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The Secret World Of Custom Balsa Crankbaits
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SONNY MCFARLAND has disappeared.
I shouldn't have been surprised. The East Tennessee region where he made his name is notoriously insular, with a history of bootlegging and moonshiners who took great pains to hide themselves from revenuers.
Multiple anglers who learned the art of making balsa crankbaits at Sonny's knee said they didn't have his number. A noted remaining contemporary likewise demurred. One day "he was just gone," said another former friend. Even Rob Cochran—who has known McFarland since he was 8 years old, virtually grew up in his shop, and effectively inherited McFarland's business—can't get his mentor to answer the phone. When I repeatedly pressed Cochran for a number, he ended the conversation by saying, "I'm not supposed to give it out. He would kill me if I did."
McFarland started his lure company in 1974. It's been nearly a decade since he's produced a crankbait for sale. One rival suggested that his sudden disappearance was an attempt to escape from the law, or creditors, but without further substantiation, it might simply reflect that he got tired of pouring his heart and soul into a craft that paid poorly and left him with little more than callused hands and the perpetual aura of paint fumes. By leaving his tools to Cochran, he provided a treasure map and little more. The fact is that no one is getting rich off of balsa, but in a world of disposability, many bass fishermen still value tools with a distinctive regional imprint. Plastic baits are cheaper, more durable, and catch fish, but for many anglers, balsa inspires a confidence that cannot be mass-produced. The Carolinas and a few other states contribute to the cult and have their own respected builders with their own devout followings, but the biggest strongholds in the craft remain in East Tennessee and the Ohio River region.
Lowen's massive stash of handmade balsa crankbaits, which he accumulated over decades. Matt Nager "It's just something we grew up doing here," says Wesley Strader, a bass pro, lure-maker, and son of McFarland's contemporary, Bud Strader. "It was part of the culture here in Tennessee, like country music."
As with country music, though, some of the innovators are being forgotten and replaced by imitators—some competent, others watered down. As legendary lure-makers fade away, it leaves those still in the game wondering if the balsa embers will burn bright enough to light the path for the next generation.
Magic TouchesWood is essential to the American creation folklore—from George Washington's cherry tree to Abe Lincoln's log cabin to Roy Hobbs' "Wonderboy" bat—and no piece of wood-based Americana is more loved or fiercely debated than barbecue. Whether you favor hickory, cherry, or mesquite, and whether you use it for pork, brisket, or sausages, it breeds fanaticism.
Crankbaits made of porous, coarse balsa inspire that same near-religious devotion, and the zealots are quick to fight—with others and among themselves—about whose lures are the best and why. The funny thing is, balsa isn't distinctly American. It's native to South and Central America, and its use in lures predates these small-batch creators, first gaining national attention in August 1962, when Finnish lure-maker Lauri Rapala was featured in a Life magazine article entitled "The Lure Fish Can't Pass Up." That issue became the publication's best-seller to date, likely because the cover featured the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe. The article mainstreamed the idea of a "magic lure," and specifically the balsa mystique. However, the very things that make balsa baits effective also make them maddening.
"No two baits are the same," says Bud Strader, who never officially started his own lure company but has been making them for personal use and for friends since the early 1970s. He also claims to have influenced other prominent builders: "There will be something special about one or two of 10 lures." Nearly all of the disciples give the same frustrating response about what makes one better: You'll know it when you fish it. The pros may intellectually understand that there's no such thing as a magic bait, but they all seem to have some balsa cranks they only throw when there's a five- or six-figure check on the line. Wesley Strader has retired some baits simply because he ground the bills off from overuse.
Balsa addict Bill Lowen in his Indiana garage. Matt Nager The secret sauce is balsa's buoyancy. You can bang balsa cranks into cover and let them float back, and they have a crisp action that responds immediately to angler input. Most important to some, though, is their "hunting" action—on a straight retrieve, some baits suddenly shoot out to the side and then track true again. That random action often triggers fish that are otherwise disinclined to eat.
Whittled DownFred Young's balsa Big O—the first of what would eventually morph into Bagley's famed line of Alphabet Baits—was hand-carved in the early 1960s in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just a stone's throw from where many of the modern artists still work. Like the Rapala, it created a firestorm when word got out. Big Os were reputedly in such short supply that anglers willingly rented them for $25 a day, with a $25 deposit in case the lure was lost. Young whittled his prototype as he recovered from surgery, and as Bud Strader notes, "There are a lot of guys around here who whittle," so the regional DNA provided a building block.
