You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Last time around they were bulwarks for climate action. This time is different.
This story is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
Following Donald Trump’s election in November, climate advocates self-soothed with the conviction that cities and states would continue carrying the banner in the absence of federal climate action. That’s what happened during Trump’s first presidency, after all. When he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, hundreds of local governments declared they were “still in” on climate, and a new wave of state and local climate policies swept the country.
By the time Biden stepped into the White House four years later, many of these communities had climate plans either in place or in progress. When his administration passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, setting aside billions of dollars for emissions reduction and climate adaptation projects, they were in a prime position to apply for funding. By November 2024, with most of that money doled out, it was easy to imagine how climate-forward cities could forge ahead, seeded by grants, regardless of what Trump did.
Except then Trump did the thing that many assumed he would not — because he legally could not — do. He froze and is now trying to claw back congressionally appropriated, contractually obligated funds. And in so doing, he has thrown the prospects for cities as a last line of defense into question.
“In this administration, it’s a lot more chaotic,” Barbara Buffaloe, the mayor of Columbia, Missouri, told me. “There’s a lot more happening than I feel like there was in 2017, right at the get-go. Nobody knows what the universe is right now.”
Columbia was among those that joined the “still in” campaign in 2017. It adopted emissions reduction goals in 2018, and passed a climate action and adaptation plan in 2019. The Biden administration awarded the city more than $28 million across three separate federal grants to build electric vehicle charging stations, make electrical upgrades that would allow it to charge electric buses, and redesign its central business loop to be more walkable, bikeable, and safe.
All three of those grants are now up in the air. Buffaloe said she was told by state partners that the $2.1 million business loop planning grant from the Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities program was paused. Columbia was the only city in Missouri to get a Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant from the DOT, with the $3.6 million supposed to help pay for EV chargers at the library and the airport. The city is moving ahead with initial activities like environmental reviews and preliminary engineering in the hope that funds to build the actual stations will be unfrozen by the time it’s ready to break ground. Regarding the $23 million bus infrastructure grant, part of a separate DOT program, she said the city hasn’t heard from its grant managers in about a month.
“We don’t know whether or not to continue on the projects,” she told me. “It’s that feeling of uncertainty and trepidation that is causing us the most anxiety. Our construction window is not year-round in Columbia, and because we’re a public institution, it takes a lot longer for us to put out bids and to start projects. We need to know if we have this budget or not.”
It’s not just the funding freeze leaving Columbia in a holding pattern. The city has a municipally-owned electric utility that had been looking to take advantage of “direct pay,” an option for nonprofit entities with no tax liability to collect federal renewable energy incentives as direct subsidies, to help it build more solar farms. But now Republicans in Congress are considering eliminating direct pay.
The funding freeze has put a lot of cities in this position where time-sensitive decisions are stalled. Hundreds of communities were awarded grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture program to fund tree-planting for carbon mitigation and shade creation, for example. Some recipients have been told their grants were canceled altogether, others are still in the dark — their federal grant managers have been fired and no one is responding to their emails.
“They’re kind of at this point of, hey, do we put in the order for trees? We need to plant at certain times of the year,” Laura Jay, the deputy director of Climate Mayors, a national network of mayors working to address climate change, told me. “For a lot of these cities and programs, there’s key decisions that they have to be making, and when there’s uncertainty around it, it puts the city at a huge risk.” There’s financial risk, she said, in terms of spending money without knowing if it will get reimbursed, but also planning risks. A number of cities were awarded grants to purchase electric school buses, for example, and they need to make sure they are going to have enough to get kids to school.
As a larger, wealthier city, Columbia is in a better position than others. It collects revenue through a capital improvement tax that Buffaloe said could be used for climate projects. “We’ll do as much as we can,” she told me.
But in more rural areas, these grants represented a rare opportunity to modernize and build more equitable access to infrastructure.
