The claim, buried in the dry prose of a lawsuit, is in-your-face aggressive: the Tennessee Valley Authority prematurely kills N.C. residents and sickens thousands a year.
Pollution drifting from its coal-fired power plants, N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper says, makes the nation's largest public power company a public nuisance. Cooper gets his chance to prove it today in a federal court in Asheville.
The unusual case has multimillion-dollar implications for both the state and TVA. Its outcome, say lawyers not connected to the case, could influence other interstate disputes over air and water pollution.
Cooper wants TVA to install pollution controls similar to those North Carolina required of Duke Energy and Progress Energy in 2002. The estimated cost to TVA: $516 million a year.
Reducing wind-blown pollutants from TVA plants in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky would prevent 99 premature deaths, 19,000 asthma attacks and 2,300 lost school days a year in North Carolina, the state says in court filings. Each year of delay, an expert witness is expected to testify, costs the state and its residents $672 million in health costs.
TVA plants cause environmental damage, the state says, including lost visibility and acidic streams in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
TVA says it has little effect on North Carolina and obeys environmental laws.
Computer models show TVA's impact here is much smaller than those of the N.C. utilities, it says in court documents, "and indeed smaller than the air quality impacts North Carolina sources export to the state's neighbors."
The trial is expected to take three weeks. It has already cost North Carolina $5.2 million for experts, studies and legal fees, not counting staff time.
An appeals court in January threw out TVA's claim that, as a federally created entity, it could not be sued by the state. U.S. District Judge Lacy Thornburg, a former N.C. attorney general who will hear the case, denied TVA's motion to decide it before trial.
It's no surprise that the two sides paint widely different pictures of power-plant emissions, amounting to hundreds of thousands of tons a year, in North Carolina and in TVA's territory.
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