The Tennessee clan resembles an NFL coaching tree, where Bill Parcells begets a Bill Belichick, who spawns 10 more successful coaches, except no one can agree on the line of succession. Bud Strader says he learned bait-making from a man called "Bull Durham" in Chattanooga. Strader built baits similar to his mentor's, and others began building baits similar to Strader's. "Pete Reynolds modified mine, and it became the Little Petey, and Sonny took his design off one of Pete's," says Strader.
An inside look at Phil Hunt's shop in Indiana, which produces 2,000 to 5,000 custom balsa crankbaits per month. Just 10 years ago, Hunt was working by himself and able to make only 300 baits per month. Matt Nager Craig Powers, a Tennessee-based pro angler and maker of CP Crankbaits, says, "There were homemade plug-makers all around me growing up. It was kind of crammed down my throat." As his tournament career progressed, he increasingly relied on a perfectly weighted, flat-sided balsa bait, with a tight wobble and no rattle to provide negative cues, as a means of separating himself from the competition. If there's one thing the East Tennessee crew can agree on, it's that the region's craftsmen share a common approach. "Sonny and Pete had the same mindset," Powers says. "It was my way or no way." Then he laughs and says, "There are things about my baits that I think are better than Rob [Cochran]'s, and I'm sure he thinks there are things that are better about his."
When McFarland saw a young Cochran teaching himself the craft, he told him, "I'm going to show you how to build them the right way." That started not with balsa, but by teaching him how to weld and make his own duplicator machines. "He'd give me hints, like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, but I made him a promise after we built those machines that I wouldn't show people," Cochran says.
Today there are numerous disciples of those early Tennessee lure makers, but few craftsmen pursue it full time. For Cochran, "It's a hobby that got out of control." He builds nearly 3,000 baits a year and sells them all, yet he relies on his lawn care and landscaping business to fund his passion and pay the bulk of his bills. "Some people may be in it for the money, but most of us are in it for the heart and soul."
Cochran is an amalgam of looks that straddle generations. His shoulder-length hair, showing not a bit of gray, scraggles at his neck and would have been right at home at a Kiss or Waylon Jennings concert decades ago. But his graying mustache and weathered face betray his years in the sun and behind a workbench. He's a child of the '70s, for certain, and since he "doesn't do websites," he's not sure the 21st century is where he belongs. He was smart enough, though, to put his company, Jawjacker Crankbaits, on Facebook, where he has more than 3,000 followers and a profile picture of himself smiling with an arm around Bill Dance.
Airbrushing custom baits. Matt Nager To achieve a reputation like Cochran's, one must realize that making great baits is less like making gumbo—in which each additional item adds to the mix—and more like baking, where imbalanced ingredients, the wrong amount of time in the oven, or inaccurate temperatures totally change the outcome of the finished product. Unlike with plastic models stamped out of a mold, there are dozens of steps involved in making a single crankbait. "You have to be an artist, a chemist, a machinist, and a woodworker," Cochran explains. "If I cut one crooked, I just throw it right in the trash."
Brothers in BalsaThe Ohio River, situated at the harsh intersection of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, is one of America's toughest bass fisheries. East Tennessee's clear highland reservoirs contrast completely with the shallow and infertile Ohio. What they have in common, however, is that their anglers bleed balsa.
Bill Lowen says the day he got his first Wee Bait was transformative. "I'm a balsa freak," he says. He has a stash of hundreds in his garage, including a lot he'd "go swimming for." Lowen came close to crying a few years ago at Pickwick Lake when thieves broke into his boat and seemingly targeted only the handmade, super-rare cranks. "When I first started tournament fishing, it just seemed that all of the best anglers in the area were using balsa," he explains. "If you didn't have them, you were behind the eight ball. You weren't going to catch any fish."
The next lineup of baits dry on the rack. Matt Nager The Wee Bait inspired others, such as the D Bait, the Lazer Lure, and "some baits nobody will ever know about from a guy building 200 a year out of his basement," Lowen says. While the Tennessee baits were often made with finesse and silence in mind, the pressured Ohio waters demand that anglers bulldoze cover. It's shallow-water combat fishing. If you can't touch bottom with a 3-foot pole, you're too deep. Baits need to float up and out of cover, and it's this region that gave us the term "worming" a crankbait, because the locals put balsa cranks in places others would only cast a worm or jig to. They'll ease them through the nasty stuff. It's this ability to plow through cover that led Lowen to refer to one favorite bait as a "baby dump truck.
