The Whole Record: What the Tennessee Valley Authority Publishes When Nothing Requires It
TVA builds transmission lines across seven states and files no siting case for any of them. The GAO reported this to Congress in 1982 and proposed statutory fixes; none were enacted. What TVA chooses to publish is the public record — this volume measures it.
Volume II in the series Concentrated Benefit, Dispersed Burden . 264 pages, fifteen chapters in five parts, six appendices.
The Tennessee Valley Authority builds transmission lines across seven states and files no siting case for any of them. No state or federal body issues a certificate, holds a hearing on need, or reviews the route. The General Accounting Office reported the condition to Congress in 1982 — “the TVA Act does not require public involvement or information programs” — listed statutory fixes, and neither was enacted. Because nothing requires TVA to publish, what it chooses to publish is the public record.
This volume measures that record. Eighteen Tennessee transmission project pages are coded field by field: sixteen stated purposes name neither an end-use customer nor a load type, no page anywhere states a megawatt figure, and the environmental-review section is identical across all eighteen. From TVA's own published route geometry, the volume computes that TVA studies 2.63 miles of corridor for every mile it selects. It reconstructs the categorical-exclusion record from 11,899 published determinations, and shows that exclusion 16's 125-acre right-of-way cap binds before its ten-mile figure for any corridor wider than about 103 feet.
Two tests changed the argument and both are reported against the author. Eighteen Dominion Energy Virginia project pages, coded against the same three codes, name an end-use customer on none of eighteen — and Dominion files a full adversary certificate case at the State Corporation Commission. The utility with the forum names fewer customers than the utility without one, so the claim that a missing forum produces a missing name does not survive and is withdrawn. What the forum produces is a pointer: fourteen of eighteen Dominion pages carry an SCC case number. TVA has nowhere to point. Separately, a search of independent public records established that only three of the eighteen Tennessee projects had a nameable end-use customer at all, so the general practice claim an earlier draft made is withdrawn for want of a denominator.
The volume states its own corrections in the text rather than absorbing them. Appendix F enumerates eighty-six, each with the test it meets, including the withdrawal of the volume's original thesis and two defects found in its own archive deposit. Ninety-seven endnotes are marked as open items, each naming what the volume has not established and what would close it.
The evidence is deposited separately and by hash at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21959989. The records-request handbook is published separately as Getting the Record .
This is a fixed edition rather than a living one. Every artifact the volume relies on sits on servers the utilities control and can revise without notice, so each version is pinned to an evidence snapshot and to a hashed archive. Cite the version DOI to fix what the text was written against.