Energy Education

by David Callis
Executive Vice President and General Manager

“Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.” This quote from historian Daniel Boorstin sums up a challenge we face in the electric utility industry.

As we get older, we (hopefully) become fairly well educated and consider ourselves to have a wider breadth and depth of knowledge. We tend to have reasonably good knowledge of our jobs and perhaps a few other areas. But it’s a big world, and it’s difficult to be an expert in every field.

I have — at best — a cursory knowledge of farming. In fact, if we were dependent on my farming skills to feed us, there’s a good chance we’d all go hungry. Recently, a friend and colleague of mine told me about an innovation he was using at his farm. He began using large grain bags as temporary corn storage. He tells me that this technique is used in other countries but isn’t common in the United States. His farm uses specialized equipment that attaches to a tractor to provide the power source for an auger that fills the bags. Each plastic bag is 10 feet wide by 300 feet long, holds 12,000 to 13,000 bushels and is not reusable. He described them as “Hefty bags on steroids.”

The point of the story is that this is something I never knew existed, but this temporary storage can help make the difference in his farming operation being successful and grain being available when needed. That’s important. I now know something that I didn’t know I didn’t know.

Everyone knows how to use electricity — you flip a switch or plug in an appliance. Even a child learns early on how to turn the lights on and off. However, it takes caring parents and adults to educate that child on how to use caution around electricity. Until they’re educated about safety, they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

As an adult, you know (or should know) how to safely use electricity. However, you might not be aware of how that electricity is made and delivered to your home or business.

That’s where we come in. Our task is to educate you on the challenges we face in keeping the electricity flowing. Tennessee’s co-ops deliver electricity generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. For more than 80 years, this regional partnership has electrified the Southeast.

TVA and your local electric cooperative are dedicated to delivering power to you at the lowest possible cost. That’s the duty imposed on TVA by Congress, and it’s our promise to you.

By its very nature, electricity is charged — positively or negatively. Unfortunately, energy policy has become politically charged. That’s not something of our choosing, but it’s the reality we face. That hasn’t always been the case, but it has certainly taken center stage over the past few years.

The challenge for us is to cooperate with our regulatory agencies as we operate and maintain the grid and to keep you informed about the decisions we make. We have a variety of choices when it comes to power sources: renewable energy, hydro power, nuclear power and coal-fired generation. As I’ve stated previously, each has its benefits and shortcomings. We have to make decisions that allow us to continue to provide power to you — now and into the future.

Our pledge to you is to provide you with facts — not opinions. We want you to know what you don’t know you don’t know.

Flickr photo by Bill Erickson