A panel of Georgia Power representatives testified for eight hours at Tuesday’s Public Service Commission hearing about its controversial roadmap for meeting large-scale, data center-driven energy demands over the next decade.
The executives testified that the investor-owned utility’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan would provide the right balance of energy capacity to meet the rising demands of a growing Georgia, largely based on the projected boom in data centers supporting emerging internet technologies and their voracious appetite for electricity.
The company’s long-term plan forecasts 8,000 megawatts of growth through early 2030s, while citing the potential of 40,000 megawatts of industrial interest in the state.
Georgia Power officials have defended the company against criticism of past overly optimistic projections that could burden ratepayers and concerns about the financial and environmental impact of large data facilities.
In its 10-year plan, Georgia Power proposes a resource mix that is reliable, economical, and diverse enough to meet the growing needs of its 2.8 million customers, including plans to build 1,000 miles of transmission lines, adding renewable solar storage facilities, and continued investments in nuclear, natural gas, coal, and hydropower plants.
A company official said it will continue to use informed judgment and historical trends to adapt to load forecasts.
A Georgia Power industrial pipeline tracking includes companies that have shown interest and companies that have committed, which occurs after a customer selects the state’s largest supplier as their electric service provider.
A PSC public interest attorney asked how much experience Georgia Power’s staff has working with data centers customers, particularly large facilities that will operate artificial intelligence.
Georgia Power’s director of resource and policy planning, Jeff Grubb, said the company has forecast industrial energy demands successfully for years.
“It doesn’t mean that every industry that we model has had somebody from Georgia Power working there,” Grubb said. “We work with those customers. We learn from those customers.”
The company said its economic development staff can promote Georgia to prospective commercial and industrial customers.
“There’s a reason why these data centers are here in Georgia,” said Michael Robinson, vice president of grid transformation for Georgia Power. “It’s the infrastructure, it’s reliability. It’s the affordability in Georgia.”
Georgia lawmakers, clean energy and consumer advocacy groups have warned against state regulators signing off on Georgia Power’s repeated utility bill increases after the Southern Company subsidiary stuck ratepayers with new electricity base rates, overrun costs associated with building two new Vogtle nuclear power plant units, coal ash cleanup and other expenses.
On Tuesday, Emory University freshman Ava Trachtenberg criticized the utility’s plan to the five-member PSC panel of elected Republicans before gathering outside to protest with her fellow Sunrise club members along with Georgia Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club of Georgia.
“The Georgia Public Service Commission has been prioritizing Georgia Power’s profits over future health of the communities, over people’s bills for so many years,” Trachtenberg said. “This is our opportunity to speak to them, to let them know that we’re paying attention. It’s really, really important that they know that young people are here. We’re paying attention, and we want clean, affordable energy.”
Georgia Power officials have said new PSC rules for data centers will prevent residential and commercial customers from being billed for power consumed by facilities that rely on enormous amounts of energy day and night.
The new rules include a provision allowing Georgia Power to require data center companies to put up front-end collateral for energy costs over the lifetime of the contract for electricity supply. Georgia Power officials testified Tuesday that the process the company uses to forecast commercial and industrial demand factors in how much the company requests to increase its energy capacity in its resource plans.
Georgia Power executives were grilled about the transparency of filings, including new generic expansion plans that lack details about specific projects.
A company official said Georgia Power adhered to a PSC rule protecting confidential information, which was put in place to prevent competitors from gaining advantages.
Jennifer Whitfield, a senior attorney representing Georgia Interfaith Power and Light and Southface Institute, requested that state regulators require Georgia Power to provide more information to consumer and green energy advocates, including fuel types and the megawattage for the proposed projects.
“This will allow intervenors to assess what the resources look like. Right now, 95% of the need to fill capacity beyond 2031 is not made available to the intervenors,” Whitfield said.
Commissioner Tricia Pridemore said that the terms of the future plan were set in a previous filing and were being withheld for good reasons this year.
“I don’t want to see us do anything that exposes pricing or anything that would jeopardize the all-source RFP,” Pridemore said.
In the recent filing, the utility company proposes extending the lifetime of coal-fired units at Plant Bowen and Plant Scherer by converting them to co-firing natural gas generation by 2030. The updated electricity generation could delay the retirement of the plants until early 2039, according to Georgia Power.
Whitfield questioned why Georgia Power staff failed to study the effects of retiring fossil fuel units at Bowen and Scherer on the economy and the environment.
Georgia Power officials said in 2022 that it was no longer economically feasible to maintain the coal-fired units.
Grubb said that because the expected energy demand increased this time, it was in the best interest of customers to continue operating the units.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Georgia Recorder.