Lowen's best friend, Phil Hunt, is one of the few who crafts balsa baits as a full-time gig. Neither guy fits the mold of the blow-dried, pressed-shirt glamour boy that pervades pro bass fishing in the YouTube era. They both have close-cropped heads and the slight paunch of lunch-pail workers, the type who might bowl together on Wednesday nights or grab a beer when a shift ends at 8 a.M. Their accents are noticeably rural but not regionally specific. They'd sound equally at home driving a combine in a Nebraska cornfield, working in an Ohio steel mill, or as transplants to the natural-gas fields of North Dakota.
Where the magic happens. Matt Nager "We didn't have much money growing up, but we lived on the river, and my brother and I spent our time wading for smallmouths," Hunt recalls. "I was always fascinated by balsa. My brother and I would literally shovel shit out of farmers' stalls and bale hay to pay for Bagley's crankbaits."
The self-sufficiency Hunt learned in childhood led him to craft his own lures, and he knows that there are no shortcuts: "It takes 40 steps or more to make one of them right." He's also learned that with wooden baits, unlike plastic lures, "every one of them has its own personality." Most important, Hunt, true to his name, has figured out the trick to getting a bait to hunt. It requires a construction that is inherently unstable. Too perfect and they'll run too true; too imperfect and they'll never come back to center. His ability to thread the needle consistently is why his baits are so highly coveted.
Hunt has curated a catalog of more than two dozen distinct designs. You can purchase them through online retail giant Tackle Warehouse, as well as from his own website, and they average $23 apiece. The PH Custom Lures Facebook page boasts almost 12,000 followers, plus the company has nearly another 4,000 on Instagram. That seemed to be a pipe dream a decade ago, when Hunt was working full time as a paramedic and producing 300 to 400 baits a month all by himself. That number increased in short spurts until he was "overwhelmed with orders." Today he has three full-time employees and another that works part time, and their annual production is 10 times what it was back then. Monthly production rarely dips below 2,000 and sometimes shoots as high as 5,000. In March 2019, he got a $12,000 order from one shop in Texas, and a tour-level pro put in a request for 59 baits, a number that pales in comparison to some single enthusiasts who often order 100 to 150 at a time.
Nearly ready for battle. Matt Nager Grains of Truth Guys like Lowen and Wesley Strader have enough experience, know-how, and passion to produce custom balsa, but they opt to put all their energy into tournament fishing. They're both in their 40s and don't have the free time to share the lessons or start their own companies. Others, like Cochran and Hunt, in their 50s, can't pass the torch because they either have no children or their children aren't interested. Ed Chambers, owner of Zoom Bait Company, often focused less on the soft-plastics that made him millions and more on his hand-carved WEC crankbaits. When he died in 2018, his 52-year-old son, Ed Jr., took over the company but not the artistry. Even the "young" guys are now on the far side of middle age.
"All the old boys are basically gone," Bud Strader says of his Tennessee peers. "When I'm gone, it's gone."
The Wee Baits that were Lowen's gateway drug to his balsa addiction are also closing in on the end, even if demand persists, because their creator, Wes England, is in his 80s. While he previously sold through multiple retailers, now Dixie Marine in Fairfield, Ohio, is the only store that carries Wee Baits. They restock 100 when they run out, which usually takes two weeks. "But when he's done, we're done with custom balsa," the store manager admits.
One of Phil Hunt's finished products, ready to fish. Matt Nager Even though plastic may rule the market, balsa's not going away—yet. Every person I talked to added another modern-day creator to the list. Covering them all would be nearly impossible. For the time being, it's not the product that's evaporating, it's the mentoring. Sure, there are younger builders who can mimic a body shape or a bill angle developed in another era, but they don't know the why behind the how. Furthermore, the pool of potential carvers has dwindled. As Lowen notes, "They've taken shop class out of schools. That was the part of the day you looked forward to."
"One buyer told me that the wood-bait industry was dead," Hunt says. "Guess what? He's selling my baits now." As far away as Japan—where many things uber-American, from baseball to jazz to denim, are revered—the appetite for these authentic pieces of Americana is insatiable. On eBay, certain rare factory Bagley's plugs routinely sell for more than a thousand bucks, and as the balsa fathers die off, their plugs should likewise start to go for several hundred or thousand dollars. The question is, if you pay that much for a bait, is it a tool or is it a collector's item? If you retire it to a locked cabinet instead of putting it in a tackle tray, how does the next generation of anglers get to understand its effectiveness?
Despite creeping cost inflation, most modern builders such as Craig Powers strive to keep their prices fair. "I grew up dirt poor," he recalls. "I have a big waiting list, but I still charge $15 to $25. People around here put on a pair of boots for a hard day of work. They can't afford more."
