June 9, 2026 - A Tennessee Valley Authority plant that had been slated for retirement instead will receive more than $46 million in federal funds as President Donald Trump's administration boosts the U.S. coal industry.

At a pro-coal event at the White House last week, Trump said the U.S. would use a Cold War-era law to funnel $700 million to the coal industry, which has faced years of declining revenues. Part of that $700 million will go to TVA’s Cumberland Fossil Plant in Middle Tennessee.

The funding will support coal revitalization at the plant and “restore reliability, enhance efficiency, and extend the operational life of the coal-fired assets to meet regional demand for dispatchable power,” according to a project description on the Department of Energy’s website.

The full cost of the project is valued at $115.7 million. TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in a text that the utility undertook the work at Cumberland after the TVA governing board in February reversed a plan to retire coal-fired units at the plant.

“Federal support of coal facilities helps ensure that utilities like TVA can maintain the reliable, around-the-clock power our region depends on,” Brooks said in an emailed statement. “This aligns with TVA’s ongoing efforts to maintain system reliability and affordability as power demand grows.”

The funding for the rest of the project would need to come from elsewhere, Brooks said. Those sources are to be determined.

TVA decided years ago to take offline coal-fired units at Cumberland and the Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County. The utility cited aging units, performance problems and rising costs as part of its reasons for moving away from coal.

“The performance challenges are projected to increase because of the coal fleet’s advancing age, the difficulty of adapting the fleet’s generation within the changing generation profile, and - in general - because the coal fleet is contributing to environmental, economic and reliability risks,” TVA staff wrote in a 2021 report.

The Cumberland plant shut down amid extreme cold in 2023, helping to trigger the only set of rolling blackouts in the utility’s history.

But the utility’s board – reshaped in 2026 by Trump and now dominated by his appointees – opted in February to reverse the retirement of the coal units and keep them online.

Environmental groups condemned the June 4 coal investment announcement. Trey Bussey, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, slammed the decision in a statement to Knox News, pressing instead for investments in solar power and battery storage.

"The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Cumberland Fossil Plant is one of the dirtiest, most expensive, and most unreliable power plants in the federal utility’s fleet,” Bussey said in the statement. “Even with this grant, it will cost hundreds of millions more dollars to upgrade the decades-old facility - and families throughout the Tennessee Valley will be left to foot the bill.”

Trump publicly criticized the utility's plans to take Cumberland and Kingston's coal units offline at a February event promoting coal, during which he had vowed to make the TVA CEO's "life miserable." Those comments followed the meeting at which TVA's governing board chose to keep both plants’ coal-fired units operational.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers described the grant award announcement as a “big win,” in an email to Knox News.