CUMBERLAND CITY, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – As the Tennessee Valley Authority continues making progress on the new Cumberland Natural Gas Plant southwest of Clarksville, it is now considering keeping the old coal-fired Fossil Plant running in order to keep up with increased power demand across the region.
The plan had been to shutter the high-pollution Fossil Plant, or “steam plant,” which uses coal to create energy and has been in operation since 1973. But during meetings this week in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the TVA board will consider a proposal to keep the Fossil Plant open, providing power alongside the new Natural Gas Plant – and it’s all thanks to AI and population growth.
“We’ve seen demand grow exponentially in our service area since about 2001,” TVA spokesman Scott Brooks told Clarksville Now, “and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon, or certainly not in this decade. So we are considering all of the options to meet that demand, including keeping Cumberland (Fossil Plant) running.”
He said the gas plant is still on track to be finished and come online by the end of this year as planned, but “we need all the energy we can get.”
Data centers, including the Google Data Center at the Clarksville-Montgomery County Industrial Park, are now making up 18% of TVA’s industrial load, and that number is rising, with power-intensive AI use being a factor in that rising demand.
And people keep moving here. Brooks said the population is growing as fast as the data center demand. “So many people have found this region to be a great place to live, work and play, with low-cost, reliable power. In the last five years, the population growth has grown about as fast as the data center AI.”
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Fossil + Natural Gas = 4,000 megawatts
The $2.1 billion Cumberland Natural Gas plant will receive the natural gas from a 32-mile, 30-inch gas pipeline running through Dickson, Houston and Stewart counties.
The gas facility will provide 1,450 megawatts of power – enough to power 840,000 homes. If the Fossil Plant stays online, with its 2,500 megawatts, that will total almost 4,000 megawatts of power coming from the Cumberland City TVA site.
But that fossil power has come at a price in terms of pollution. In 2016, the Cumberland Fossil Plant ranked as the No. 3 air polluter in the nation, with a combination of greenhouse gases and Toxics Release Inventory emissions, and the worst mercury polluter in the country among coal-fired power plants, according to Leaf-Chronicle archives.
At this time, there are close to 1,900 workers employed at the Fossil Plant, which includes 247 TVA staff members and just over 450 subcontractors.
The board will take up the question of keeping the fossil plants open, both Cumberland and Kingston, during its meeting on Wednesday. The TVA Board meets at 9 a.m. at the Bruce Convention Center, and the meetings are open to the public.
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