Georgia Power aims to add even more generation to the grid.
According to the utility’s 2025 integrated resource plan, submitted today to the state’s Public Service Commission, “new and expanding economic development projects in Georgia have progressed more rapidly and on a larger scale than in previous years.”
Georgia Power anticipates load growth of 8.2 gigawatts through the winter of 2030-31. And it plans to meet the demand via a combination of delaying coal retirements, deploying more renewables, and building more transmission.
This is the first IRP that Georgia Power has published since the fall of 2023, when it filed an updated plan in light of unanticipated load growth, especially from data centers. The 2022 IRP expected just 300 megawatts of growth between this winter and winter of 2030-31 — and the 2023 update reflected a staggering jump, up to 5.9 GW.
To maintain Georgia’s ability to “attract and retain businesses,” it said at the time, the utility must take “immediate action” to meet capacity needs by the end of 2025. A year and a half later, the urgency has only grown.
And much of that load growth is coming imminently. In the near-term, Georgia Power reported, the company projects six GW of growth as early as the winter of 2028-29. And there’s no sign that it will abate for the foreseeable future. “Over the next ten years — through the winter of 2034/2035 — Georgia Power expects up to 9,400 MW of load growth,” the IRP reads.
Generation, new and old
Just three years ago, Georgia Power announced plans to retire two coal stations, blaming economic factors. Today, though, load growth has changed the calculations.
The company plans to keep both Plant Scherer and Plant Bowen operating into the 2030s, exploring co-firing with both coal and natural gas. Of course, getting coal off the grid is one of the most impactful ways to mitigate carbon emissions — it’s both a highly dirty and highly inefficient way of generating electricity.
The company also plans to upgrade both gas and nuclear plants to unlock additional power. And it’s hoping to add more than a gigawatt of solar and battery storage to the grid, with aims of getting 11 GW of renewables online by 2035.
And Georgia Power also has a lot of new 230-kilovolt and 500-kV transmission projects in the works. One is under construction, three are in the engineering stage, and 19 are in the planning stage.
Meanwhile, the IRP emphasizes Georgia Power’s demand-side management portfolio, including demand response and energy efficiency programs and pilots. For instance, in April 2024 the utility announced a managed charging pilot with WeaveGrid, which so far is open to a limited number of EV drivers.
At present, gas dominates Georgia Power’s resource mix, followed by nuclear and goal. Solar and wind amount to 6% and 1%, respectively.
The fall 2023 IRP update — which reflected the first wave of load growth alarm — came with a request to Georgia’s Public Service Commission to meet the anticipated demand increase with more generation, including via three new gas turbines.
In response, Microsoft — which owns and operates several data center campuses in the utility’s service territory — challenged GPC’s modeling methods. The tech company said at the time that the analysis undervalues renewable energy and overestimates data center load, and were one of the early examples of the tension between hyperscalers and utilities that has defined the last year. A separate analysis from over a year ago from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that Georgia Power has regularly overestimated its actual peak demand for electricity.