Hunt airbrushes a batch of baits. Matt Nager Today's technology does allow for economies of scale and improvements, but an honor among the fraternity to not steal designs will always limit the supply. As Hunt says, "There are a lot of baits people ask me to build, but I can't copy them." When a designer has been dead for decades but his legend and creations live on, what is the best way to respect that heritage? Is it to build carbon copies? Build close facsimiles? Or just let the few remaining plugs be his legacy? There's not necessarily a consensus of opinion.
In the grand scheme of things, the disappearance of the archetypal Tennessee or Ohio craftsman is not a national catastrophe that will garner media attention or end up the subject of an HBO documentary. The old-school craftsmen will just continue to quietly retire, the lures in shops will eventually sell out and not be replenished, leaving balsa believers to cherish the baits they have or spend more time talking about the baits they wish they could replace. Nevertheless, the overall fading of the art reflects a wholesale change in fishing culture.
Kids no longer sit in workshops or in the back of a dusty tackle shop, earning silent wisdom paid for in hours. You can't whittle while you text. There are Facebook groups and tackle-building websites in which bait-makers get together and share pictures and (limited) trade secrets, but they have their own vernacular—there's no way for the uninitiated to wade into a sea of "mutts" and "coffin bills" and references to long-ago builders—and that makes it hard to infiltrate the clique. If you don't already know why the folklore matters, then you probably won't think to ask. And if you don't know the back story, it's easy to just pull homogenized plastic products off the pegboard and head to the big-box cash register instead.
"The tradition is not going away, but the history of it is," Powers says. "You can't write a book about it. No one will read it. The only way to preserve it is to tell as many people as you can the simple facts while you're still here."
The Crank Addict's Black BookIf you're ready to dabble in high-quality, low-volume balsa cranks and the online-auction route doesn't appeal to you, here are a few builders who still produce exceptional baits on demand.
PH Custom Lures: Phil Hunt produces homages to long-gone Tennessee and Ohio builders, and also has plenty of his own designs. Phcustomlures.Myshopify.Com
Jawjacker Custom Crankbaits: Rob Cochran is the heir to legendary lure-maker Sonny McFarland. Facebook.Com/jawjackercrankbaits
Black Label Balsa: These cranks are handcrafted by 2013 Bassmaster Classic winner Cliff Pace. Blacklabeltackle.Com
This story originally ran in the Summer 2019 issue. Read more OL+ stories.
Born Out Of The Pandemic, Online Fish Stores Continue To Thrive
Although Sanzana Haque Rita loves the taste of our local small fishes, she barely gets to have them because of the time it takes to prepare them. Sanzana holds a 9-to-5 job at a bank, which requires her to commute from Agaorgaon to Karwan Bazar every working day.
"Karwan Bazar has a range of raw fish and I love choto mach. But in the evening when I get back from the office, I have no one to process that fish for me and I don't like the ones processed by the salesmen in the market who do it in a dirty environment," she says.
Before the pandemic, Sanzana refrigerated the raw fish she purchased, so that her househelp could cut and process the fish the next day. "But by that time the fish loses its consistency," she says.
During the pandemic, the local fish market's supply chain of fish was disrupted and, additionally, Sanzana's helping hand also left her job. Sanzana began looking for alternatives and came across 'Macher Haatbazar' – a FaceBook-based fish market online that sold clean, cut and processed ready-to-cook fish in boxes. Fish that Sanzana could "give a rinse once or twice and toss them in the pan."
"I have to pay Tk 50-60 more per kg plus a delivery charge, but if you consider the quality, and the hassle-free delivery, this is quite a bargain," Sanzana said.
Like Sanzana, hundreds of working women and students are ordering processed and ready-to-cook fish online from the online pages, according to the business owners that TBS spoke to.
We found more than 15 online shops that sell processed fish of all kinds, besides processed meat. And these stores sell 50-200 kg of fish every day.
From an English-medium school teacher to the online 'Ilish Apa'
Before moving out to Australia with her husband in 2016, Zarin Hannan worked as a teacher at one of the capital's English-medium schools in Dhanmondi. In 2019 they returned and her government-officer husband got posted in Chandpur, the land of Ilish in Bangladesh.
"Everyone in our family and friend circle asked me to send Ilish to them. Over the next two years, I developed a network with the fishermen of Padma and the idea struck me. During the pandemic in 2020, I started my page 'Macher Haatbazar' and now, after three years, I have over a lakh followers and over 200kg fish orders every day," explained Zarin. The confidence in her tone was palpable.
