This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising electricity bills to developing renewable energy.
On a Tuesday morning in January, college student Aurora Gray stepped up to the podium in a windowless room in Atlanta, around the corner from the state capitol building. In front of her sat a five-member panel of elected officials that oversees how and where nearly every Georgia resident gets their power.
“The generation of energy… using fossil fuels has become an existential threat to our safety due to the undisputed impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on our planet,” Gray told the commission. “We must act now, as later is way too late.”
More than a dozen other students sat behind her, awaiting their allotted three minutes in front of the Georgia Public Service Commission, or PSC. One after another, they called on the commission to reject a request from Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility, to add new natural gas capacity to the grid. Instead, they repeated at the podium, the company needs to expand renewable energy and take other steps to combat climate change.
“You can help get Georgia Power to take the right actions in the essential timeframe,” said high school senior Evelyn Ford, the last of the students to speak across two days. “Actually, you’re the only five people in Georgia who can.”
Ford is substantially correct. Though Georgia’s state legislature can pass laws on clean energy and the governor can issue executive orders on climate action, the Public Service Commission is the only government body with direct authority to regulate whatever Georgia Power does. The panel sets the rates people pay for electricity and approves the utility’s plans to make or buy that power and deliver it to customers.
According to the commission’s own website, “very few governmental agencies have as much impact on peoples’ lives as the PSC.”
The Georgia Public Service Commission was established in 1879, first as a government body to regulate railroads and later expanded to address the services popping up in an increasingly electrified and connected state. Today, the PSC oversees investor-owned utilities, as well as natural gas pipelines and telecommunications.
Georgia has 42 member-owned cooperatives and 52 municipalities that provide electric service to residents. But Georgia Power is by far the state’s largest electricity provider, serving 2.7 million customers, from the Tennessee border to the coastal islands. It is also Georgia’s only investor-owned electric utility — meaning it is the only power company whose rates and operations the PSC directly oversees.
At the core of the commission’s oversight of Georgia Power are two main decision-making processes: the integrated resource plan and the rate case. Every three years, the utility updates its 20-year plan for making and delivering electricity, the IRP. This involves forecasting how much power Georgians will need and laying out what combination of resources — coal and gas plants, nuclear energy, solar fields, hydroelectric dams, and purchase agreements with other utilities — Georgia Power will use to meet that demand.
The rate case determines how much Georgia Power’s customers pay for this electricity. In addition to the base cost of power, the company is allowed to pass on to customers the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure approved in the IRP, as long as the PSC signs off on it.
As an investor-owned company, Georgia Power also aims to make a profit; the commission decides how much it can make by setting a figure in the rate case called “return on equity.” The commission, by its own description, “must balance Georgia citizens’ need for reliable services and reasonable rates with the need for utilities to earn a reasonable return on investment.”
There are a lot of opportunities for input before the Public Service Commission decides on IRPs and rate cases. Along with public commenters like Fort and the group of students last month, a subset of PSC employees, known as the Public Interest Advocacy staff, advocate for ratepayers’ interests in the hearings. Other organizations, including environmental and consumer advocacy groups, major electricity buyers, and cities, can engage in the hearings as well. These stakeholders and the Public Interest Advocacy staff present expert testimony and cross-examine one another’s witnesses as well as Georgia Power’s representatives.
How the Georgia PSC’s decisions relate to climate change
The PSC has the authority to alter Georgia Power’s business proposals and dictate its energy mix — thereby significantly controlling the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, they already have. In 2011, commissioner Bubba McDonald added 50 megawatts of solar power to Georgia Power’s generation mix. When the utility updated its long-range plan for power generation, known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP, in 2013, the commission more than doubled the solar capacity that Georgia Power asked for. In subsequent IRPs, which happen every three years, the commission continued to order more solar than the utility proposed. By 2023, the state ranked seventh in the country for solar power. Georgia’s emissions dropped by 5 percent from 2017 to 2021, and power generation dropped below transportation as the leading emissions source. Researchers credit the change largely to the solar growth that the commission mandated.
But the PSC has also upheld and prolonged fossil fuel energy generation in Georgia. In the utility’s most recent IRP, in 2022, the commission approved six agreements to purchase natural gas power for more than a…