“We’re in Southeast Ohio, which traditionally has been left behind when it comes to larger infrastructure projects,” Andrew Chiki, the deputy service-safety director in Athens, Ohio, told me. “We don’t have an interstate highway.”
Chiki helped lead a regional effort to apply for a Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant, the same program Columbia won funding from that is now frozen. He and his partners were awarded $12.5 million to build a corridor of electric vehicle chargers in 16 communities between Athens and Dayton. “One of our attempts with this was to answer the question, if EV adoption takes off the way that we are envisioning, how do we allow an on-ramp for communities that are already disadvantaged to be able to adopt?”
Chiki said they were still waiting to hear whether they could move forward with the project or not. Athens passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency in 2020, and adopted a target to reduce emissions by 50% over 10 years. The city has made some strides, Chiki said, by making buildings more energy efficient and installing solar on city-owned facilities. “We are still committed to doing as much as we can,” he told me.
But if the EV charging grant falls through, the smaller villages and towns between Athens and Dayton that don’t have the staff resources or capacity to apply for these types of grants will lose out, he said. “We would probably look at other types of funding sources, but it would make it incredibly difficult and not be nearly as broad as we want.”
There are some pots of money for local climate projects that have flown under the Trump administration’s radar. Last year, the South Florida ClimateReady Tech Hub, a consortium of local governments, schools, labor groups, and companies working to accelerate the development of climate technologies, won a $19.5 million grant from the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. The money came from the Biden-era CHIPS and Science Act, a law that Trump is pushing Congress to scrap but that Republicans have thus far defended. Tech Hub will use the funds to scale low-emissions cement that can be used for adaptation projects, energy efficiency, and workforce development, among other things.
Francesca Covey, the chief innovation and economic development officer for Miami-Dade County and regional innovation officer for the Tech Hub, told me the group has continued to have quarterly check-ins with federal partners and haven’t gotten any signal that the funding is in jeopardy. “It’s really been more business as usual,” she said. Covey also mentioned two pilot projects to build artificial reefs and seawalls in the area that had funding from the Department of Defense and were moving forward.
Still, the Tech Hub has adjusted its language to stay competitive in the new political environment. The group changed its name to the Risk and Resilience Tech Hub two weeks ago, Covey told me. “We wanted to underscore the economic imperative of the work,” she said, when I asked what motivated the name change. “Right now we’re finding that where we are getting the best traction with the private and public community is around risk. We wanted to make sure we were couching it in the right way.”
Ithaca, New York, on the other hand, which passed its own Green New Deal in 2019, is committed to its climate and equity-centric messaging. “We are not intending to change the narrative around what we’re doing,” Rebecca Evans, the city’s sustainability director, told me. “It’s still clean energy, and it is still because climate change is a threat to human existence. We are still going to prioritize black and brown populations and populations that experience poverty at various levels because they are most vulnerable to climate change.”
About 85% of Evans’ Green New Deal budget comes from federal sources, and at first she worried that was all at risk. In 2022 and 2023, Ithaca had received funding from what’s called “congressional directed spending,” or “earmarks,” in two federal appropriations bills, meaning that New York state lawmakers fought to get money set aside for the city. The first grant, worth $1 million, was for a hydrogen production and fueling project. The second, worth $1.5 million, was for a wide-ranging program to decarbonize the school system and enhance a local workforce development program to include new energy efficiency certifications. Both programs included explicit diversity, equity, and inclusion-related objectives, so Evans assumed they would be targeted by the Trump administration.
But on Tuesday, she was told by federal partners on the hydrogen grant that congressionally directed spending was not subject to Trump’s executive orders and got the greenlight to move into the next phase. Evans still hasn’t heard back from her federal partners on the second grant, but she’s more hopeful now that it will move forward.
Back when I first spoke to Evans, when things were more up in the air, she told me she worried that the Trump administration’s actions would cause advocates to lose hope. “I think anger can be a positive thing, but it’s the loss of hope, even if it’s marginal, that is truly, truly dangerous to this movement.”
