The conference room at United Way was packed for a Lunch & Learn. Still, Brenda Brickhouse stepped to the podium as if she were entering her own living room.
As vice chair of green | spaces and a senior technical executive with the Electric Power Research Institute, she’s used to straddling two worlds – the nonprofit arena of community sustainability and the technical environment of the utility industry.
For more than 40 years, Brickhouse has been working at the intersection of energy policy, infrastructure and environmental stewardship. She’s managed oil, gas and hydroelectric plants, overseen distribution operations and shaped corporate sustainability strategies for major utilities.
On Aug. 13 at United Way, she distilled that experience into an hourlong tour of how electricity gets from source to socket, why the clean-energy transition is more complicated than it looks and what steps the city can take to power its future responsibly.
From tree lines to power lines
Brickhouse didn’t stumble into her role. She earned a forestry degree at NC State University, added a master’s in public administration focused on environmental planning and capped it off with a master’s from Vermont Law School – completed at age 60.
“It’s never too late to go back to school,” she told the audience.
Her career began at ground level – literally.
“I started out cutting trees to keep the lights on,” she said with a laugh. “From there, I built substations, managed power plants and eventually talked energy policy with Congress.”
That breadth of experience, she explained, is why she now gets invited to “sit in on strategy tables” at utilities nationwide – conversations that wrestle with the same thorny mix of affordability, resilience and environmental goals that Chattanooga faces.
The energy system, stripped down
Brickhouse’s presentation began with a quick tour from power generation to living room light switches. Steam-electric plants – whether coal, nuclear or biomass – “all boil water,” she quipped. “It’s just a matter of what you use to make the steam.”
On the cleaner side, utility-scale wind and solar feed the grid alongside smaller rooftop installations.
But the energy story isn’t just about generation, she said – it’s also about how the system balances supply and demand minute by minute.
Brickhouse couldn’t resist poking Texas for its decision to run an isolated grid: “In my view, this is a bad decision, because they can’t share power across a large area when it’s needed most. That’s fine until the weather throws you a curveball.”
She pulled up a set of charts showing how demand spikes and dips over 24 hours and seasons. Daily patterns are one challenge; seasonal swings are another.
“Remember Christmas when TVA had to turn the power off?” she asked. “That cold snap sent demand through the roof first thing in the morning. Those are the kinds of extremes we have to be ready for.”
Sustainability’s three pillars
Brickhouse framed sustainability as a three-legged stool: environmental, economic and social.
“Balancing all three, keeping all those plates spinning, is hard,” she said. “The transition to clean energy would be far easier if we didn’t care about affordability – but we do.”
New demands are testing that balance, including the rise of electric vehicles, energy-hungry hydrogen production and the boom in data centers. Each offers benefits – cleaner transportation, lower emissions in hard-to-electrify industries, technological progress – but each also places new stress on the grid.
Resilience is another challenge. In Chattanooga, EPB’s advanced sensors and automatic relays keep outages short and infrequent, making the city’s electric service unusually reliable. Yet when the power does go out, the effects are not evenly felt. Households with the means can rely on generators or check into hotels until service is restored, while low-income families often face far more difficult recoveries.
“We need to think about who suffers more when you lose power,” she said, advocating for targeted resilience planning in vulnerable communities.
Affordability
In much of the TVA service area, electric rates are among the lowest in the nation, but monthly bills are among the highest. The culprit? Housing conditions. Poor insulation, aging HVAC systems and drafty construction push up energy use no matter how cheap the kilowatt-hour.
Brickhouse pointed to green | spaces’ weatherization programs – run in partnership with Erlanger, Three Cubed and others – that can range from simple weather-stripping to $20,000 whole-home makeovers.
She also introduced the concept of an “energy wallet,” which looks at a household’s total energy spending – electricity, natural gas, heating oil, gasoline – rather than just the electric bill.
“It’s the whole picture that matters,” she said.
The data center dilemma
No conversation about modern energy would be complete without data centers – and Brickhouse didn’t shy away from them. The computing demands of artificial intelligence can spike suddenly, she said, creating power surges on par with “everybody going to the bathroom at halftime during the Super Bowl.”
While most data centers are privately owned and profit-driven, many are exploring on-site generation and grid partnerships. The challenge, she added, is making sure the costs – for infrastructure, for backup power – are shared fairly between tech giants and everyday ratepayers.
No silver bullets – only silver buckshot
If anyone was expecting a single magic solution to Chattanooga’s energy challenges, Brickhouse was quick to set them straight.
“There’s no silver bullet,” she said, “but there is silver buckshot.”
By that, she meant a mix of approaches working in concert. Efficiency comes first, achieved “one house, one widget at a time.” Energy storage plays its part, from daily-use batteries to long-duration systems like pumped hydro or hydrogen. Distributed resources such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles can be linked into “virtual power plants” that pool many small contributors into a significant force. And smart management – using connected thermostats and meters to make small adjustments during peak demand – can reduce the need for costly backup generation.
Brickhouse spent extra time on the “virtual power plant idea, explaining how a fleet of plugged-in EVs could act like a miniature utility.
“If the systems were talking to each other, your car could feed a little power back into the grid during peak demand – and you’d never even notice.”
Finding common ground
Brickhouse also addressed the reality that not everyone in the Southeast sees sustainability as a priority. She advised avoiding jargon and focusing on the economic logic.
“TVA didn’t shut down coal plants just to be green,” she said. “It was an economic play. Many of them were old, expensive to maintain and less efficient than modern gas plants.”
By reframing the conversation in terms of reliability, cost and diversity of supply, she believes it’s possible to reach audiences who might otherwise tune out.
“It’s about building a balanced portfolio,” she said. “You need different resources in the mix so you can keep the lights on no matter what’s happening outside.”
Why community matters
Technical fixes alone won’t get the job done, Brickhouse said. Community engagement, local workforce development and creative ownership models are essential. She cited EPB’s community-scale solar as an example of a project where profits and benefits can be shared.
“We have to involve everybody,” she stressed. “You can’t do this alone. It’s harder than it looks.”