Zarin has a team of 17 people that work in her warehouse in Banani. Her suppliers in Chandpur send fish by dawn, and the fish reach her warehouse in Banani on pickup vans. By 6 am, one team cuts and washes the fish. And then by 10 am, the delivery team heads out with foam boxes full of fish on their bikes and starts delivering.
"We provide both whole raw fish as well as ready-to-cook raw fish; the pricing varies with an added 50tk per kg," Zarin said. In the last three years, Zarin has had 20-25,000 customers and a pool of 100-150 regular customers that give her a turnover of Tk20-25 lakh every month.
And Zarin gets 30-40 orders every day, most of them from working women from all over Dhaka.
During the winter vacation of November-December, sales drop a bit as "most of my clients are people that can afford a vacation and the winter vacation season is the only time they go for one. That season my turnover goes to Tk17-19 lakh," she added.
Macher Haatbazar has customers in 36 districts other than Dhaka, where they send the fish in 15-16 hours. Currently, they have home delivery services in three other districts - Sylhet, Khulna and Chattogram.
Zarin's page has more than 20 posts every day and she loves to write the posts herself. "As a regular writer on the WE [Women and E-commerce forum], I have earned the title of 'Ilish Apa' on that platform. And this writing habit has got me 80% organic reach on my page."
Zarin boasts of not having a refrigerator in her warehouse as she doesn't have to store any fish. She uses ice in the foam boxes so that the fish doesn't rot on the way. "I pray that I never have to own a refrigerator because I want to maintain the quality of my service by providing fresh fish," she explained.
Orko and Afiya - the fish-selling couple
In 2018, Orko and Afiya started Heritage BD, an online shop that used to sell sweets. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, their business came to a halt. And for two months, they sat at home.
"We live in Uttarkhan, near the Shitalakhhya River. Everyday morning, fishermen arrive with fish from the river and one day while shopping for fish, the idea struck me, and I shared it with Afia. That is how 'Heritage BD: Matsya Kathan' started its journey," recalled Orko.
The next day they made a post on their page offering fish and the orders flowed in. "For the first 20 days, I bought fish from the fishermen and the supplier in the market. Then Afiya, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law cut and washed the fish to deliver. I used to deliver myself. But eventually, we realised that, with growing demand, this would be too hectic. So we decided to develop a team," Orko explained.
Now, besides the four family members, Orko and Afiya have a pool of 12 team members that work to process the fish and deliver them. With 30-40 orders every day, HeritageBD has a monthly turnover of Tk 7-8 lakh.
"Almost 95% of our customers are women - either working or students. And most of them have experience of living abroad. And the pandemic lockdown was a reason we received a thrust in our business," Orko and Afiya added.
The way Ilish worked out for Zarin, it was the egg of the fish that worked out for Afiya and Orko.
"Initially we used to send the fish eggs with the fish order. But later we found out that Dhaka hotels and restaurants have a huge demand for this. Last month we sold 200kg of fish eggs in just an hour. We couldn't believe it ourselves," they exclaimed.
The reason fish eggs have so much demand is that washing them can be tricky. The delicate egg sack has veins that need to be cleaned and also a sudden crack can lead the tiny egg pearls to be washed away with water. "We do the work for our customers so that they can cook without the hassle," the couple added.
A Controversial Model For America's Climate Future
On November 10 of last year, at a place called Paradise in western Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley Authority blew up the cooling towers of a large coal-fired power plant. The three stout towers, each 435 feet high, buckled at the waist in synchrony, then crumpled like crushed soda cans. Within 10 seconds, they'd collapsed into a billowing cloud of dust.
To anyone who watched the demolition happen, or saw the footage online, the message was clear: TVA, a sprawling, federally owned utility created 90 years ago as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, is getting off coal.
Though some people in the region regret that move, it's a win for the local environment—and for the global climate. In the past few years, as the urgency of slowing climate change has grown, something like a consensus has emerged on how to do it: Green the electrical grid while retooling as much of the economy as possible—cars, buildings, factories—to run on zero-carbon electricity. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden last August, is supporting that plan with $370 billion in subsidies. In a 2021 executive order, Biden directed the federal government to "lead by example in order to achieve a carbon pollution–free electricity sector by 2035" and a net-zero economy by 2050.
Given this strategy, electric utilities are crucial to our future—and none more so than TVA, the largest public power provider in the United States. Its territory covers nearly all of Tennessee; large chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky; and bits of three other states. In one of the most conservative regions of the country, 10 million people get electricity from a federal agency that has no shareholders to answer to and no profits to make.
