVA Recommends Replacing Cumberland Coal Plant w/Natural Gas).
In January of this year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a certificate of public convenience for Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) subsidiary to build the Cumberland Project, a pipeline to feed the TVA’s proposed Cumberland gas-fired plant (see FERC Approves 32-Mile Cumberland Pipeline to TVA TN Power Plant). Big Green is suing FERC to overturn its decision to allow the pipeline.
Of course, if there isn’t a pipeline, the gas-fired plant won’t get built. And that’s the aim of these radicals. The Sierra Club and Appalachian Voices, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, are suing the commission in the D.C. Court of Appeals to try to stop the pipeline, claiming FERC needs to calculate the impact of mythical man-made global warming that would come from the gas plant. We need to bankrupt these organizations. Read the news from The Tennessean:
Environmental groups are suing to stop the construction of a 32-mile natural gas pipeline to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Cumberland power plant.
The pipeline, which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved in January, would cut through Dickson, Houston and Stewart counties to reach the plant in Cumberland City. TVA announced last January that it is transitioning the facility from coal to a gas-fired plant.
The Sierra Club and Appalachian Voices, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, are suing the commission in the federal appeals court in Washington to try to stop the pipeline. The lawsuit was filed on Monday.
“FERC’s decision to greenlight this project ignored the harm the pipeline and gas plant would inflict on Middle Tennessee and beyond,” SELC senior attorney Spencer Gall said in a news release. “FERC is supposed to safeguard the public interest, not rubberstamp unnecessary pipeline projects that will harm our communities, hurt the climate, and contribute to higher power bills.”
The groups say that the pipeline would cut through dozens of streams in Middle Tennessee and that Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co., owned by Houston pipeline giant Kinder Morgan and set to build the project, plans to use explosives to blast through streambeds to lay the pipeline.
The groups also expressed concern about the amount of methane that these sorts of pipelines leak and the possibility of explosions in the pipelines and their terminal destinations.
“FERC can’t weigh the climate impact of this pipeline until FERC knows how much carbon and methane pollution is really on the ledger,” said Cris Corley, chair of the Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club, in the news release. “Upstream, downstream — it’s all connected.”
Kinder Morgan declined to comment for this story.
TVA’s announcement about switching from coal to natural gas came after a nearly two-year environmental review process in which environmental groups, the U.S. Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency criticized TVA for not meaningfully exploring other options, such as renewables, like solar.
TVA estimated that the switch to natural gas would cut carbon emissions by up to 60%.
FERC, in its approval of the pipeline, acknowledged that construction of the pipeline and new gas-fired units at the plant would disproportionately impact people already overburdened with existing pollution sources. [MDN: This is a patently false statement by the “reporter” who appears to be on the payroll of the Sierra Club rather than a real reporter.]
The pipeline will connect the plant to an existing line in Dickson County.
Editor's Note: What caught my eye about this story was the reference to “Appalachian Voices,” which is another one of those phony groups always conjured up by fractivist financial enablers who want to make it seem they're only helping some poor grass-roots movement seeking justice and needing assistance. The truth is typically exactly the opposite, of course, as it’s the rich special-interest funders who are seeking to find shills to do their dirty work.
Appalachian Voices, as it turns out, is also funded by us:
The Environmental Protection Agency announced an award of up to $500,000 to regional nonprofit organization Appalachian Voices on Tuesday for the organization’s Building Community Resilience in Virginia’s Coalfields with Place-based Climate Change Adaptation project. The funding comes through EPA’s Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving (EJCPS) Cooperative Agreement Program. EPA announced $43.8 million in EJCPS funding for 98 projects this week.
These funds are the largest investment ever announced under the long-standing EPA program. Funding was boosted by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in U.S. history. EPA’s EJCPS program provides financial assistance to eligible organizations working to address local environmental or public health issues in their communities. The 98 EJCPS projects will work to address the diverse set of challenges facing communities with environmental justice concerns.
Yes, Joe Biden is taking your money and the money of the next 6-8 generations of your family to empower opponents of clean natural gas production to replace coal. It's not about reselience but, rather, the ravaging of poor communities by wealthy elitists invested in the Big Green Grift who don't want any competition from natural gas.
Jim and I both wrote about Appalachian Voices almost seven years ago and here's some of what I wrote then:
The pipeline industry is under attack by hordes of radicals firing at it with lawsuit and protest machine guns. Yet, pipeline companies hardly bother to fight back, preferring, it seems, to die as mealy-mouthed creatures of their public relations and corporate legal staffs. If they were serious, they would be filing countersuits at twice the rate of the radicals. They’d also be going hard after the funders; elitist foundation money being the mother’s milk of the anti-pipeline campaign.
It’s perfectly obvious who those funders are and they represent but a handful of extremely wealthy trust-funders and special interests. The radical Rockefeller family is the pre-eminent force among these entities, being the wealthiest. It is also precisely the entity behind this attack on the MVP. Appalachian Mountain Advocates has, in fact, been specifically funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) to “oppose construction of oil and gas pipelines in Virginia.” RFF also funds Appalachian Voices according to its website…
This entire charade, in other words, is funded directly or indirectly by the radical Rockefeller family as part of its ongoing special interest agenda of making a wilderness of areas it wants for its own enjoyment. If the pipeline industry is serious about defending itself, it will go on offense against all these groups, but especially the Rockefeller family, which is conducting a racket here. Challenge them with a RICO lawsuit. Challenge their tax-exemption. Challenge their failure to effectively disclose who they are funding. Document the relationships and, as Jim recommends, file a new lawsuit every week. That’s the way to win. Anything less is not only pointless but also counterproductive in giving the opposition more time, which is part and parcel of their delay game. Stop playing games and fight!
Everything we said was correct then and now.
#AppalachianVoices #NaturalGas #PowerPlant #Pipeline #Elites #BigGreenGrift #EPA #Biden
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But it's OK with all the "protection groups" that Dominion Energy and various other FOREIGN companies are destroying the ecology of the oceans off the east coast, killing fisherman jobs, killing whales and other fragile ocean life. Dominion et al MIST BE STOPPED. Pipelines do far less damage than solar or wind.
I live near a 6400 acre utility solar project AND a two reactor nuclear plant. I'll take the nuclear plant any day.
Many of us I'm VA (as well as thousands all over the country, see Robert Bryce's list) are small grassroots groups with little or NO money, who are fighting these Goliaths. We aren't winning all but we are winning many. We REFUSE to allow these foreign companies to coming into our counties and destroy our way of life to the benefit of Data Centers, the Silicon Valley Oligarchs and companies that don't care about anything but subsidies.
Jim’s my hero, I tell you.