A story flying below the radar of most national media has been the drawn-out loss of electric power by tens of thousands of Nashville-area residents. About 200,000 Nashville Electric Services (“NES”) customers lost power in an ice storm on Sunday, Jan. 25. A week later, there were still over 30,000 customers without service, with temperatures continuing to dip well below freezing. The mounting death toll has included a 92-year-old man and a 79-year-old woman, both found dead in their frigid residences.
NES is a public utility that has been captured by woke leadership focused on DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental Social Governance) rather than focusing on being a provider of reliable, affordable energy.
As documented by the Tennessee Star, NES produced a “Community Investment Report” with a heavy focus on green energy, sustainability, and DEI. The CEO, Teresa Broyles-Aplin, boasted that employees were put through over 100 “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility, & Belonging” training sessions. The report also identified “renewable energy, electrification, energy efficiency and demand response, resiliency, diversity, equity and inclusion, employee engagement and development, and greenhouse gas emission as the topics most important to NES and stakeholders simultaneously.” Maintaining a functioning electric grid is noticeably absent from that itemization.
One reason the storm was so destructive is that NES deliberately refrained from trimming trees along power lines. Just this past August, Ms. Broyles-Aplin boasted on a local TV station about the utility’s decision not to do preventative trimming, stating that “We care about the canopy. We have to live here too. I don’t want us out destroying the canopy.” Unfortunately, that canopy got covered in ice, and much of it fell on power lines, causing extensive damage. With NES apparently incapable of handling the core functions of a utility, nor capable of getting service restored, there is a growing clamor by state politicians for changes in how the inept utility is run.
Hellbound and Down 