TVA had a good financial year, expects no rate hikes

The Tennessee Valley Authority board voted last Thursday to give TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore a 10 percent increase in his largely incentive-based compensation package to $3.6 million.
That package includes Kilgore’s annual salary of $850,000, which remains the same for 2011. Kilgore said he has not received any increase in two years.
It was the board’s first meeting with three new appointed members and one reappointed by President Barack Obama.
Kilgore said a decision about 2010 bonuses for other TVA executives will be made later this month. There was no bonus last year due to the economy and the utility’s December 2008 coal ash spill that is costing $1.2 billion to clean up at its Kingston Plant.
The cleanup of the 5.4 million cubic yards spilled at the plant in East Tennessee is ongoing and was not mentioned at the meeting. Kilgore said afterward that dredging the ash from the Emory River is finished.
Kilgore said TVA had a good year financially in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, and expects no increases in base rates this year. The utility expects that payments it makes to state and local governments in lieu of taxes, which increased by 9 percent in 2010 to a total of $550 million, will decrease this year to about $520 million due to a drop in rates.
Kilgore also said after the meeting that although the board has not made a decision, TVA is likely moving ahead with plans to reopen one of its reactors at the Bellefonte Plant in northeast Alabama.
The board in August included $248 million in the fiscal year 2011 budget for initial engineering design and site preparation for Unit 1 at the idle plant. Kilgore said final approval for the project is not expected until next spring.
The board also approved spending up to $160 million to build new cooling towers at the Browns Ferry Plant. When finished by 2013, they are expected to prevent the river from heating to the level that forced TVA to interrupt operations during the summer and avoid switch-off costs.