Georgia Ratepayers Carry Coal Plants Kept for Data Centers

Georgia Power is keeping about 4,000 megawatts of coal capacity at Plants Bowen and Scherer running past retirements it sought in 2022, to cover data-center load. The Georgia Public Service Commission approved that course on July 15, 2025, in the utility’s integrated resource plan. The people who did not order the servers now live with the plants, the fuel clause, and a bill promise that is a comparison, not a cut.

Kim Greene, the company’s chairman, president and CEO, called the vote a plan “to reliably and economically meet the future energy needs of our customers.” Consumer groups and two commissioners have spent the year since asking a narrower question: who pays when the load is late, thin, or priced on a tariff built for factories, not 24-hour computing.

Bowen and Scherer Stay Open Past 2028

Three years before that vote, Georgia Power had treated much of this coal as a bad bet. In the 2022 plan, Scherer Unit 3, the company’s 614-megawatt share of a Monroe County unit, was set to retire by December 31, 2028. Bowen units 1 and 2 in Bartow County had been proposed for the end of 2027. The plants were called uneconomic, in part because new federal water and carbon rules would have forced expensive controls on old boilers.

The 2025 plan reversed the clock. Regulators approved continued operation of Bowen and Scherer, a combined 4,000 megawatts in the company’s own count, with gas co-firing to keep the units inside federal rules. Southern Company’s later 10-K puts Scherer Unit 3 through at least December 31, 2035, Bowen units 1 through 4 (3,160 megawatts) through at least the end of 2035, and the company’s 500-megawatt share of Alabama’s Plant Gaston through December 31, 2034. Company filings have discussed running the Georgia units into the late 2030s once they burn gas with coal.

THE UNITS KEPT IN THE FLEET

The same order is not a coal-only plan. It adds 268 megawatts of gas at Plant McIntosh near Savannah, up to 4,000 megawatts of renewables by 2035 with a first buy of 1,100 megawatts, more than 1,500 megawatts of batteries, and more than 1,000 miles of new transmission. Georgia Power says fleet carbon emissions are down more than 60% since 2007. Jennifer Whitfield, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, still called the coal U-turn an odd choice, because the customers cited as the reason have their own climate targets.

It is not only an expensive and dirty fuel that Georgia Power didn’t even want a couple of years ago for some of these plants, but the data centers don’t want it, either. They want clean energy.

Jennifer Whitfield, senior attorney, Southern Environmental Law Center

Liz Coyle, executive director of Georgia Watch, put the same objection in bill language: extending uneconomic coal, “especially if tied to energy-guzzling data centers, makes no sense when better investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency are clearly available.”

An 8,500-Megawatt Forecast Still in Motion

The justification is a load number that has jumped twice in three years. In 2022, Georgia Power told the commission it needed about 400 megawatts of added generation over seven years. By 2023, after the first wave of data-center announcements, that figure was 6,600 megawatts, and the company filed an unusual mid-cycle update. On July 15, 2025, it said the approved plan covers about 8,500 megawatts of load growth over the next six years, 2,600 megawatts above the 2023 update.

That 8,500 megawatts is more than three times the 2,234 megawatts from Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the new reactors that entered commercial operation in 2023 and 2024. Jeffrey Grubb, Georgia Power’s director of resource planning, told the commission the forecast “is based on facts. It’s tangible projects.” Public-interest staff have argued the company assigned those projects too high a chance of showing up.

Marilyn Brown, a Georgia Tech professor who studies energy systems, has described a simpler error. Data-center companies tour several states at once and ask each for a clean-power deal. Utilities in more than one state then bake the same campus into their plans. “I think there is a real overestimation of the power requirements throughout the southeast,” she said. “It’s like double counting.” Industry forecasts for 2030 data-center demand, compiled by Frontier Group, already differ by as much as 200 terawatt-hours; one Electric Power Research Institute range runs from 29% growth to 166%.