Perhaps that’s why Evans, like all of the other local leaders I spoke with, projected optimism when I asked what they could accomplish over the next four years without federal support. She was already trying to find the money elsewhere, she said. “We can’t do all of the amazing things that we wanted to do, but we can still make progress,” she said.
“Cities are incredibly nimble and innovative,” Jay, of Climate Mayors, told me. “I think that they’re eager to and committed to keeping the work going. What that looks like, I think, is hard to figure out right now, because everyone’s kind of caught in the chaos of trying to figure out if they still have this funding or not. But they’re fully committed to making sure that this work is continuing.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The delayed vote on a net-zero standard for the International Maritime Organization throws some of the industry’s grandest plans into chaos.
Today, members of the International Maritime Organization decided to postpone a major vote on the world’s first truly global carbon pricing scheme. The yearlong delay came in response to a pressure campaign led by the U.S.
The Net-Zero Framework — initially approved in April by an overwhelming margin and long expected to be formally adopted today — would establish a legally binding requirement for the shipping industry to cut its emissions intensity, with interim steps leading to net zero by 2050.
In the intervening months, however, U.S. opposition has gotten much louder. On Thursday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he’s “outraged that the International Maritime Organization is voting in London this week to pass a global Carbon Tax.” He also took the extraordinary step of threatening not to comply with the rules. “The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping, and will not adhere to it in any way, shape, or form.” If the framework ever does pass, noncompliance could subject U.S. vessels to fines or even denial of entry at the ports of IMO member countries, potentially setting off a cycle of retaliatory measures from all sides.
No specific date has yet been scheduled for the forthcoming vote, which will be taken again a year from now. That throws plans for the world’s largest shipping companies — some of which have already taken expensive measures to decarbonize their fleets — into turmoil. The framework would have marked a major turning point for a sector that’s responsible for 3% of global emissions, of course. But even more importantly, it would have made a range of decarbonization technologies — from advanced batteries and clean fuels to wind-assisted propulsion and onboard carbon capture — far more viable and attractive to investors.
Kate Danaher, managing director of the oceans team at S2G Investments, has a vested interest in the frameworks’ eventual passage. “Over the past two years people have really started investing around the anticipation of something like the Net-Zero Framework being adopted,” Danaher told me. For its part, S2G has invested in Sofar Ocean, which focuses on fuel savings through route optimization, battery company Echandia which is aiming to electrify smaller vessels, and ocean data and monitoring companies Xocean and Apeiron Lab.
The new rules were originally set to take effect in 2028, and would apply to large vessels — ships of 5,000 gross tonnage or more — involved in international voyages. Qualifying ships would be assigned a base target for emissions intensity and a stricter “direct compliance target.” For every metric ton of CO2 equivalent that exceeds the compliance target but falls below the base target, ships must pay $100. For all emissions that exceed the base target, ships must pay $380 per metric ton. Noncompliant ships would pay these penalties by purchasing so-called “remedial units” from a central IMO registry, while the cleanest vessels — those performing better than their compliance targets — would earn surplus units they can sell to others or bank for future use.
Green shipping fuels such as e-methanol, e-hydrogen, and e-ammonia — all produced from green hydrogen using renewable electricity — stand to be the biggest winners, she said. “A new fuel would completely decarbonize the industry. That is 10 years out, and is completely contingent on the IMO,” Danaher said, explaining that if the framework ultimately fails, there’s no economic incentive to adopt these more expensive fuels, which also require costly retrofits for existing fleets. But the framework would effectively cause the cost of conventional fuel to rise just as alternative fuels are scaling up, which would allow them to reach parity around 2035, she said.
A specialized agency within the United Nations, the IMO gets its power to set global regulations from the vastness of the ocean itself. Most of the world’s waters exist outside the jurisdiction of any national government. Because of that, IMO member states — which represent the vast majority of global shipping tonnage — have ratified treaties that empower the organization to set safety, security, and environmental standards on the high seas, which members then implement and enforce through their own national laws. Only member states have a stake in IMO policy. Furthermore, vessels that aren’t IMO-compliant face penalties such as fees and even possible detentions when entering the ports of IMO countries.
