S. David Freeman, an icon of energy policy and politics for seven decades, died in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Reston, Va., May 12 of heart disease. He was working on a critical analysis of recent Tennessee Valley Authority operations when he had to go to the hospital just days before his death. He was 94.
Dave Freeman was a towering figure in public power, having served as the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Lower Colorado River Authority, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the New York Power Authority.
Born in Chattanooga, Simon David Freeman was the son of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, a shop owner selling and repairing umbrellas. He was a graduate of Georgia Tech with a degree in civil engineering. With a degree in hand, he went to work as a junior engineer at the only place he wanted to work, TVA.
As he told the story many times, he wasn’t a very good civil engineer and didn’t much like the job. So he got a law degree from the University of Tennessee and went to work in TVA’s legal shop.
As a TVA lawyer, he came into the orbit of Joseph Swidler (1907-1997), then TVA’s long-time general counsel and also a major historic figure in energy policy and politics. In 1961, President Lyndon Johnson named Swidler to head the Federal Power Commission, the predecessor to the current Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. A Washington Post obit of Swidler said that “he revitalized a moribund, strife-torn and chaotic organization.”
Freeman came to the FPC as a personal legal aide to Swidler. Together they worked on the federal government’s response to the 1965 Northeast electricity blackout. He joined the Johnson White House staff after leaving the FPC, and served presidents Johnson, Ford, and Carter. In 1974, he directed a seminal Ford Foundation study of U.S. energy policy in the context of the first Arab oil embargo, “A Time Choose,” which highlighted the role of energy conservation, something the Nixon administration, pushing large-scale deployment of new nuclear plants, didn’t much want to hear.
Carter appointed Freeman to head the TVA in 1977, replacing the legendary Aubrey “Red” Wagner, who had bet TVA’s future on electric generation, particularly nuclear power plants. One analysts of Red Walker’s long career at the helm of TVA, commented, “He never met a nuclear plant he didn’t like.”
Freeman didn’t like TVA’s reliance on nuclear, and his skepticism of nuclear power was a theme throughout his career. When he was hired in 1990 to run Sacramento’s large municipal utility, his chief task was to make the transition from the very-troubled 1,000-MW Rancho Seco nuclear plant. The citizens had ordered the shutdown of the plant, which went into service in 1974, in a referendum in 1989.
Freeman became an outspoken advocate of energy efficiency and renewables as a replacement for central station nuclear and coal generation.
In his final years in retirement in the planned community of Reston, Va., (he didn’t really retire) Freeman dedicated his time to working on anti-nuclear advocacy for the environment group Friends of the Earth. His surprise and dramatic 2013 testimony at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station captivated the crowd and led the commission to approve the final shutdown of the plant, which began in 2012.
In an opinion piece in the Sacramento Bee in 2012, Freeman wrote, “San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are both disasters waiting to happen: aging, unreliable reactors sitting near earthquake fault zones on the fragile Pacific Coast, with millions or hundreds of thousands of Californians living nearby. Does that sound alarmist? I’ve been in the utility industry for 40 years, and I have come to realize that you have to be blind not to be an alarmist about nuclear power.”
[On a personal note, I knew Dave Freeman well, having covered him for multiple publications since his arrival as Carter’s TVA director. I found him always willing to talk freely, push his views aggressively, and an utterly charming individual. I liked him a lot.]
— Kennedy Maize