The Georgia Public Service Commission is pushing back against Georgia Power’s latest load forecast, citing concerns about underlying assumptions, model specifications, and input data that staff say may lead to overestimations of demand.
In January, Georgia Power submitted its 2025 integrated resource plan, projecting up to 9.4 gigawatts of new load in the next decade — a number commission staff said represented growth nearly three times faster than historical trends. In order to meet that demand, the company said it would delay coal plant retirements, as well as build more transmission and renewables.
But this month, commission staff told the utility they are particularly concerned about how the utility is modeling data centers, which represent 83% of its large load forecast pipeline. And last week Microsoft stepped into the fray. The tech giant owns several data center campuses in the region and plans to build more — and pushed back against Georgia Power’s previous IRP last April.
Data center projects make up the majority of large load projects canceled since Georgia Power last filed its forecast, staff pointed out, yet the utility is still predicting data centers will come online at much higher rates than other types of load. That could be leading to an overestimation of future electricity demand.
“The company assumes that data center projects will materialize at a rate higher than other industry segments without sufficient justification,” staff wrote in their testimony. Historically, the opposite has been true — data centers have been removed from Georgia Power’s queue at a higher rate than other types of projects.
Since Q2 of last year 19 data center projects that had at one point expressed interest in receiving electricity from Georgia Power have been canceled or otherwise withdrawn. Of all removals from the large load queue, data centers accounted for 63% of projects removed, and 83% of the megawatts removed.
The vast majority of Georgia Power’s data center project removals — 96% — came from projects that were in the early “technical review” stage, which is where the vast majority of Georgia Power’s data center pipeline is currently concentrated.
Georgia Power’s load forecast generally uses reasonable methodology, the testimony said. But the model “biases data center and cryptocurrency projects to materialize at a higher rate than other industries.”
The regulators recommend adjusting Georgia Power’s forecast assumptions, specifically by removing the assumption that data center projects will materialize at higher rates than others. “This assumption is not empirically evidenced by the data in the company’s large load pipeline,” the testimony said. The model also doesn’t account for economic uncertainty, which could cause the data center pipeline to “diminish or be delayed,” they added, and that uncertainty could bring the load forecast down even further.
Adjusting the model to remove data center bias would mean reducing the probabilities for the segment by 25% for the “most likely” scenarios, to match the assumptions for other sectors. That would result in around a 2,000-MW reduction to peak load through 2032, and 2,200 MW by 2044.
Moving forward, the staff said, Georgia Power should provide additional, data-center specific information in its quarterly reports, including the quarter in which a project entered the large load pipeline, whether that customer is considering sites outside of Georgia, and a “description and quantification of financial commitments” made by each data center customer.
Microsoft’s stake
Concern over Georgia Power’s data center load predictions isn’t limited to its latest IRP. When the company filed an updated IRP in late 2023 — an interim filing addressing short-term generation needs — it drastically increased its near-term predictions. In that proceeding, Georgia Power garnered the Public Service Commission’s approval to meet the load gap it described with three new natural gas turbines, a 150MW demand response program, and a handful of fossil fuel power purchase agreements.
In comments filed during that proceeding, Microsoft challenged the utility’s modeling methods, and argued it was overestimating data center load.
“Microsoft agrees that most of the load growth associated with data centers in the 2023 IRP Update is real and that GPC does require additional capacity,” the company wrote. “However, Microsoft has concerns with GPC’s approach potentially leading to over-forecasting near-term load (through 2030) and procuring excessive, carbon-intensive generation.”
Of particular concern, Microsoft said, was the fact that Georgia Power’s forecasts include projects that are considering Georgia as a location, but haven’t committed funds or signed a contract — a practice that the utility continues in its current IRP, but that Microsoft said its neighbors Dominion, Duke, and APS don’t.
In the current proceeding, Microsoft said it is “not presently intending to submit any testimony,” but that as a customer of Georgia Power, the commissions’ response to the utility’s IRP “will directly impact Microsoft’s business interests.”
Some of this comes down to Microsoft’s emissions, given that the AI boom has been a hit to the company’s progress on ambitious net zero goals.
“The proportion of Georgia Power’s resource mix that is served by carbon-emitting resources versus the proportion served by carbon-pollution free electricity will have an impact on Microsoft’s ability to meet its sustainability commitments,” the company added.
