Jerry Collins Urges Congress to Raise TVA Debt Ceiling

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Jerry Collins Urges Congress to Raise TVA Debt Ceiling

The head of TVA’s biggest distributor said today that Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling for the Tennessee Valley Authority to allow the federal power agency to undertake costly, long-term improvements.

Jerry Collins Jr., president and chief executive of Memphis Light, Gas & Water, said the $30 billion cap on how much TVA can borrow should be raised so new power plants can be built and long-term investments made without having to burden existing customers with most of those costs.

“The debt ceiling needs to be raised such that our customers that we have today don’t have to pay the total costs for infrastructure that is going to be around for the next 30 to 40 years or even longer,” Mr. Collins told the TVA board of directors during a meeting today in Jackson, Tenn. “I would encourage you to work to raise the debt ceiling.”

In the next five years, TVA is projecting to double what it spends on capital spending programs for new power generation, environmental controls and demand response. The agency is in the midst of a $2.5 billion program to finish a second reactor at the Watts Bar plant near Spring City, Tenn., and TVA President Tom Kilgore said the staff will make a recommendation to the TVA board in August about what type of reactor should be built at the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Northeast Alabama.

In its most recent quarterly report, TVA said its long-term statutory debt was $21.8 billion. The utilility has more than $4 billion of other short-term debt and debt-like obligations counted as long-term obligations. TVA set the current debt cap of $30 billion in 1979.