"TVA is this crazy unicorn—it's not like anything else," Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told me. As a federal agency responsible not just for promoting the clean-energy transition but for building it, TVA is positioned to provide a national model—and TVA says it is doing just that.
But that's not how Smith and other environmental advocates describe TVA's behavior. They see a utility that is replacing coal plants, at Paradise and elsewhere, with gas-burning plants that will pollute the climate for decades. They see a utility betting heavily on small nuclear reactors that don't yet exist. Above all, they say, TVA is failing to embrace proven clean-energy technologies, such as solar and wind power and energy-efficiency measures.
"TVA is a living laboratory that could be part of a phenomenal push to change to clean energy," Smith said. Instead of an agency "on a war footing to get us to zero carbon," he sees it becoming "an impediment in the executive branch."
TVA has cut its carbon emissions by well over half since 2005, far more than the nationwide average for the electricity sector, while charging lower-than-average rates. It has done so by replacing coal with gas and by switching on a large new nuclear reactor. But like most American utilities, TVA has no plans to reach Biden's goal of a net-zero grid by 2035; it's targeting only an 80 percent carbon reduction by that date. "We aspire to net-zero by 2050, and we aspire to go farther, faster, if we can," Jeff Lyash, TVA's president and CEO since 2019, said at a meeting of the agency's board of directors in November. With existing technology, though, he doesn't think that's possible.
What's the right road to net-zero? The Tennessee Valley is an illuminating microcosm of a national debate, in which the imperative of addressing climate change is pitted against the enormous practical challenge of not only maintaining a reliable electric supply but dramatically expanding it to meet the needs of a decarbonizing economy. "TVA is in a unique position to lead in delivering the clean-energy future," Lyash said in November. He and his critics agree on that much. But as for when that future will arrive, and what it will look like, they are very far apart indeed.
T
VA was born from another global crisis. In 1933, when Roosevelt and Senator George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, persuaded Congress to establish TVA, the United States was at the nadir of the Great Depression, and the Tennessee Valley, where only a tiny percentage of the homes had electricity, was one of the country's poorest regions. TVA transformed it. Starting with the Wilson Dam, at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a series of dams controlled flooding on the Tennessee River and its tributaries and electrified the whole Valley. Hydroelectric plants still produce about 10 percent of the region's power, carbon-free.
Private utilities hated TVA, and complained bitterly about what they saw as unfair competition. They challenged the agency's existence before the Supreme Court and lost, twice. As late as the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower wanted to sell off the agency, which he saw as an example of "creeping socialism." The agency survived by becoming quasi-independent of the federal government. The president appoints and Congress confirms TVA's board, but since 1959, TVA has mostly done without federal appropriations. It pays its own way by selling electricity—not directly to consumers (aside from a few dozen industrial and federal properties), but to the 153 municipally or cooperatively owned local power companies, or LPCs, that distribute power to the people.
From the start, TVA's strategy was to make electricity cheap and accessible enough that people would use it for everything. The agency succeeded so well that demand soon outstripped what even a thoroughly dammed river could supply. In the '50s, TVA began relying on coal as its main energy source, ultimately building 12 large power plants. Over the past decade, it has closed six, but giant piles of toxic ash remain. In 2008, a dike ruptured at the coal plant in Kingston, Tennessee, spilling more than 5 million cubic yards of ash into the Emory and Clinch Rivers.
Environmentalists have long had reason to distrust TVA. In the '70s, when the newly created Environmental Protection Agency began regulating air pollution, TVA resisted. Accustomed to making its own engineering decisions, it argued that investing in scrubbers for its coal stacks made no sense—after all, it was about to replace most of them with nuclear reactors. But the agency completed only seven of a planned 17 reactors—demand for electricity grew slower than forecast—and today, unfinished reactor hulks lie scattered around the Valley. The fiasco left TVA constrained by debt, which still totals nearly $20 billion.
Nevertheless, TVA is proud of its nuclear fleet. Although Georgia Power is expected to bring a new reactor online soon, TVA has been the only U.S. Utility to have managed that in the past three decades. It began construction on the two reactors at its Watts Bar plant, in Tennessee, in 1973; mothballed them for years; then completed them in 1996 and 2016. In the first half of 2023, they and the agency's other reactors helped it generate nearly 60 percent of its kilowatt-hours without emitting carbon—significantly higher than the national average. But it has "fumbled, failed, and flopped" into that enviable position, Stephen Smith told me. The climate crisis demands transformative change, Smith said, and TVA has abandoned its historic mission to provide precisely that.
