US utility Georgia Power has projected that load growth across Georgia will triple by the mid-2030s due to data center energy consumption.
“The latest data continues to support Georgia Power’s expectation for continued and robust economic growth in Georgia and the timing of new large loads,” the company’s Nov 18 economic development outlook read.
The utility will outline its strategy to meet the growing demand in its 2025 integrated resource plan, which will be filed next month.
Georgia Power’s pipeline of development projects has swelled significantly in 2024, rising from 12GW to 36.5GW. Large-scale facilities, including data centers, account for 34.6GW of expected demand. The majority of these projects are due to come into service by the end of 2028, placing significant strain on the utility to meet the demand.
Georgia Power has received commitments to purchase electricity from 70 data center facilities. In November, Stream Data Centers announced plans for a 49,300 sq ft (13,870 sqm) data center campus in Douglas County, west of Atlanta. In the same week, Sailfish Investors revealed plans for a 1.78 million sq ft data center site in Atlanta.
However, despite these commitments, there is skepticism about whether operators will keep their word and build data centers in the state.
Maggie Shober, the research director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said: “Although these are scary numbers, I think there’s a lot of speculation going on, especially in the data center industry, where people and companies that are interested in sort of flipping sites for data centers are absolutely scrambling to get into this queue. I think that a lot of these will ultimately never show up. I think it’s going to be a challenge to figure out which ones and how do we determine that?”
To meet demand, Georgia Power has already obtained approval from the Georgia Public Service Commission to expand its generation capacity by increasing its reliance on fossil fuels and adding more renewable energy by 2025.
In November, Georgia Power's parent company, Southern Company, indicated that due to increasing energy demand from data centers and other commercial and industrial properties, coal-fired power is considered an option to meet the expected demand.
Its CEO, Chris Womack, said it is considering an “all of the above” generation plan and, as part of its strategy, could extend the life of its four-unit, 3,450MW Plant Bowen coal-fired facility in Georgia.
Currently, renewable energy sources contribute 13 percent of Georgia’s electricity generation, with the majority from hydropower. However, the state has significantly scaled its solar generation capacity over recent years, producing 8,103GWh of solar energy in 2023, more than all solar generation across the state before 2019 combined.
As a result, data center firms in the state have increasingly sought to sign Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) to bolster their clean energy supply. Meta, Digital Realty, and QTS have all signed long-term solar PPAs in the state.