Dive Brief:
- Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company and Georgia’s main utility, received approval on Tuesday from the Georgia Public Service Commission on an integrated resource plan update which proposed 1,400 MW of new gas and oil-fired generation.
- Georgia Power filed the update with the PSC in October, saying in a release that the state is “attracting extraordinary customer growth” and needs to deploy additional electricity generation to reliably and economically support Georgia’s rapidly growing energy needs as a result.
- Environmental groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center have criticized the decision, raising concerns about the state’s continued reliance on fossil fuels and potential rate increases for customers.
Dive Insight:
The approved Integrated Resource Plan authorizes Georgia Power to build three new methane gas and oil-burning units at Plant Yates and purchase 750 MW of power from a Mississippi Power coal-fired plant through a PPA. “It will cost Georgia Power’s customers approximately $3 billion to build and acquire these new energy sources. About half of that cost is for new gas units at Plant Yates,” the Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC, said in a release.
Georgia Power’s construction of new combustion turbines at Plant Yates will be exempt from the request for proposal process, according to the stipulation agreement between the utility and PSC staff the commission approved Tuesday.
The stipulation also commits Georgia Power to investigating opportunities to use distributed energy resources and grid-enhancing technologies, and developing a residential and small commercial solar and battery pilot program.
Georgia Power said in its October release that the update’s commitments to battery energy storage system, or BESS, resources, as well as DERs, “are essential to ensuring that the grid remains reliable and resilient while the company continues adding renewable resources.”
“Based on the company’s energy expansion plan in the 2023 IRP Update, the company anticipates adding a total of approximately 10,000 MW of new renewable resources by 2035, which is nearly double the 6,000 MW projected in the 2022 IRP,” the utility said.
However, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy said the update does “little to protect ratepayers and even less to advance clean energy like solar and wind,” and criticized the PSC for shooting down Georgia Power’s proposal to add 200 MW of new solar, saying it had “even [removed] a token amount.”
The 200 MW of new solar was proposed along with a 200-MW BESS, a project which the PSC said in the stipulation “is not approved at this time,” though Georgia Power “may bid the project in a future RFP.”
The PSC also denied the utility’s request to own and operate 1 GW of BESS resources, but gave it the authority to “develop, own and operate” up to 500 MW of BESS resources to help “meet the needs of economic development customer loads in the winter of 2026/2027.”
