Last October, Georgia Power approached regulators with what it said was a crisis. Unless they did something soon, they discovered, the growing demand for electricity would outpace production sometime in the winter of 2025. Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp and other state leaders had been courting data centers and new manufacturing plants for some time, and it was all catching up to the aging power grid.
The Georgia Public Service Commission, the elected body tasked with regulating the utility company, had approved Georgia Power’s long-term grid plan, which the company makes every three years, in 2022. Since then, the company said, its projections for the growth of electricity demand through 2030 had increased by a factor of 17.
Georgia Power proposed a mix of resources to meet this rising demand, including buying power from neighboring utilities, adding solar and battery storage, and building three new natural gas turbines that could generate 1,400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than half a million homes, per year. Experts, including some on the servi... Read more
