TVA Celebrates its 90 Year Anniversary with activities across the Valley

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) celebrates its 90-year anniversary this year, and the major power producer is honoring the milestone with tons of activities for anyone interested.

The TVA kicked off the celebration with the largest day of service in its history, where more than 2,000 employees and 125 retirees volunteered throughout all 201 counties in the TVA’s service area, spanning across seven states. There were 150 service opportunities available to volunteers, like cleaning trails and streams, planting trees and removing invasive species, packaging and delivering meals at food banks and cleaning up storm-ravaged communities. In all, they logged 10,000 service hours.

In addition to the day of service, the TVA also offering public tours of some of its dams this summer. The tours will allow people to see inner workings of a dam and learn how the utility produces clean hydropower while ensuring the health of the waterways. The 60-90 minute tours will be hosted at various locations and states throughout the Valley, and each tour will be limited to only 20 people. Demand for the tours are very high, so the TVA will use a random drawing to select from a pool of registrants. Registrants will be notified by email indicating whether or not they are selected because registration does not guarantee a space on the tour. Registration for June tours has closed, but those interested can still register for July, August and September dates.

The TVA is also hitting the road and participating in some of the biggest festivals across the Tennessee Valley region this summer. The utility has already visited big events like Memphis in May, the world’s biggest fish fry in Paris, Tennessee and the Panoply Arts Festival in Huntsville, Alabama.

Congress founded TVA in 1933 during the Great Depression with a two-pronged purpose of affordable power production and agricultural advancement. On the agricultural side, TVA researched and developed affordable fertilizer people could use to ensure healthier, more bountiful crops and harvests at a time food was scarce. TVA eventually dropped its agricultural mission to focus fully on power production.

The TVA is the fourth largest power producer in America. For a full list of the utility’s 90^th anniversary events, click here.