Georgia PSC Primary Clears the Path to November’s $16 Billion Fight

The margin that kept the Georgia Public Service Commission’s majority question alive on Tuesday was 2,948 votes. Former commissioner Fitz Johnson edged challenger Brandon Martin by that sliver in the Republican primary for District 3, setting up an autumn rematch against incumbent Democrat Peter Hubbard that will determine who holds real oversight authority over a $16 billion natural gas expansion for the next six years.

Georgia is one of only 10 states that elects its utility commission, the Public Service Commission (PSC), which sets electricity rates for roughly 2.7 million customers statewide. After Democrats Hubbard and Alicia Johnson won upset victories in November 2025, the fall elections represent the first genuine chance at a Democratic PSC majority since 2006. What that majority would inherit is not simply a mandate to push cleaner energy but active monitoring authority over the largest capacity expansion in Georgia Power’s history, a plan the commission’s all-Republican composition approved unanimously weeks before the incoming Democrats could take their seats.

Fitz Johnson Survives a Squeaker for November’s Rematch

Final unofficial results from the May 19 primary put Johnson at 50.1% with 389,416 Republican votes to Martin’s 49.8% and 368,468. The gap falls within the statutory threshold for a recount should Martin request one; he did not respond to requests for comment. Johnson will face Hubbard for a full six-year term in November. Hubbard ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and drew 942,784 statewide votes, a figure that signals broad Democratic enthusiasm for holding a seat he won just last year.

In District 5, Democrat Shelia Edwards won outright over Craig Cupid and Angelia Pressley, advancing directly to November. On the Republican side, no candidate cleared the required threshold, sending Bobby Mehan and Josh Tolbert to a June 16 runoff. Libertarian Thomas Blooming also qualified for the November general.

The path to this November matchup runs through three years of courtrooms. A 2022 federal ruling found Georgia’s at-large PSC election structure violated the Voting Rights Act. Legal gridlock pushed regular commission elections off the calendar and eventually opened the door for Hubbard and Alicia Johnson to win special-election seats in 2025, ending a Republican win streak that stretched back to 2006. Both of Tuesday’s general-election races are for full six-year terms.

Both races matter together, not separately. A Democratic sweep in November would produce a 4-1 PSC majority, enough to set the agenda on rate cases and long-term energy planning for the better part of a decade. Lose either seat, and the three-member Republican bloc that controlled the commission for two decades holds through at least 2032.

The December Vote These Candidates Are Running Against

On December 19, 2025, with all five PSC seats still in Republican hands, the commission voted unanimously to approve Georgia Power’s request for nearly 9,900 megawatts of new generating capacity. The package covers five new natural gas combustion plants, battery storage, solar paired with storage, and power purchase agreements to be built across five years. Georgia Power is a subsidiary of Southern Company and serves about 2.7 million customers in the state. The authorization is the largest in the company’s history and one of the largest utility capacity approvals anywhere in the United States in recent memory.

Advocates had pushed to delay the vote until January, when the two newly elected Democrats would be seated. The commission declined. Hubbard and Alicia Johnson, who defeated Republican incumbent Tim Echols in District 2 last November, were still preparing to take office when the unanimous vote was gaveled through.

When they did take their seats, the first major test arrived in February. The Southern Environmental Law Center’s petition challenging the December certification, joined by the Sierra Club and Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, argued the commission approved more capacity than Georgia Power’s own forecast justified and overstepped its legal authority in doing so. Both Democratic commissioners voted to reopen the proceeding. The three Republicans voted no. The December authorization held 3-2.

The coalition escalated to Fulton County Superior Court in March. Their petition argues state law requires the PSC to demonstrate need for each certified power resource, and that the December decision failed that bar. Advocates also pointed to a direct parallel: similar promises that the Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion near Augusta would not reach residential ratepayers were later contradicted by actual rate increases, a piece of recent PSC history that consumer groups have been citing in every proceeding since. PSC spokesman Tom Krause declined to comment on the active litigation.

A $50 Billion Exposure and an $8.50 Promise

Georgia Power has framed the expansion as a financial benefit to residential customers. The company told regulators the plan would deliver about $8.50 per month in downward pressure on the average household bill, or roughly $100 per year. Commission attorney Chris Collado told commissioners at the December hearing that the years 2029 through 2031 would be the critical monitoring window, when the new plants come online and large-load contracts are expected to generate offsetting revenue.

