NREL Partner Testimonial: Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Dr. Joe Hoagland (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video NREL Partner Testimonial: Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Dr. Joe Hoagland.

[Music plays, narrator speaks]

[Caption: Dr. Joe Hoagland, Vice President of Innovation and Research, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)]

>>Joe Hoagland, Tennessee Valley Authority: The Tennessee Valley Authority is the largest public power utility in the United States.

We serve over 10 million customers in approximately seven different states. So a partnership with NREL for us is really important because we're in a midst of a huge transition. The model that we've had for the utility industry has worked great for 90 years. It's not working so great anymore.

There's a lot of things now we have to worry about, whether it's figuring out how do we reduce our carbon footprint, worrying about distributed generation—consumer needs are very different than they used to be, and of course, technology—we're all much more dependent on energy than we've ever been.

So, TVA needs the resources, both in terms of operations—in terms of research, in terms of planning—to really be able to figure out how to address that. I think the value NREL can bring to the commercial and the no-commercial sector is sort of twofold.  One is about scientific integrity. You can analyze problems. You can look at technologies. You can look at complex systems and help find answers because of all of the great knowledge and experience that you have here, but you can do it in an impartial way.

You're not trying to sell a product. You're not trying to satisfy some particular agenda that somebody may have. What you're trying to do is solve the technical problem in the best way possible. And the more you can do that for all of the industry, the better off industry will be because it's very difficult sometimes to sift through all of the different agendas—all of the different products that folks want you to buy and come up with the right answers.

[Web address appears on screen: nrel.gov/workingwithus]

[Narration ends, music stops]