The country’s largest public power provider is building a large-scale solar field on a closed coal ash site at its Shawnee Fossil Plant site in McCracken County. Tennessee Valley Authority officials say it’s the world’s first.
Project Phoenix, a 270-acre solar installation, sits atop what was once a landfill where TVA disposed of the byproducts from burning coal in West Paducah. A layer of turf sits in between the past and the future of the plant’s energy offerings.
Patrick Kiser, the general manager for strategy and engineering at TVA’s Civil Projects Group, said TVA is turning what was once considered unusable land into a money and power-generating asset.
“One of the benefits here is it allows us to maximize property that TVA already owns, right? So we can generate energy in a new way, but within the same footprint that we've occupied for decades,” Kiser said.
In 2008, a coal ash pond at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant in eastern Tennessee failed, releasing over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry into nearby rivers and surrounding land. It’s considered one of the worst industrial and environmental disasters in U.S. history.
In the years following, the Environmental Protection Agency created new regulations guiding how fossil fuel plants should dispose of waste. In response, TVA began storing coal ash that couldn’t be recycled by drying it and compacting it into the ground.
At the Shawnee Fossil Plant site, this closed coal ash site was then covered with artificial turf. Kiser said that would allow for a solar farm to be built on top. That treatment would also allow the utility to cut into the turf and potentially harvest some of the coal ash for use in things like concrete and roofing materials, or for pulling out rare earth minerals like gypsum, which occur naturally in the coal byproduct.
Shannon Benton, the plant manager of the Shawnee Fossil Plant, said the current set up allows them to make use of the site now with the potential for other uses in the future.
“While we're waiting for that technology to advance, we put solar panels on it tied into our grid system,” Benton said.
TVA chose turf instead of natural grass because it requires less maintenance.
Whereas most solar panels are typically mounted a few feet off the ground, the panels at the Project Phoenix site are a few inches away from the turf. Kiser said panels at a typical solar farm are often spaced farther apart to prevent shading and maximize sun exposure. At Shawnee, they’re closer to the ground and each other. He said the project addresses the EPA’s regulations to prevent disasters like the one in eastern Tennessee, and also efficient for making clean power.
“This is really the coalescence of some new technologies that allow us to make use of this landfill property that you really couldn't make much use of before,” Kiser said.
The Shawnee Fossil Plant first opened in the 1950s to support the nearby Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which operated from 1952 to 2013. The nine-unit fossil fuel burning facility now generates around 1,100 megawatts – enough to power more than 625,000 homes. When it is complete, Project Phoenix could generate an additional 100 megawatts from solar energy.
While the federal utility had previously planned to retire all four of its remaining coal-firing plants by 2035, those plans are now paused due in part to executive orders from President Donald Trump.
Last month, TVA became the first utility group to ask federal regulators for a permit to build a small nuclear reactor, which it seeks to build at its Clinch River site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
“It's like my stock portfolio, right? The diversification allows you to weather a lot of things,” Kiser said. “Inclusion of solar as part of our overall generation portfolio improves our reliability [and] gives us the opportunity to handle many more upset-type conditions.”
The solar project is currently on track to be fully operational in 2028.