While IMO decisions are typically made via negotiated consensus, the contentious nature of these new regulations necessitates a vote. U.S. officials celebrated the delay. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that the postponement represents “another HUGE win for @POTUS,” going on to say that “the United States prevented a massive UN tax hike on American consumers that would have funded progressive climate pet projects.”
Along with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Rubio last week issued a statement threatening to punish nations that voted in favor of these “activist-driven climate policies” with actions such as banning their ships from U.S. ports, imposing vessel fees, and even leveling sanctions on officials supportive of the regulations.
Saudi Arabia — the world’s second largest oil producer after the U.S. — also strongly opposed the framework, as did a host of other oil-producing Middle Eastern countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Thailand, Russia and Venezuela. Singapore ultimately put forth the motion to delay the adoption vote for a full year and Saudi Arabia called it to a vote. It passed with a simple majority, with 57 countries approving and 49 opposed.
When it comes to costs, Trump officials might actually have a point, Danaher conceded. “Once alternative fuels come online and people are actively paying penalties, it gets a lot more expensive,” she told me. “I don’t see how this isn’t incredibly inflationary to the global market in 10 years.”
Today’s standard low-sulfur fuel, she explained, costs about $500 per metric ton. But reaching the same energy density with e-methanol, for example, could push the price to around $2,000 a metric ton. “That is all going to get passed on, essentially, to the consumer,” she said.
Even so, the framework has the backing of major shipping trade organizations and industry giants alike, from the International Chamber of Shipping to Maersk. As a group of leading international maritime associations put it in an open letter last week, “Only global rules will decarbonise a global industry. Without the Framework, shipping would risk a growing patchwork of unilateral regulations, increasing costs without effectively contributing to decarbonisation.”
Indeed, a universal set of coherent rules is what many in the sector want most, Danaher affirmed. Some voting bodies, such as the EU and Singapore, have already set their own shipping-related emissions requirements, creating a regulatory patchwork that’s both costly and confusing for companies to comply with. “I think most people are like, let’s just do this. Let’s rip the Band-Aid off, and let’s get clarity,” Danaher told me.
In a statement released after the vote’s delay and the conclusion of the IMO’s days-long meeting in London, Thomas A. Kazakos, the shipping chamber’s secretary general, said, “We are disappointed that member states have not been able to agree a way forward at this meeting. Industry needs clarity to be able to make the investments needed to decarbonise the maritime sector, in line with the goals set out in the IMO GHG strategy.”
The delay also risks delegitimizing the power of the IMO as a whole, something the organization’s Secretary-General, Arsenio Dominguez, warned about in the meeting’s opening remarks on Tuesday, when he stated that “Prolonged uncertainty will put off investments and diminish confidence in IMO.”
There would be other ways for shippers to comply with the framework besides switching to e-fuels, Danaher told me. For example, S2G’s portfolio company Sofar Ocean operates a network of ocean sensors designed to improve marine weather predictions and power a route optimization platform that can help ships save time, fuel, and ultimately, emissions.
Software solutions have a pretty low barrier to adoption. But a step up in complexity — and cost — would involve a technology such as wind-assisted propulsion. The companies Norsepower and Anemoi, for example, use a cylindrical “rotor sail” that creates a powerful thrust as it spins, which they say allows for up to 25% to 30% fuel savings. Another approach is the “rigid wing sail,” such as that developed by Bar Technologies. This generates lift in the direction of the ship’s movement with less drag than a normal sail — similar to how an airplane wing works.
Pairing route optimization with wind-assisted propulsion will generate even greater emissions savings, as the software can direct ships towards areas with the most advantageous winds. Given the obvious co-benefits and cost savings stemming from lower fuel use, Danaher thinks this tech could gain traction even if the regulations ultimately fail to pass next year. “I think the adoption curve will still continue without IMO [Net-Zero Framework], but I think it'll be slower,” she told me.
