Power for the People

THE NATION'S LARGEST electric power utility and leading investor in strip-mined coal and nuclear power is encouraging its customers to switch from dependence on the mammoth power plants to an updated model of the wood-burning stove or to futuristic solar heating systems. It is helping families in one of th Unites States's poorest regions to buy alternative sources of home energy with low-interest loans payable over decades. Doesn't sound like something your local Exxon or Con Ed would do, does it? It's not.

In the past months, the Tennessee Valley Authority has shown healthy signs of emerging from the world of corporate values to its original purposes so grandly conceived in 1933.

Tennessee Valley Authority Chairman David Freeman explained yesterday, when every position on T.V.A.'s three-man board of directors opened up last year, Jimmy Carter had an opportunity unprecedented since the New Deal years to play Franklin Roosevelt, to restore some of the creative, idealistic spirit that characterized T.V.A. before the Eisenhower and Nixon appointees took over.

Back in 1940 F.D.R. complained that the "dammed newspapers have made it out that T.V.A. is simply a power agency. Now that isn't the fact. We aren't just providing navigation and flood control and power. We are reclaiming land and human beings."

In the 1930s a more humanistic T.V.A. attempted to solve the valley's problems, to harness the awesome power of the river that ran through seven states, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Ohio, to mend the damage it had wrought, and to improve the lives of the valley's residents. Not only did the agency bring electricity to most of their homes fro the first time, it also cut the price of power throughout the valley by two thirds, by serving as a yardstick against which the public could judge the prices charged by private utility companies. The yardstick idea was one of the most successful, but least imitated innovations of the era.

The agency, however, did not limit itself to providing clean, cheap hydroelectric power. It also replanted forests which had been washed away and helped farmers restore land ravaged by floods and destructive farming practices. But again, the T.V.A.'s way of doing business was unlike virtually all other federal agencies. Instead of forcing the farmers to adopt T.V.A. standards, the agency convinced several farmers to try out their suggestions, and once the success of the programs was demonstrated the rest of the farmers clamored for assistance. Instead of imposing authority from above, the T.V.A. espoused the philosophy of decentralized administration of centralized authority. The T.V.A. is the only federal agency whose main headquarters is in the region it serves, not Washington, D.C.

But since the 1950s, T.V.A. has had "hardening of the imaginative arteries" as David Lilienthal put it. Especially under Nixon appointee William L. Jenkins, who resigned last May, the agency had become just another power company singlemindedly pursuing energy without regard for human costs. Through its dependence on coal it became a scavenger on the land; through its mania for dam and park building, the T.V.A. dispossessed thousands of people who had lived in the valley for generations. Communities with names like Energy, Wildcat and Turkey have been wiped out. Through its cultivation of nuclear power (it will have seven operating plants by the late 1980s) the T.V.A. encouraged the development of a dangerous source of energy. The agency's leaders and bureaucrats also developed a contemptuous attitude towards the people they ostensibly served; Jenkins who had been fighting federal regulation of strip mining told the press that he would pass a good bill if "the neurotics and psychotics would just trust us." And T.V.A. bureaucrats, instead of sympathizing with people dispossessed by the agency's activities, trumpeted their own bureaucratic righteousness. T.V.A.'s chief solicitor said, "The story of these people has been told to the point of nausea. There ought to be some point where reporters would tell things as they are instead of indulging in a lot of sentimental drip."

THE TWO MEN Carter has appointed thus far, and who compose a majority on the board, favor restoring the T.V.A. to its original role. Asked if he would continue to lead the agency in a new direction, David Freeman said no, that he would restore the T.V.A.'s traditional role as a laboratory for the testing of new ideas. Freeman has not hesitated to use the broad authority granted directors in the 1933 Act to carry out his goals.

The T.V.A. is now trying out two alternative sources of energy--wood-burning stoves and solar heating systems. If they are successful, they will be offered to all T.V.A. customers.

The administration of the solar demonstration project in Memphis harks back to the more democratic methods of the 1930s. Instead of relying on a skilled labor force already employed, the agency is training people from the unemployment lists to install the solar systems. In addition, they have given all their orders for solar equipment to small businesses that are being bought up by oil giants like Atlantic Richfield, Mobil Oil, and Shell Oil. This is a particularly ominous trend as these companies have an interest in seeing that solar technology is not marketed until their oil, coal, and nuclear resources are exhausted.

The T.V.A. experiment also enables middle and low income consumers to buy expensive solar water heating equipment by giving them a loan at an interest rate of 3.37 per cent to be paid back over twenty years. Even without any publicity for the project, 900 people have volunteered to participate, and Freeman imagines a day when all the valley's residents will use solar energy to heat their water. There is a second project cranking up that will test solar space heating systems.

The T.V.A. is also trying a demonstration project with wood-burning stoves. Freeman explains that the forests replanted 40 years ago now cover 60 per cent of the valley. This wood has the potential to be an important and relatively inexpensive source of heat for residential users.

The agency already provided low-interest loans for the insulation of 35,000 homes in the valley to help conserve energy.

Though these programs only affect residential customers, who use 30 per cent of the energy produced by the T.V.A., they presage a turning from nonrenewable, polluting sources of energy. They are a spear in the cyclops's eye.