HOW THE LOAD NUMBER MOVED

1. July 21, 2022: Commission approves the 2022 plan, including Scherer Unit 3’s retirement by December 31, 2028.
2. 2023: Georgia Power files an IRP update and lifts the seven-year need from about 400 megawatts to 6,600 megawatts.
3. January 31, 2025: The company files a 167-page 2025 plan asking to keep Bowen and Scherer running.
4. July 15, 2025: Commissioners approve the plan and an 8,500-megawatt six-year load figure.
5. December 19, 2025: They certify 9,985 megawatts of new energy generation, about 80% of it for data centers.
6. August 26, 2026: Staff reviews a 3,200-megawatt data-center contract; the commission says the full 9,985 megawatts is now contracted, four months ahead of the one-year mark set in December.

Those two large figures are not the same pile of electrons. The 8,500 megawatts is forecast load. The 9,985 megawatts is new supply the company may build or buy. Commission staff have also told the panel that the wider announcement pipeline is shedding projects: 33 data-center plans totaling 11,332 megawatts have come out since the 2023 update. That is churn in proposed campuses, not a hole the commission has declared in the 9,985 megawatts it now lists as signed. Southern Company CEO Chris Womack has separately described a 3.2-gigawatt, 25-year OpenAI contract near Savannah, with service starting in 2028 and 1 gigawatt of flexible demand response.

Households Still Carry the Fuel Costs

The coal decision and the new-build decision share a rate design problem. Large-load customers, including data centers, often take service on real-time pricing, a tariff written for factories. In the 2026 fuel-cost case, public-interest staff said that tariff’s fuel credit does not pick up firm gas transport, hedging, or some purchased-power costs. Staff put the spillover on everyone else at about 5% to 11% a month as large load grows. On July 7, 2026, the commission voted to investigate.

Commissioner Peter Hubbard, a Democrat on the five-member panel, did not treat that as a rounding error. “Experts identified nearly $1 billion in costs that data centers pay nothing towards, but families, churches, and small businesses do,” he said after the vote. Findings are due December 31, 2026. Georgia Power says large-customer revenue is credited both to fuel and to base rates, and that it supports the review it already agreed to in a May fuel settlement.

The fuel case also showed how fast the underlying burn is rising. Projected fuel costs in that docket ran about $1.4 billion, or 25%, above the prior case, with 98% of some 36 million megawatt-hours of extra load coming from commercial and industrial customers, data centers included. A separate Hubbard motion to hold back about $15.2 million in disputed coal-dispatch costs did not pass. The plants that were supposed to leave the stack are still in it, and the clause that pays for their fuel still runs through the household bill.

Georgia Power serves about 2.7 million customers. Coyle’s warning from the IRP fight is the one that still fits the fuel docket: the company is pouring money into units it had already judged too costly, then asking families to sit inside the recovery mechanism while the largest new users sit on a different tariff.

What Downward Pressure Means for a Typical Bill

The commission has spent two years writing guardrails so that sentence does not become policy. In April 2024 it ordered Georgia Power to make data-center revenue push residential bills down, not up, and to file quarterly large-load reports. Since February 1, 2025, a new customer at or above 100 megawatts must take a custom contract, with financial guarantees, terms of up to 15 years, minimum monthly payments, and a 30-day commission review before signing. On July 31, 2025, base rates were frozen through 2028.

The December 19, 2025, supply deal went further. Georgia Power agreed to backstop the new generation through 2031, so if contracted load fails to show, the company, not households, eats those costs until that year. It also pledged “downward pressure” of at least $8.50 a month on a typical 1,000-kilowatt-hour residential bill for 2029, 2030, and 2031. After the August 26, 2026, contract review, that figure rose to at least $15.00 a month for those three years, or $180 a year, and the company said it would not chase other customers for incremental costs if a data center walks away mid-term.

THE LARGE-LOAD RULES NOW ON PAPER

• Custom contracts: New loads of 100 megawatts or more, from February 1, 2025, need long-term deals with minimum bills and collateral, not a standard tariff.
• Rate freeze: Base rates cannot rise through 2028 while the new plants and lines are being built.
• Company backstop: Georgia Power covers stranded new-build costs through 2031 if the signed load does not arrive.
• Bill comparison: The $15.00 monthly figure is downward pressure against a higher counterfactual rate in 2029 through 2031, not a credit on a 2026 bill.

