Fossil Power

TVA’s Cumberland Fossil Plant

Most of the electricity that TVA makes is generated at the 11 coal-fired power plants that TVA runs across the Tennessee Valley. These plants burn coal to make electricity. They are also called "fossil" plants because the coal they burn was formed from the remains of prehistoric plants.

TVA built the first of its 11 large fossil plants in the 1940s. In 2011, these plants produced more than 74 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity—52 percent of the electricity TVA made that year.

How does a fossil plant work?

Electricity is made at a fossil plant by burning coal, which heats water in a boiler to produce steam. The steam, under a lot of pressure, flows into a turbine, and the turbine spins a generator to make electricity. (See a diagram of a coal-fired power plant.)

TVA's Kingston Plant near Knoxville, Tennessee, is a good example of a fossil plant. It generates about 10 billion kilowatt-hours a year, or enough electricity to supply 700,000 homes. To meet this demand, Kingston burns about 14,000 tons of coal a day, an amount that would fill 140 railroad cars.

Coal use and the environment

The burning of coal to produce power can help cause air pollution. Scientists have also linked fossil plants to climate change, the gradual, possibly harmful, warming of the world's climate. The Tennessee Valley Authority is among the world leaders in finding ways to help control environmental damage from fossil plants.

What is coal?

Coal is a rocklike mineral found in the earth that can be burned to release energy.

Millions of years ago large quantities of dead plants collected and slowly began to decay. This happened most often in wet, swampy areas, where the decaying plants turned into a spongy brown material called peat.

Over millions of years this peat came to be buried deep under the earth’s surface, where it was pushed together and heated up by the weight of the earth above it. The compressed peat finally turned into coal.

People have been mining and burning coal to produce heat (and later, power) for many centuries. Today, about half the world’s six billion people cook their food and heat their homes with coal.

Coal is easy to find and inexpensive. In the United States, we use coal to create about 50 percent of the electricity we use. TVA is the largest single utility buyer of coal in the U.S. It bought almost 45 million tons in 2001.

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