No Raise This Year For TVA CEO – The Highest Paid Federal Employee In The U.S.
Image Credit: tva.com
The Tennessee Conservative Staff –
Tennessee Valley Authority President and CEO Jeff Lyash will not be getting a raise for the next fiscal year, after this year was plagued by rolling blackout days and a site foreman’s death on the job.
The Board of Directors for TVA voted 6-3 in favor of eliminating the raise for Lyash this year during their November 9th meeting in Tupelo, Mississippi.
In 2022, Lyash’s compensation package was worth $9.8 million. Board members say this amount is still about 29% below the average salary of individuals in comparable positions at similar companies.
The Board also voted unanimously to award nearly all of the at-risk compensation to 10,000 non-executive employees. This pay comes at the end of the year and is based on performance. In a 6-3 vote, they opted to give 70 executives a portion of that compensation, although it would be a lesser amount.
Lyash stated that he believed executives should be held accountable when there are issues within the company.
Last December, Winter Storm Elliot caused several of TVA’s fossil fuel plants to crash during a critical time. In order to preserve its grid, the company as forced to initiate rolling blackouts for the first time in its 90 years of operation. TVA was one of 12 power companies in the Eastern United States that dealt with the unexpected outages during the storm.
TVA also dealt with the loss of a site foreman this past September at its Lagoon Creek Site in Brownsville. The natural gas pipe he was repairing burst, and he succumbed to his injuries a few days later.
Lyash said that, despite this, the company had its best safety record ever this year, landing in the top 10% in the industry.
“We are committed to learning from this and taking the actions needed to prevent something like this from ever happening again,” Lyash stated.
These issues shine a light on the dangers of working with fossil fuels like natural gas and coal. These fuels account for 35% of TVA’s power supply last year.
The issues also brought attention to the use of nuclear energy. All three of TVA’s nuclear plants – Brown’s Ferry, Sequoyah, and Watts – functioned as normal throughout the winter storm. Although the company at one time struggled in the area of nuclear energy, it now makes up 42% of the total power supply, coming in as TVA’s greatest source of power.
TVA is also currently developing a small modular reactor at the Clinch River Site. Plans for the reactor were approved in 2019 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Planned company investments, along with inflation, led to the company’s first increase in electricity rates in four years.
Exiting board member Bill Kilbride told other members as he concluded his final meeting, “Strap in, I think the next few years will be exciting, interesting, transformative, and ultimately rewarding.”
Well, I for one am more concerned with TVA’s ability to circumvent the coming failure of grids all across the nation! With the aggressive policies that Obama and Biden Administrations have pushed through the unelected bureaucracy of the EPA, all American’s will be subject to the coming blackout! Why is Congress ignoring potential grid failure, and the overall susceptibility of our electric grid? Please do some reporting on this angle in future articles.
TVA is a FEDERAL AGENCHY and he’s paid over $9M??? Fire him.
Privatize TVA but prohibit any foreign company or foreign-controlled company to buy it. In the meantime TVA should either complete its unfinished nuclear power plants or sell them to an entity that will complete them. As for the small 100 mW modular reactors – waste of time, money and space. The former site of the K-25 is a brownfield so put a gW-class reactor on it. And while were at it, the next POTUS should revoke Jimmy Carter’s EO prohibiting the federal government from spent fuel recycling. Problems solved!