In late March, and following lobbed criticism of Tennessee Valley Authority leadership from Tennessee Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, multiple sources reported that President Donald J. Trump fired TVA Board Member Michelle Moore — leaving open multiple seats in one of the strongest energy governing bodies in the southeastern United States.
She had been unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in December 2022, with her term set to end May 18, 2026, after being nominated by President Joe Biden.
Following Moore’s termination, three board members remain as of July 9: Bobby Klein, Bill Renick and Lyon County’s Wade White — all of which were nominated by Biden, and confirmed along with Moore to serve five-year terms.
Five members are needed for a voting quorum.
Daniel Dassow, of the Knoxville News Sentinel, reported that Blackburn and Hagerty called for a new interim CEO at the Tennessee Valley Authority — following CEO Jeff Lyash’s retirement — and they wrote in POWER Magazine that the utility’s board lacked “talent, experience and gravitas” to build the first small modular reactor in the U.S., a process that is currently being vetted and planned at the Clinch River Site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Furthermore, Dassow said Blackburn and Hagerty wrote that TVA had “focused on the diversity of its executives ahead of job creation” and had “fallen victim to paralysis by analysis” on new nuclear technologies.
However, in April, what remained of the TVA’s Board of Directors selected Don Moul to serve as its next President and Chief Executive Officer of the nation’s largest public power utility — just the fourth CEO in the agency’s history.
Lyash called Moul “the right choice” to lead TVA forward, and that he would “continue to propel TVA’s nuclear leadership.” An appointee of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to the state’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Council, Moul has nearly four decades of nuclear experience, and had served as President and Chief Nuclear Officer at FirstEnergy, leading the nuclear fleet to its best ever performance year in 2018.
In another recently released opinion, Southern Alliance For Clean Energy Executive Director Dr. Stephen A. Smith noted that in the past week, the Trump Administration put forth four new TVA Board nominations — Tennesseans Lee Beaman, Mitch Graves and Jeff Hagood; and Randall Jones of Alabama — and that Blackburn and Hagerty have been “pressuring the Senate to move quickly to overcome the TVA Board being in a non-quorum state.”
Dr. Smith also noted that one of the new nominees, Nashville’s Beaman, is a megadonor to Blackburn and other Republican candidates and causes in amounts exceeding millions of dollars, and as such, called these recent measures “a self-imposed and manufactured ‘crisis’ orchestrated by the Trump Administration and the Tennessee senators.”
The removal of three duly appointed TVA Board members in good standing with time remaining on their appointments — while replacing them with hyperpartisan campaign contributors of the senators involved in the nomination process — has taken “the partisan nature of the TVA Board selection process to a level never seen before in TVA’s history.”
He went on to call it “a dangerous precedent that represents a new low point in professional leadership at the agency.”
In an op-ed published through The Tennessean, Executive Director of Black American United for Tennessee’s Walter Blanks Jr. said Blackburn and Hagerty were “right” — citing TVA’s ordered rolling blackouts, general equipment malfunctions and 2023-24 rate hikes as reasons the organization “needed a big overhaul.”
At 10 AM Wednesday, July 16, TVA officials will showcase ongoing construction on a new 1,450-megawatt Cumberland Natural Gas Plant in Stewart County. Once completed, it will be considered a state-of-the-art natural gas facility that will provide enough power for more than 840,000 homes — while providing access to the Cumberland Fossil Plant.
It’s worth noting:
+ A native of LaGrange, Georgia, and current resident of Richmond, Virginia, Moore is the CEO of Groundswell — a clean-energy non-profit that proclaims to work toward local power resilience, cutting electricity bills in half for neighbors who “need savings the most,” as they remain on track to deliver more than $29 million in annual energy savings to 36,000 households, while deploying more than 40 resilience hub projects across 12 states by 2030.
+ Trump fired three TVA board members during his first term, and openly criticized Lyash — while publicly asking for his termination.
