Cheatham County Generation Site EIS Scoping Report
1 Introduction The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a wholly owned corporate agency of the United States (U.S.) that serves a region that consists of parts of seven southeastern states. As a public power entity, TVA has no shareholders and receives no federal appropriations. Under the TVA Act of 1933, Congress charged TVA with advancing the social and economic well-being of the residents of the Tennessee Valley region. TVA produces or obtains electricity from a diverse portfolio of energy sources, including solar, hydroelectric, wind, biomass, fossil fuel, and nuclear. In June 2019, TVA published the 2019 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) and associated Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which were developed with input from stakeholder groups and the public. The IRP evaluated six scenarios (plausible futures) and five strategies (potential TVA responses to those futures) and identified a range of potential resource additions and retirements throughout the TVA power service area, which encompasses approximately 80,000 square miles covering most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia. The target power supply mix adopted by the TVA Board through the 2019 IRP included the potential retirement of 2,200 megawatt (MW) of coal-fired generation by 2038. The IRP acknowledged continued operational challenges for the aging fossil units and included a recommendation to conduct end-of-life evaluations on TVA’s remaining fossil plants to determine whether retirements greater than 2,200 MW would be appropriate. Based on the end-of-life evaluations, which indicated that the aging coal fleet is contributing to environmental, economic, and reliability risks, TVA established retirement planning assumptions for all remaining coal units. Consistent with the aging coal fleet evaluation, TVA recently completed an EIS for the proposed retirement of the Cumberland Fossil Plant (CUF) (TVA 2023). The CUF EIS included options for the replacement of generation provided by the first CUF unit to be retired. In the CUF record of decision (ROD), TVA made a decision to retire the first CUF unit by the end of 2026 and the second unit by the end of 2028. Generation from the proposed Cheatham County Generation Site (CHG) project would replace a substantial portion of the capacity of the second CUF unit to be retired by the end of 2028 and would also be consistent with the target power supply mix in the 2019 IRP that allows for the addition of up to 5,200 MW of simple cycle capacity by 2028 to facilitate the integration of solar onto the TVA bulk power system. The proposed CHG project would be located on TVA-owned land about 3 miles north-northwest of Ashland City, Cheatham County, Tennessee, and approximately 22 miles northwest of Nashville. The total property is approximately 286 acres with the proposed facilities occupying about 75 acres.
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