In downtown Chattanooga, the people directly responsible for delivering electricity to the Valley's 10 million residents sit in TVA's system-operations center. It's a large, hushed, dimly lit room, in which curving rows of workstations face a wall filled with an illuminated schematic of TVA's sprawling transmission grid. The first rows of operators track the physical condition and voltage of the transmission lines. The operators behind them "dispatch" power as needed from hundreds of generators around the grid, matching supply to demand minute by minute. That complex job is simplified by having lots of "dispatchable" power, which is what coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro plants provide, at least in principle: power that's available any time of the day or year.
In a conference room overlooking the control room, I met Greg Henrich and Aaron Melda, TVA's vice president and senior vice president for transmission and power supply. Melda had helped formulate the agency's decarbonization strategy, and he grabbed a marker to sketch out the numbers on a flip chart. The strategy's central element is the closure of TVA's last five coal plants, all more than 50 years old, by 2035. "Over the same period, we will add 10,000 megawatts of solar," Melda said. To store energy for when the sun isn't shining, TVA will also add 1,000 megawatts of battery capacity.
Over the next decade, though, the agency's main carbon-reduction strategy is to build more gas plants—7,000 megawatts' worth, roughly the capacity of the current coal fleet. When I visited the system-ops center last fall, TVA was finalizing plans for the latest addition: a 1,450-megawatt gas plant in Cumberland City, Tennessee, at the site of its biggest coal plant, whose two generating units are scheduled to retire in 2026 and 2028. Environmentalists strenuously opposed the gas plant—even the EPA questioned it—arguing that it would commit TVA to emitting carbon long past 2035 or even 2050. In the near term, though, the switch from coal will substantially reduce emissions of carbon and other pollutants. "You replace coal with gas, you've now taken every one of those megawatts down 50 percent in its carbon intensity," Melda said.
Why not just build more batteries and more solar, and take the intensity down to zero? It would cost a lot more, Melda said, and batteries discharge within several hours. A few rainy days could leave you unable to meet demand. Nor is solar a big help on dark winter mornings, which are the moments that TVA worries about most. The majority of homes in the Valley have electric heat. A spokesperson for TVA, Scott Fiedler, later said that gas is "the only mature technology that allows us to quickly add renewable energy and maintain the low cost and reliability" needed.
I visited the system-ops center on a chilly November day a week before Thanksgiving. Early that morning, as people cranked up their thermostat, TVA had seen a fairly typical winter peak in the load on its grid. Warmer weather was coming that would drive down demand, Henrich said, but it would rise again on Thanksgiving morning, as people roasted turkeys. That afternoon, the load would plummet. "Everybody's asleep on the couch," Henrich said. "It's awesome to watch—it's truly societal behavior driving your load."
He opened the blinds on the conference-room windows so we could see into the control room itself. It looked pretty quiet, with a lot of the workstations empty. "When does it ever get exciting?" I asked. A month later, my question was answered.
On December 23, people in the Tennessee Valley awoke to temperatures that had plunged 40 degrees or more overnight. Worse, both units of the Cumberland coal plant had shut down, because thick ice from a big storm had encased instruments on the exposed boilers. In the morning, the Bull Run coal plant wouldn't start, and some natural-gas plants failed too. As demand soared to an all-time winter record of 33,427 megawatts, the operators in Chattanooga found themselves about 8,000 megawatts short. Neighboring utilities couldn't help; the storm had affected half the country.
For two hours that morning, TVA had to instruct its 153 local power companies to cut demand by 5 percent. On Christmas Eve, it asked for a 10 percent cut for more than five hours. To comply, the LPCs shut off power neighborhood by neighborhood for 15 minutes or more at a time. The rolling blackouts were the first in TVA's 90-year history. At Christmas dinner, Fiedler told me, his mother required him to explain why his storied organization had cut her power on the holiday. "She wore me out," he said.
TVA likes to boast of its reliability, and environmental advocates seized on the Christmas failure. "The emperor has no clothes," Amanda Garcia, the director of the Southern Environmental Law Center's Tennessee office, told me. "The winter storm to me provided a perfect example of why TVA needs to change"—by showing that fossil fuels are no guarantee of reliability and that it should be transitioning to renewables faster. The Sierra Club ranks TVA among the very worst American utilities for its energy transition. The Center for Biological Diversity calls it a "climate laggard." Both want the agency to replace all its coal plants as soon as possible with renewable energy, not gas.