One approach she doesn’t think will be economically viable without the framework is onboard carbon capture. This tech, which traps carbon dioxide from a ship’s exhaust system before it’s released into the atmosphere, is being explored by startups including Seabound — which I reported on last year — and Value Maritime, as well as more established companies such as Mitsubishi and Wartsila. “A lot of the carbon capture technologies have not yet solved for how to turn that captured carbon into a valuable resource, and how to get it off the boat, put it in a pipeline, and sell it,” Danaher told me.”The economic incentive just isn't there without the IMO.”
At the same time, when I talked to one of Seabound’s backers — Clea Kolster, of Lowercarbon Capital — last year, she told me that when it comes to cargo shipping, “carbon capture is probably the only way that you can get a meaningful amount of emissions reductions in any near term way.” And it’s true that alternative fuels will take a while to scale up, so if the framework is ultimately adopted, carbon capture may still have an important role to play — at least that’s what investors and startups alike are banking on. “Everybody's talking about carbon capture in anticipation of this getting adopted,” Danaher told me. “All these vessels are going to be old, they’re going to need to comply, and they’re not going to be able to comply fast enough,” she said.
Amidst the turmoil, one silver lining is that interest in maritime innovation and efficiency appears to be increasing regardless of global frameworks. For one, the surge in global military spending has underscored this tech’s potential for dual-use applications. “A lot of wars happen in and around the oceans, because that’s where we intersect each other the most.” Danaher told me. Many of S2G’s investments in ocean tech have received additional backing from governments and defense agencies looking to make their fleets more efficient, energy resilient, and secure. “Every single one of our ocean tech companies, one of their customers is the government, or many governments,” she said.
It’s an important reminder that there are many practical reasons for investors and states alike to support a decarbonization agenda, regardless of whether the U.S. is on board or not. But a global system of carrots and sticks sure wouldn’t hurt either. And now, we face the uneasy prospect of waiting another year to see whether the shipping industry will resist the Trump-era pushback or abandon its collective ambitions for a decarbonized future.
Amarillo-area residents successfully beat back a $600 million project from Xcel Energy that would have provided useful tax revenue.
Power giant Xcel Energy just suffered a major public relations flap in the Texas Panhandle, scrubbing plans for a solar project amidst harsh backlash from local residents.
On Friday, Xcel Energy withdrew plans to build a $600 million solar project right outside of Rolling Hills, a small, relatively isolated residential neighborhood just north of the city of Amarillo, Texas. The project was part of several solar farms it had proposed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission to meet the load growth created by the state’s AI data center boom. As we’ve covered in The Fight, Texas should’ve been an easier place to do this, and there were few if any legal obstacles standing in the way of the project, dubbed Oneida 2. It was sited on private lands, and Texas counties lack the sort of authority to veto projects you’re used to seeing in, say, Ohio or California.
But a full-on revolt from homeowners and realtors apparently created a public relations crisis.
Mere weeks ago, shortly after word of the project made its way through the small community that is Rolling Hills, more than 60 complaints were filed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission in protest. When Xcel organized a public forum to try and educate the public about the project’s potential benefits, at least 150 residents turned out, overwhelmingly to oppose its construction. This led the Minnesota-based power company to say it would scrap the project entirely.
Xcel has tried to put a happy face on the situation. “We are grateful that so many people from the Rolling Hills neighborhood shared their concerns about this project because it gives us an opportunity to better serve our communities,” the company said in a statement to me. “Moving forward, we will ask for regulatory approval to build more generation sources to meet the needs of our growing economy, but we are taking the lessons from this project seriously.”
But what lessons, exactly, could Xcel have learned? What seems to have happened is that it simply tried to put a solar project in the wrong place, prizing convenience and proximity to an existing electrical grid over the risk of backlash in an area with a conservative, older population that is resistant to change.
