TVA takes 'full responsibility' for Christmas Eve power outages, rolling blackouts

The Tennessee Valley Authority pledged to conduct a review of what led to unprecedented rolling blackouts across its service territory in the days before Christmas.

The power generator apologized for the temporary planned power outages, the first in the utility’s 90-year history, and pledged “corrective actions,” in a statement Wednesday.

“This is not the way we want to serve our communities and customers,” the statement said. “We are conducting a thorough review of what occurred and why.”

The mea culpa comes after government officials and leaders of local power companies dependent on TVA power criticized the utility for its performance during last week’s winter storm that left tens of thousands of Tennesseans without power.

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TVA supplied more power than at any other time in its history on Dec. 23, the first day of the storm, and experienced its highest-ever winter power peak, the utility said. Energy demand was close to 35 percent higher than expected on a typical winter day, TVA COO Don Moul told The Tennessean on Friday. The freezing temperatures also forced some of TVA’s gas and coal facilities to shut down.

Because of the unprecedented strain on TVA’s system, TVA asked the 153 local power companies on its system to reduce their power by as much as 10 percent. In many places, that reduction took the form of rolling blackouts: planned outages that reduced demand but left homes and businesses without power.

The outages created frustrations across the state as families gathered for the Christmas holiday. More than 10% of electric customers in Tennessee were without power Saturday morning.

In Nashville, where temperatures fell below zero for the first time since 1996, 50,000 people were without power on Friday. Mayor John Cooper called on the Tennessee Titans to cancel their noon game Saturday against the Texans, which eventually started an hour later than scheduled as 10-minute rolling blackouts hit every one to two hours in the city.

“TVA needs to invest in infrastructure to withstand extreme temps,” Cooper posted on Twitter on Saturday.

TVA gave Nashville Electric Service just an 8-minute warning about rolling blackouts on Friday, Cooper said.

In Memphis, more than half the 422,000 customers of local power company Memphis Light, Gas and Water experienced rolling blackouts.

Following the blackouts, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said TVA was "certainly not as reliable as they said they were."

Wednesday’s public apology comes after TVA CEO Jeff Lyash made similar comments to elected officials across TVA’s seven-state service area during a conference call after the blackouts, adding that the utility should have had better communication with its local power companies.

Reach Josh Keefe at jkeefe@tennessean.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: TVA takes responsibility for Christmas Eve power outages in Tennessee