A modeling study released in March by the Center for Biological Diversity and by GridLab, a nonprofit consulting group, concluded that TVA could indeed stop burning both coal and gas by 2035. To do that, it would need to build the equivalent of about 145 large solar farms, with a total capacity of 35 gigawatts, in its territory, along with the transmission lines needed to import about 12 gigawatts of wind power from the Midwest. (The Valley isn't windy enough to produce cost-effective wind power.) Then, by 2050, it would have to nearly triple that expansion again in order to electrify and decarbonize the Valley's economy. The goals are ambitious, given the delays that now plague many renewable and transmission projects—but the benefits to society would dwarf the costs, the study found. Consumers would save more than $250 billion, mostly from switching to cars that run on TVA's electricity rather than gasoline. Carbon emissions would drop by hundreds of millions of tons.
The first step toward a clean-energy future, advocates agree, would be to reduce energy waste in the Valley. About a quarter of homes there rely on resistance heating—the method employed in electric furnaces and space heaters. Many heat pumps also fall back on it at freezing temperatures, Huntsville Utilities' president and CEO, Wes Kelley, told me. "That is basically the equivalent of turning on a bunch of big hair dryers to heat your house," Kelley said.
According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates, efficiency measures, including more and better heat pumps, could save roughly as much electricity as the Cumberland gas plant will generate. "If you reduce that resistance heating, you're helping the system as a whole"—by reducing the peak load—"as well as the customer," Maggie Shober, the research director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), told me. Because people in the Valley use so much electricity, monthly bills are high even though rates are low, creating an especially heavy burden on the poor.
Utilities generally have little incentive to invest in energy-saving measures, which only reduce their revenue. But TVA should be different: It doesn't need to make a profit. Since 2018, it has run an admirable program, called Home Uplift, that provides heat pumps, weatherization, and other measures to low-income homeowners, all for free—but so far, only to 5,000 of the hundreds of thousands of Valley residents who might be eligible. TVA could do much more, SACE and other critics say, especially now that the Inflation Reduction Act is subsidizing energy-efficiency programs. For its part, TVA says it's planning more of these types of investments, including rebates to replace older and less efficient heat pumps. Fiedler, the TVA spokesperson, said the agency will lower energy costs in underserved communities by $200 million over the next five years through Home Uplift and other programs.
The environmental advocates I talked with were all suspicious of TVA's clean-energy intentions. SACE's Stephen Smith, a close observer of the agency for more than three decades, thinks TVA is building gas plants now and planning nuclear for the future because large power plants are what it is comfortable building, and it has a monopoly on building them in the Valley. The future of the industry should lie in "shifting from central stations to a more distributed model that opens up a whole new powerful toolbox for fixing the climate crisis," Smith said. "But TVA is not going there."
He and other advocates see a "rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future," to quote the most recent United Nations climate report, and in that stark light, TVA's current fleet of renewables looks inadequate, especially if you set aside the hydroelectric dams and focus on what it has achieved lately. It buys about 1,200 megawatts of wind from the Midwest; it has installed about 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity in the Valley. That's far less solar power, Amanda Garcia pointed out, than deployed by utilities in the Carolinas or Georgia. Though she acknowledged TVA's plans to expand solar over the coming decade, "actions speak louder than words," she said.
But TVA is actually making a big effort these days, Gil Hough, the executive director of TenneSEIA, the state solar-industry association, told me. Hough worked for SACE from 2000 to 2010, promoting solar with Smith. Now he helps deliver it to TVA.
In the mid-2010s, he told me, the agency did indeed walk away from solar because it was focused on paying down its nuclear debt. Under Lyash, though, TVA has changed, Hough said. It may have only 1,000 megawatts of solar online—but it has more than 2,200 under construction or contracted. "TVA wants every megawatt we can provide them right now," Hough said. "It's us who's holding them back." Supply-chain disruptions have slowed solar projects and raised prices. But Lyash announced in May that TVA would award contracts this year for 6,000 megawatts of solar power, to be brought online between 2026 and 2029. "We are building as much solar as we can get panels for," he said.
What got TVA's attention was the demand from large corporations, says Reagan Farr, the CEO of the Nashville-based Silicon Ranch, which owns and operates solar farms for TVA and other utilities. Farr told me that companies like Google and Meta, by insisting on renewable energy, convinced TVA that it could no longer fulfill its mission of economic development without expanding its solar capacity. "The power of these large companies—their procurement decisions drive actions," Farr said.
Local resistance to solar farms is a growing problem, both TVA and the industry say. At the November TVA board meeting, C
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