Greene has sold that package in plain language: “Large energy users are paying more so families and small businesses can pay less, and that’s a great result for Georgians.” Jason Shaw, the commission chairman, said after the IRP vote that the plan puts the state “in a safe and secure spot to meet that energy need.” Coyle’s gloss is the one families will test in 2029. “It doesn’t mean your bills are going down,” she said. “It means that maybe they’re not going up as fast.” Mailers and campaign ads in September 2026 already treat the $180-a-year comparison as a rate cut. It is not. It is a pledge about how the next rate case, due to be filed in 2028, will spread data-center revenue for three years after the freeze lifts.

Old Fossil Plants Get a National Second Life

Georgia is late to a list, not first on it. Frontier Group, updating a January 2025 paper last October, counted 16,491.4 megawatts of delayed fossil retirements across 34 generating units at 15 plants, delayed in whole or in part on reliability grounds as data-center load rose. Those 15 plants emitted almost 65 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent in 2023, more than Massachusetts emitted in 2022. The Southeast slice is 5,986.8 megawatts, almost all on the Southern Company system.

THE DELAYED-RETIREMENT TALLY

• National capacity: 16,491.4 megawatts of fossil units that had a retirement date and then did not.
• The fleet: 34 generating units at 15 plants, several of them kept on by grid-operator or Department of Energy orders.
• 2023 pollution: Almost 65 million metric tons of CO2e from those 15 plants.
• Southeast share: 5,986.8 megawatts of delay on Southern Company systems, including Bowen, Scherer, and Gaston.

In Maryland and Pennsylvania, operators used reliability-must-run deals and emergency orders to hold coal and oil units past 2025. In Virginia, Dominion no longer lists a retirement date for Clover. Alliant has walked Columbia in Wisconsin from a 2024 close to the end of 2029. The pattern is the same one Georgia wrote into an IRP: a plant that failed a cost test gets a second life once a data-center forecast appears in the load file. Frontier Group’s earlier paper also noted that 22 states still offer data centers some form of subsidy. Georgia’s equipment sales-tax break dates to 2018. Lawmakers voted in 2024 to pause it for a resource study; Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed the pause.

Farmland Now Sits in the Transmission Path

The hidden bill is not only on the fuel clause. The 2025 plan’s 1,000-plus miles of new lines have to land somewhere, and they land on people who never signed a large-load contract. In Coweta County, farmers have told local boards that high-voltage easements tied to data-center campuses would cut grazing land and drop property values, and that Georgia Power can condemn a strip if talks fail. Utility eminent domain is legal in Georgia for grid projects. Whether a line built mainly to move power to a private campus is a public use is the argument those owners are already making.

The same tension has already shown up in resident fights over South Fulton data centers, where neighbors pressed officials for basic details on water, power, and who actually benefits. DeKalb County’s zoning commission voted down a large campus after nearby homes were already living with substation work. The political ads running into the fall treat data centers as either a rate cut or a land grab. The physical fact underneath both pitches is simpler. The plants that were supposed to close are still on the river, and the new wires have to cross somebody’s field to reach the loads that were used to keep them there.

The Utility Backstop Runs Through 2031

The commission’s own fact sheet is blunt about the residual risk. After December 2025, Georgia Power, commissioners, and staff said they expected signed contracts for all 9,985 megawatts within a year. The August 2026 deal let them say that target was hit early. The backstop still ends in 2031. After that year, the company is no longer on the hook, under this order, to eat new-build costs if a campus never draws the power it reserved. The $15.00 of downward pressure is written for 2029 through 2031 only. Base rates come unfrozen in 2028. The RTP investigation is supposed to say, by December 31, 2026, whether fuel costs that data centers do not pay are already sitting on everyone else.

Shaw has said the commission has to stay flexible because Georgia is growing faster than most states and is not the only one in this queue. Brown’s double-counting warning, the 11,332 megawatts of dropped announcements, and the OpenAI contract can all be true at once: some of the load is real and long, some of it was counted in two states, and the coal units do not wait for the spreadsheet to settle. Households will still be on the fuel clause while Bowen and Scherer burn. The servers that justified that burn can leave when a contract ends. The plants, the ash, and the lines stay in Georgia.

Coyle’s line about uneconomic coal was aimed at a 2025 filing. It now describes a fleet the commission has already certified, a bill comparison that does not start until 2029, and a backstop with a printed expiration date. The data-center operators got the megawatts. The people on the clause got a promise about the next rate case.