Earlier this year, in a stride toward a more sustainable future, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed to reduce carbon pollution from coal and gas-powered power plants. Framed within section 111 of the Clean Air Act, this initiative seeks to curtail the carbon footprint that our nation’s energy sector has long created, casting a long shadow over our country’s public health and environmental safety. Under the purview of this proposal, coal power plants and some gas plants—responsible for about a quarter of the nation’s carbon emissions–will need to scale back their output of ..read more

Read the Report RSVP for the Webinar on 8/9 at 12:30 PM ET Communities across the Southeast, particularly frontline communities, are already living the reality of the climate crisis. Over the past year we have felt heat waves, hurricanes, and blackouts caused by extreme winter weather across our region. To avoid worsening impacts of the climate crisis, scientific guidance says we must limit warming to 1.5° C. The key to this is reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That means from here on out, every ton of greenhouse gas emitted, every resource decision to continue to rely on fossil fuels or sw ..read more

Electric power plants produce toxic pollution when they burn fossil fuels, like coal, oil, and gas. The carbon pollution from power plants fuels the climate crisis, making summers hotter, storms bigger, and floods deeper. Fossil fuel pollution from power plants also harms our health, increasing the rate of asthma, heart attacks, and other illnesses, causing people to miss work and school, and even shortening lives. These harmful effects of pollution impact everyone, but they are worse in Black and Brown and low-income communities, which tend to be on the front lines for pollution and climate d ..read more

This opinion piece was first published in Energy News Network on June 16, 2023. A little-known regulatory policy temporarily put in place following the oil crisis of the 1970s is still prevalent and causing high electric bills, hiking Dominion customers’ bills yet again this past month. Legislation introduced in the state house seeks to fix it. The obscure policy is a “fuel cost adjustment,” which allows electric utilities, like Dominion and Duke Energy, to charge customers 100% of the cost of fuel power plants need to generate electricity, like coal and fossil gas. This arrangement leaves cus ..read more

Analysts from energy think tank Energy Innovation recently published a report showing that it is now more expensive to continue to run most coal plants than to replace them with renewable energy. Let’s dive in to see what this Coal Cost Crossover analysis can tell us about coal plants in the Southeast. Energy Innovation included 37 coal plants from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee for a total of just over 53 GW of coal capacity. Of these plants included in the analysis, both local and regional solar resources are less expensive tha ..read more

Today, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) filed comments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in the review process for the pipeline that would serve the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) proposed new fossil gas plant to replace its Cumberland coal plant. TVA’s environmental review, which has yet to be finalized, is flawed and skews the results toward TVA leadership’s desired outcome: to build a new gas combined cycle (CC) power plant instead of renewable energy. Part of FERC’s review of proposals for new gas pipelines is to verify there is a need for that pipeline. T ..read more

This blog post was written by Brady Watson, former Civic Engagement Coordinator for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. As we stated in an earlier blog post, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) released a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) in late April to determine how it should retire and replace the Cumberland Coal plant in Cumberland City, Tennessee.  As part of the DEIS, TVA identified three possible methods for replacing the coal power with: Alternative A: A large (1,450 megawatt) gas combined cycle (CC) power plant that would require the construction of a new 32-mile ..read more

Read the Report Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, experience rapid and deep reductions, and reach net zero by the early 2050s to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C  in order to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Many utilities and municipalities have acknowledged this dynamic, but the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy’s fourth annual “Tracking Decarbonization in the Southeast“ report highlights that current utility resource plans are not in line with this overarching target. Obstacles to getting utilities on track that are discussed in our report include: increas ..read more

This blog post was jointly prepared with contributions from Southface (Will Collier and Katie Southworth) and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (Bryan Jacob and Forest Bradley-Wright). “In everything we do, our goal is to provide people with ways to better meet their economic challenges, build better communities, and seek a better future for their children.” – Tom Fanning, Chairman & CEO of Southern Company (Georgia Power is a subsidiary of Southern Company) Georgia Power and the Public Interest Advocacy Staff of the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) have reached a preliminary ..read more

This Guest Post by Brianna Knisley originally appeared on Appalachian Voices’ Front Porch blog on June 10, 2022.  On June 1, more than a dozen Kingston coal ash workers and their families showed up at the Tennessee Supreme Court in Nashville. With them was an incredible showing of faith, labor and environmental justice advocates, many of whom had traveled from across the state after participating in solidarity events in advance of the hearing. The group gathered in the lobby for a prayer led by the Rev. Gordon Myers of Memphis. There in spirit were many other workers’ families who were to ..read more