The Tennessee Valley Authority has promoted TVA veteran James R. “Bob” Dalrymple to senior vice president of coal and gas operations.
Dalrymple is a 25-year utility veteran who has been with TVA since 1990. He will be reporting to recently-appointed Chief Generation Officer Chip Pardee.
Dalrymple, who most recently served as vice president of TVA’s gas operations, will oversee the low-cost and reliable operations of TVA’s more than 150 coal, combined cycle gas, and simple cycle gas units.
Altogether, the TVA fleet has more than 22,000 MW of coal and gas-fueled generation.
“Combining our gas and coal units under a central leader supports our ‘one fleet’ approach to power generation,” Pardee said. “This allows us to more efficiently operate our assets in a time of soft load growth, higher fuel and commodity costs, and stringent environmental standards.”
Speaking of environmental standards, one of the people reporting to Dalrymple will be Dennis Spencer. Spencer came out of TVA retirement not long ago to help oversee a settlement agreement with EPA that requires TVA to retire 18 of its coal units by 2018, a spokesperson said.
Under Dalrymple’s leadership, TVA’s gas units set records for total generation, unit starts and unit availability in 2012.
Dalrymple joined TVA in 1990 as an electrical engineer in transmission and customer service. Dalrymple earned his electrical engineering degree from the University of Alabama.
