A planned agreement with the Southeastern Power Administration (SEPA) is the latest round of paperwork in the Princeton Electric Plant Board’s first months of divorce from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Plant Board directors in session Thursday authorized Manager John Humphries to execute documents facilitating the utility’s agreement with SEPA for hydroelectric transmission from its network of Cumberland River plants, including that at Barkley Dam.

Humphries said SEPA, sometime in the 1960s, had allocated electricity to several communities, including Princeton, through TVA.

The local utility receives 650 kilowatts of its power load from the SEPA system.

Now that the Plant Board has ended its TVA contract, it must pursue its own agreement with SEPA in order to continue to obtain that power.

Princeton is the first city to ask SEPA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, to transfer its agreement from TVA.

“We’re actually plowing a new field here,” Humphries said.

The hydroelectricity provided by SEPA is much cheaper per kilowatt-hour than the fossil-fueled power provided by other suppliers.

“It’s about 2-cent power,” he said. The 650-kilowatt load, he added, is “not much, but it’s still something. We didn’t want to give it up.”

American Municipal Power (AMP) of Ohio, the firm managing the Plant Board’s power portfolio, will include the SEPA allocation in its daily evaluations, once the agreement is complete.

Any power unused by the Plant Board can be put back on the market, PEPB officials said.