HR6357-119

What This Bill Does

The TVA IRP Act changes how the Tennessee Valley Authority involves the public in major planning. It creates an Office of Public Participation inside TVA to conduct outreach, educate the public about TVA processes, provide technical assistance, coordinate with TVA offices, and build a public engagement process within one year. The TVA Board, not staff, controls hiring for the office. For integrated resource plans, the Board must oversee meaningful public engagement, preside over required evidentiary hearings, publish modeling assumptions at least 100 days before the draft plan, include long-term sales and peak-demand forecasts, identify planned transmission investments, evaluate demand-side and supply-side resource portfolios, perform sensitivity analysis for fuel costs, environmental regulations, electrification, distributed energy resources, and other risks, and explain how public input affected the draft. The Board must approve, deny, or modify the draft plan based on its statutory evaluation and public input. The bill also amends Energy Policy Act resource-planning considerations to add resilience, extreme-weather risk, and public-health impacts.

Who Benefits and How

TVA customers, local communities, consumer advocates, public-interest groups, distributed-energy advocates, and environmental organizations benefit because they get technical assistance, more accessible proceedings, earlier modeling assumptions, and a formal role in integrated resource planning. The TVA Board benefits from a more structured record for resource decisions.

Who Bears the Burden and How

TVA staff and the TVA Board bear procedural burdens because they must create and staff the Office of Public Participation, manage discovery and evidentiary hearings, publish assumptions, respond to public input, and run broader analysis. Utilities, industrial customers, and energy suppliers may face more contested planning proceedings and more scrutiny of resource portfolios.

Key Provisions

• Establishes a TVA Office of Public Participation with outreach, education, liaison, technical-assistance, and process-improvement duties.
• Requires the TVA Board to control hiring for the public participation office rather than delegating it to staff.
• Requires TVA to create a public engagement process for integrated resource planning within one year.
• Requires intervention, discovery, written comments, testimony, evidentiary hearings, and public comment deadlines for resource planning.
• Requires TVA to publish modeling assumptions at least 100 days before releasing a draft integrated resource plan.
• Requires forecasts, transmission-investment summaries, resource-portfolio analysis, sensitivity analysis, and Board approval tied to public input.