The Tennessee Valley Authority has revoked its previous decision to wind down operations at two of its coal plants, citing upward demand and the Trump administration’s coal-friendly posture.

The TVA Board of Directors voted to rescind retirement dates of both units at the 2.5-GW Cumberland Fossil Plant and all nine units at the 1.3-GW Kingston Fossil Plant at a quarterly board meeting Feb. 11 in Hopkinsville, Ky. The plants, all older than 50 years, are to operate indefinitely.

The new, Trump-appointed board members, Art Graham, Mitch Graves, Jeff Hagood and Randy Jones, joined the unanimous vote.

The board’s resolution directs TVA to fund the plants’ continued operations, apply for all necessary permits and secure fuel contracts for the plants for the foreseeable future.

TVA leadership recommended the extensions to its board prior to the vote.

Executive Vice President and CFO Tom Rice began by acknowledging President Donald Trump’s Energy Dominance Council; he said without it, TVA “would not be in the position we are today to recommend continuing to operate over 3,000 MW of beautiful, clean coal that will directly support energy resiliency, reliability and low-cost power for the 10 million people we serve.”

TVA in early 2023 decided to retire one Cumberland unit by the end of 2026 and the other by the end of 2028. A little more than a year later, it decided all nine Kingston units were to power down by the end of 2027.

TVA’s aging coal fleet evaluation, conducted in May 2021, concluded that “although no coal-fired units has reached mechanical end of life, a phased plan to retire TVA’s coal fleet by 2035 is aligned with least-cost planning and reduces economic, reliability and environmental risks.”

TVA says in the years since those conclusions, its region is experiencing a dramatic rise in electricity demand that wasn’t expected when it made the call to set retirement dates.

Rice said climbing demand, the Department of Energy’s issuance of an energy emergency and a “change in the regulatory outlook, particularly for coal,” creates the opportunity and the need to revisit the retirement authorizations.

Now, Rice said, keeping the plants online fits with TVA’s least-cost planning mandate and commitment to reliability.

TVA is building a $2.1 billion, 1.4-GW natural gas combined-cycle facility at the Cumberland Fossil Plant site that could be completed as soon as fall 2026. It originally was supposed to replace the coal plant. Until now, TVA had been using Cumberland’s retirement as justification for the new generation.

TVA previously said the coal plants are nearing the “end of their life cycle.” In its 2024 final environmental impact statement on Kingston, TVA wrote that the plant is forced to cycle frequently, which is not how it’s intended to run. It said the on-again-off-again output is “outside the intended design of the plant resulting in increased wear and tear, which presents reliability challenges that are difficult to anticipate and expensive to mitigate.”

In its final environmental impact statement regarding the Cumberland retirement, TVA wrote, “The continued long-term operation of some of TVA coal plants, including the Cumberland Fossil Plant, is contributing to environmental, economic and reliability risks.”

TVA Director Wade White said he applauded TVA leadership for the extension recommendation and reminisced on his western Kentucky hometown’s roots in coal mining.

White said the board and TVA had been working out the coal plants’ fate for months.

“Now that we have a quorum, the board can act,” White said, referring to the installment of the four Trump appointees. For half of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, the TVA Board had just three members after Trump terminated a trio of board members appointed by former President Joe Biden. (See Nonprofits Warn of Potential TVA Privatization Ahead of Board Hearings.)

“Over the past several years, the TVA board has faced pressure to make decisions based on stringent environmental regulations that were targeted to reduce the economic viability of important generation resources like coal,” White said. “Coal, like other energy resources, should be a part of a comprehensive strategy for delivering reliable, resilient and affordable electricity to TVA customers.”

White said the coal continuance tallies with DOE’s recent emergency orders to keep retirement-bound coal plants running in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington, Colorado and Indiana.

No Public Input; a ‘Staggering Reversal’

TVA did not take public comments prior to holding the vote.

Environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices called the decision a “staggering reversal.”

It said the public was left in the dark until the moment the decision was finalized, with the only hint it would extend the plants’ operations found in a pair of supplemental environmental impact statements that were quietly published to the TVA website.

Appalachian Voices said TVA bypassed public input through changes in January to its review process under the National Environmental Policy Act. Previously, major TVA changes in direction like this would have required a public weigh-in.

Environmental groups accused TVA of trying to buoy the coal industry and pander to data centers’ large loads. The Southern Environmental Law Center, Appalachian Voices, Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity released a joint press release condemning TVA’s reversal.

Trey Bussey, a staff attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said TVA’s broken promise is a “bait and switch” that will increase pollution, contribute to climate change, chip away at reliability and raise power bills.

“This is a blatant attempt from TVA to take the public out of ‘public power,’” Bussey said.

The Cumberland and Kingston fossil plants are among Tennessee’s three biggest sources of carbon dioxide pollution.

“Regular working people shouldn’t have to pay to keep these expensive, polluting power plants online just because some politicians want to prop up the coal industry, or for TVA to supply power to large industrial customers like data centers,” Bri Knisley, a director at Appalachian Voices, said in a statement. Kingsley said more distributed, clean generation would help improve reliability during adverse weather. She also said data centers should fund their own clean generation.

“TVA already found these coal plants to be uneconomical and unreliable, and that hasn’t changed just because the administration wants to keep coal online,” added Leah McCord, a coordinator at Appalachian Voices. “For TVA to take this action without public input is contrary to the public power model these new board members all recently affirmed.”