The Tennessee Valley Authority will be returning to Cheatham County on Tuesday, Feb. 13 at 6 p.m. to hold a public meeting at Cheatham Middle School’s gymnasium in Ashland City about the proposed Cheatham Generation Site on Lockertsville Road.
According to TVA Regional Relations (North) Regional Vice-President Justin C. Maierhofer, the briefing, which he said will be part-town hall, part-exhibit format, is in response to feedback the TVA received from various Cheatham County residents who expressed dissatisfaction with the exhibit-style information meeting held in the David C. McCullough Room in Ashland City back in June. Maierhofer said many residents said the noise level in the room and sheer number of attendees left residents feeling frustrated and that they didn’t get their concerns heard.
“The real intent of [Tuesday’s] meeting is less about TVA presenting and more about TVA listening,” he said.
Speakers at Tuesday’s meeting will include Maierhofer, Major Projects Project Manager Robert Kulisek and Cheatham County Mayor Kerry R. McCarver. Maierhofer said he hopes the larger venue Cheatham Middle School provides will accommodate the expected crowds and make sure residents who attend feel heard.
Holding public meetings to gauge interest and get feedback from residents in the vicinity of the proposed power generation site is part of the process set in place by the National Environmental Policy Act, and Maierhofer said Tuesday’s meeting is in addition to the meeting held in June 2023.
“The meeting that we are doing next week is really outside and in addition to the NEPA process, and we’re doing it because the June meeting, as I’ve been told by the mayor and several folks in Cheatham County, did not go very well from their perspective. So TVA has an obligation and a commitment to the communities where we have generating assets as well as where we may have potential generating assets to have strong, effective, open, honest, transparent relationships with the communities that we serve,” Maierhofer said.
The TVA purchased the roughly 285 acres on Lockertsville Road in 2020 for the purpose of possibly constructing an electric power generation plant, powered by a 12-mile natural gas pipeline, in order to partially replace the power generated by the Cumberland Fossil Plant, set to be retired by 2028. The future of the proposed project is contingent upon the results of the environmental impact statement, which will be comprised of public input, various geological, wildlife and safety studies, and be completed sometime later this year, according to Maierhofer.
“This site is still a matter of if, not when. TVA doesn’t have any interest in going into a community where we’re not welcomed or where we don’t have the opportunity to be a good neighbor,” he said.
Some of the concerns expressed by citizens since June’s meeting are the impact on the wildlife, water supply (including Sycamore Creek and the Pleasant View Utility District), noise levels associated with the site operation, the safety of the natural gas and if and how Cheatham County would directly benefit from the generation site.
Concerning the impact on the water supply, Kulisek said, “The generation technology that we are proposing was specifically selected knowing that Sycamore Creek is not just listed on the US Scenic Waterways register, but it is also the source of the community’s drinking water. So understanding that and appreciating that the technology that we have chosen uses very little water, and probably most of the water that would be used there would be for a bathroom on site, and there is no discharge from the site itself. We have already, before we proposed anything, we did discuss with the local utility, the water utility district, and their capabilities to supply water. We actually met them on site so they could show us their pumping facility. We are located roughly a quarter of a mile from Sycamore Creek itself, and there would be nothing that would be taken out of the creek or put discharged into the creek from TVA.”
Addressing the use of natural gas to power the plant, some have said the TVA is being deceptive calling it natural gas and not methane gas.
Kulisek said, “A lot of people do like to refer to it as methane gas because it’s the main constituent within natural gas, but what we will be burning is natural gas. That’s one of the, say, misconceptions with this site is that with methane gas, it tends to refer to a different source, and so that’s why we continually say natural gas not to be deceptive and not to say that it’s greener. The reason it’s called natural gas is because it’s naturally occurring. You get it straight out of the ground. You don’t typically have to process it very heavily. So whereas methane gas is just one part of natural gas, so that subtlety is not necessarily. Depending on where you get your supply from, it can be up to 80 percent, I think methane and the other ones are like pentane and butane and much, much smaller quantities. CO2 is another part of it, water is part of it. So those are the small constituents with it.”
Another objection expressed to the TVA is the belief that the power generation site would not even benefit Cheatham County residents but would be used to power West Nashville. External & Regional Communications Senior Media Specialist Scott Fielder said the power generated from the proposed site would benefit everyone and is a necessary addition to accommodate the unprecedented growth in the region.
“Our region is growing three times faster than the national average, so not just Nashville, but our entire seven state service territory. We serve 10 million people. In 1950, about 2 percent of the energy consumed was electricity. In 2022, about 20 or about 22 percent of the energy we consume was electricity, so we’ll seen tremendous growth by 2050. Our projection is we will need to double or triple our electric grid, so facilities like this, while we have the ability to mitigate now, if we need to double or triple our electric grid for all of this growth, we need to plan now, because in the electric system, you need to plan 20 to 30 years out,” Fielder said.
Maierhofer said he hopes to build strong relationships with residents and the local government officials and make sure questions are getting answered clearly and empathetically.
“One of the reasons we’re doing this public meeting on Tuesday is to put a face on TVA in front of the local community,” Maierhofer said.
For more information about the Cheatham Generation Site, visit www.tva.com/environment/environmental-stewardship/environmental-reviews/nepa-detail/cheatham-county-generation-site.
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