NASHVILLE, April 14 (UPI) -- The Tennessee Valley Authority has voted to retire portions of coal-fired plants in three parts of the region, officials said.
They include all the units at the Johnsonville plant east of Nashville, two at John Sevier in East Tennessee and six units at Widows Creek in Alabama, The (Nashville) Tennessean reported Thursday.
TVA's polluting coal plants have been the targets of lawsuits by environmentalists and even neighboring North Carolina.
"We realized we could not keep all our operating coal plants on online," TVA President and Chief Executive Officer Tom Kilgore said before the vote.
"Our plant are some of the oldest in the country. The average age is about 47. They were designed for 40 years," he said.
Bringing them up to mandated environmental requirements would be extremely costly, he said.
The closures would not be immediate, he said, but TVA wanted to inform employees and communities well in advance what was going to occur.
"This is not going to happen tomorrow," he said, adding that the closures could take up to six years.
