BOONE—Electricity is a commodity we all rely on, and it’s a commodity many of us waste, says Tom Kilgore, president and chief executive officer of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Kilgore was the guest speaker at the Harlan E. Boyles Distinguished CEO Lecture Series at Appalachian State University on Wednesday.

“Electricity is the most flexible fuel that you can have. It heats things, cools things, turns things and lights things,” he said.

“Our biggest challenge at TVA is keeping up with demand,” Kilgore said. He said that the southeast region’s protracted drought has cost customers $1.75 million a day—the cost of purchasing power from other sources when the power company’s hydro-electric plants can’t operate because of low water levels.

TVA is the nation’s largest public power company. Its power-service area covers 80,000 square miles in the southeastern United States, including almost all of Tennessee and parts of Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. TVA operates 105 hydro-electric plants, 59 coal-operated plants and six nuclear power plants. It also owns 17 wind turbines.

The rising costs of coal and natural gas have also impacted the cost of producing electricity. More than half of TVA’s electricity is produced at coal-fired plants. Eleven percent is purchased from producers using either coal or natural gas.

That’s one reason why conservation efforts and education figure prominently in TVA’s strategic plan. TVA demonstrates energy conservation to its customers by constructing energy-efficient houses for Habitat for Humanity. By using a variety of construction techniques and products, electricity costs average 47 cents a day for the TVA built houses.

“We are slightly spoiled,” Kilgore said of Americans’ energy consumption. “Our tradition of having cheap energy has made us more than a little wasteful. We really have to become more efficient in how we use energy, and plan our lives better in regard to our energy footprint. Efficiency needs to be built into our way of life.”

The increased use of nuclear energy is also part of TVA’s strategic plan. The company hopes to complete two plants in north Alabama. “We build nuclear units because they are carbon free and sulfur free,” he said.

Critics of the plan have urged TVA to increase its use of renewable energy resources, but that Kilgore said, is not economically feasible at this time. Solar power costs the power company about 30 cents per kilowatt hour to produce, compared to nuclear energy, which costs about five cents a kilowatt hour, he explained.

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