Mississippi is unique to the rest of the U.S. in that electricity is provided by two of the largest investor-owned utilities Mississippi Power and Entergy Mississippi) along with cooperatives and municipal utilities. The creation of cooperatives dates back to the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in 1935 in order to bring electricity to rural areas of Mississippi. There are currently 25 cooperatives in the state, with 11 under the control of Cooperative Energy and 14 under the control of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

Cooperative Energy, which is owned by their member cooperatives, is irrefutably the best run electric utility provider in Mississippi. Under the leadership of Jim Compton (recently retired CEO), Nathan Brown (Chief Operating Officer) and their management team, Cooperative Energy has continuously upgraded their generation and transmission assets. Furthermore, in 2015, they withdrew from partial ownership of the Kemper debacle before the eventual outcome would have devastated their 11 members.

TVA, on the other hand, is a U.S. government corporation that was created by the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 (“TVA Act”) to primarily generate and transmit electricity to cooperatives and municipalities in parts of seven southeastern states, including most of northeast Mississippi. While TVA performs a service similar to Cooperative Energy, none of the 14 Mississippi cooperatives actually own any part of TVA. These Mississippi cooperatives, which serve 350,000 households and 86,000 businesses, are at the risk of absorbing the cost of poor TVA management decisions that are made without any independent regulatory oversight.

TVA also has a nine-member board of directors that are appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate, which results in making TVA “self-regulated.” ….

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