WASHINGTON — Four nominees to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s board appeared in front of a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday, bringing the board one step closer to conducting new business after it’s been without a quorum for six months.
Randall Jones, a resident of Guntersville, answered questions from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee alongside nominees Mitch Graves and Jeff Hagood of Tennessee and Arthur Graham of Florida.
U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., introduced Jones, saying his “strong background in business and civil service sets him up to be a valuable board member of the TVA.”
Jones, an insurance agent, serves on the Guntersville Electric Board and the Jacksonville State University Board of Directors. He hopes to use his rural community roots to inform how to best serve those in the smaller communities TVA serves, Jones said.
“Our region in north Alabama is experiencing unprecedented growth, but while we welcome high-tech data centers and defense industry growth, we never lose sight of families who receive a power bill every month,” Jones said in his opening statement.
TVA is the nation’s largest public utility and serves customers in seven southern states, including the northern parts of Alabama.
The board has been without enough members to perform much of its business since President Donald Trump fired three Biden-nominated board members earlier this year, including Huntsville lawyer Joe Ritch, who served as the board’s chair. The board should have nine members, of which five are required to reach a quorum. Just three members are currently serving.
The committee’s Chairwoman, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-WV, asked each nominee what the primary challenges TVA faces when it comes to providing “affordable, reliable energy” to its customers while keeping up with the area’s growing demand for electricity.
“I will commit to continue to look into carbon-free future technology and also increase the hydropower and the nuclear, which on the nuclear end of it, we need a sense of urgency,” Jones said in response to Capito’s question.
The four nominees all mentioned their interest in investing in nuclear energy to meet increased demands.
Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts asked the nominees if they would support privatizing TVA, to which all four men said no.
In September, an Alabama coalition of more than 40 organizations sent a letter to Alabama’s congressional delegation and state elected officials urging them to oppose any efforts to privatize the public utility, which they said would “raise energy costs, eliminate good jobs, (and) weaken environmental protections.”
The nominees also agreed that they would not sell off any of TVA’s assets, with Jones saying he did “not see any reason” to do so.
New data centers, which require massive amounts of energy to operate, were also a popular topic during Wednesday’s hearing. The nominees each said the cost of powering these centers should be on the companies, not on the current utility customers.
The Senate committee will now vote on the nominees before they’re sent to the full Senate for a vote. No committee vote has been scheduled yet.
The TVA board’s next meeting is Nov. 6.