Consumer advocates say the math only works if the data center demand actually shows up. Georgia Power told regulators that roughly 90% of the new capacity is earmarked for data centers, and a post-approval analysis by law firm Perkins Coie noted the commission’s own staff warned that “much of the requested capacity was driven by speculative load forecasts, based on a pipeline of prospective large customers rather than fully executed contracts.” If those projects stall or the hyperscale construction boom cools, the generation assets remain and their costs transfer to existing residential accounts.

Abe Scarr, energy and utilities program director for Georgia PIRG (public interest research group), put the downside plainly at the December hearing: “If the demand doesn’t show up, if data centers fail to cover their costs, and when gas prices spike again, Georgia Power customers will be left holding the bag for decades to come.” Total cost to customers over the full life of the new resources, per estimates from the SELC and PSC staff, runs between $50 billion and $60 billion, well beyond the $16 billion capital figure the company uses publicly. The new gas units are expected to operate for at least 45 years.

• 9,900 megawatts of new capacity certified December 19, 2025, roughly the output of nine Plant Vogtle nuclear reactors
• $16 billion capital investment projected over five years
• $50 to $60 billion estimated total customer cost over the life of the resources, per PSC staff and SELC projections
• $8.50 per month in promised downward pressure on the average residential bill, per Georgia Power

What the District 5 Candidates Say About the Buildout

District 5 may be where majority control is made or lost, and the candidates running for it have been unusually direct about the December authorization.

Edwards, a Cobb County political veteran who won the Democratic primary for this same seat in 2022 before a court ruling canceled that year’s general election, entered Tuesday’s race as the explicit tiebreaking candidate.

I’m running to be that third vote that’s going to help them change the trajectory of the PSC. And to bring some balance to something that’s been completely imbalanced for years.

She said that before the primary, framing her candidacy not as a stand-alone win but as the decisive vote that transforms a 2-3 Democratic minority into a governing majority. Her outright win in a three-way race suggests the message is resonating with Democratic primary voters in a state where high utility bills drove last year’s PSC results.

Her Republican opponents heading to June 16 offer different cases. Josh Tolbert, an engineer with experience across multiple plant types, has made technical competence his central pitch. “I do not think there is a place on the commission for advocates,” Tolbert told reporters. “Its job is to ensure that Georgians have reliable, affordable electricity.” Bobby Mehan, a businessman who describes himself as a pro-gas, pro-nuclear “all-the-above energy guy,” has raised questions about whether the $16 billion authorization was properly scrutinized, making him the rare Republican candidate to express public skepticism about the December vote.

Fitz Johnson stands alone on one point: he is the only candidate in either race who has argued the commission’s December vote adequately protected ordinary ratepayers from data center costs. Every other candidate from both parties has indicated the authorization warrants additional scrutiny.

Georgia’s Contagion Effect Across the South

The 2025 Democratic wins sent a signal beyond Georgia’s borders faster than most political observers anticipated. Alabama lawmakers moved legislation this year to expand that state’s Public Service Commission from three members to seven and place the expanded body under a newly created secretary of energy appointed by the governor. Alabama Power, the state’s largest utility, requested a rate freeze effective through 2027 shortly after Georgia’s November results came in, a timeline that surfaced in Alabama Senate committee hearings. Critics in Montgomery called both moves a structural shield designed to prevent Democrats from winning a commission majority in that state.

A separate Alabama bill proposed ending PSC elections entirely, replacing them with appointments controlled by the governor, the House speaker, and the Senate president pro tem. Consumer advocates there warned the arrangement would “benefit monopoly utilities, particularly Alabama Power, by taking voters out of the process.” The Alabama Public Service Commission has not conducted a formal rate case since 1981, a fact Democratic candidates for the expanded board have made central to their campaigns.

In Arizona, national activist groups on both sides have invested in that state’s utility commissioner races, treating it as the next front in what has become a genuinely nationalized contest over who controls state-level utility regulation. Metro Atlanta remains one of the country’s top destinations for data center construction, and whatever the PSC decides about cost allocation for the current buildout will function as a model, or a warning, for regulators elsewhere.

If both Democratic candidates prevail in November, the commission enters the 2029-to-2031 critical monitoring window identified by PSC staff with a majority that ran explicitly on scrutinizing the gas buildout already underway. If either seat stays Republican, the bloc that cast the unanimous December vote holds through 2032, and the case pending in Fulton County Superior Court becomes the only remaining mechanism for ratepayer advocates to challenge capacity costs already being incurred.