Just ask John Coffee, one of the commissioners for Potter County, which includes Amarillo, Rolling Hills, and a lot of characteristically barren Texas landscape. As he told me over the phone this week, this solar farm would’ve been the first utility-scale project in the county. For years, he said, renewable energy developers have explored potentially building a project in the area. He’s entertained those conversations for two big reasons – the potential tax revenue benefits he’s seen elsewhere in Texas; and because ordinarily, a project like Oneida 2 would’ve been welcomed in any of the pockets of brush and plain where people don’t actually live.
“We’re struggling with tax rates and increases and stuff. In the proper location, it would be well-received,” he told me. “The issue is, it’s right next to a residential area.”
Indeed, Oneida 2 would’ve been smack dab up against Rolling Hills, occupying what project maps show would be the land surrounding the neighborhood’s southeast perimeter – truly the sort of encompassing adjacency that anti-solar advocates like to describe as a bogeyman.
Cotton also told me he wasn’t notified about the project’s existence until a few weeks ago, at the same time resident complaints began to reach a fever pitch. He recalled hearing from homeowners who were worried that they’d no longer be able to sell their properties. When I asked him if there was any data backing up the solar farm’s potential damage to home prices, he said he didn’t have hard numbers, but that the concerns he heard directly from the head of Amarillo’s Realtors Association should be evidence enough.
Many of the complaints against Oneida 2 were the sort of stuff we’re used to at The Fight, including fears of fires and stormwater runoff. But Cotton said it really boiled down to property values – and the likelihood that the solar farm would change the cultural fabric in Rolling Hills.
“This is a rural area. There are about 300 homes out there. Everybody sitting out there has half an acre, an acre, two acres, and they like to enjoy the quiet, look out their windows and doors, and see some distance,” he said.
Ironically, Cotton opposed the project on the urging of his constituents, but is now publicly asking Xcel to continue to develop solar in the county. “Hopefully they’ll look at other areas in Potter County,” he told me, adding that at least one resident has already come to him with potential properties the company could acquire. “We could really use the tax money from it. But you just can’t harm a community for tax dollars. That’s not what I’m about.”
I asked Xcel how all this happened and what their plans are next. A spokesperson repeatedly denied my requests to discuss Oneida 2 in any capacity. In a statement, the company told me it “will provide updates if the project is moved to another site,” and that “the company will continue to evaluate whether there is another location within Potter County, or elsewhere, to locate the solar project.”
Meanwhile, Amarillo may be about to welcome data center development because of course, and there’s speculation the first AI Stargate facility may be sited near Amarillo, as well.
City officials will decide in the coming weeks on whether to finalize a key water agreement with a 5,600-acre private “hypergrid” project from Fermi America, a new company cofounded by former Texas governor Rick Perry, says will provide upwards of 11 gigawatts to help fuel artificial intelligence services. Fermi claims that at least 1 gigawatt of power will be available by the end of next year – a lot of power.
The company promises that its “hypergrid” AI campus will use on-site gas and nuclear generation, as well as contracted gas and solar capacity. One thing’s for sure – it definitely won’t be benefiting from a large solar farm nearby anytime soon.
And more of the most important news about renewable projects fighting it out this week.
1. Racine County, Wisconsin – Microsoft is scrapping plans for a data center after fierce opposition from a host community in Wisconsin.
2. Rockingham County, Virginia – Another day, another chokepoint in Dominion Energy’s effort to build more solar energy to power surging load growth in the state, this time in the quaint town of Timberville.
3. Clark County, Ohio – This county is one step closer to its first utility-scale solar project, despite the local government restricting development of new projects.
4. Coles County, Illinois – Speaking of good news, this county reaffirmed the special use permit for Earthrise Energy’s Glacier Moraine solar project, rebuffing loud criticisms from surrounding households.
5. Lee County, Mississippi – It’s full steam ahead for the Jugfork solar project in Mississippi, a Competitive Power Ventures proposal that is expected to feed electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority.