Nine hours ago we ran the study saying data centers made electricity cheaper for a decade. Here is the same trade, priced in a different currency.
Georgia Power is executing a 10-year plan the Georgia Public Service Commission approved last year: more than 1,000 miles of new transmission line, routed across upward of 330 parcels of land, plus roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over five years. One piece of it — the Ashley Park–Wansley Transmission Project — runs 35 miles through Fayette, Heard, Fulton and Coweta counties. Building it means leveling nearly 30 houses.
“My childhood home is being taken by Georgia Power,” one affected homeowner, Ansley Brown, said in an Instagram video quoted by Fortune on Sunday. “They are going to bulldoze this entire property to the ground.” Georgia Power told the magazine it has since reached an agreement with Brown’s mother and considers that matter resolved. Land and easement negotiations along the route are “close” to complete. Construction could start as early as next year.
The two numbers that don’t sit together
Georgia Power’s case is a rate case, and it is not a weak one. The utility projects the five projects will deliver about $102 in annual savings per residential customer, beginning in 2029, funded by charging large-load customers more and pushing the difference down onto households. That is the same fixed-cost-divided-by-more-kilowatt-hours arithmetic the EPRI paper described this morning — only here it is written into tariff design rather than inferred from a decade of data.
The other number is the one the utility keeps at arm’s length. A December 2025 agreement between Georgia Power and the PSC certified a nearly 10,000-megawatt generation plan “approximately 80 percent of which is expected to power data centers.” CBS separately estimated 70–80% of the Wansley line’s power will serve AI data centers. Asked about it, a Georgia Power spokesperson said the company is “not in the data center business” and could not confirm the estimate.
On compensation, the utility says it opens at 125% of appraised value and negotiates up from there, and that eminent domain is a last resort used in under 1% of its land transactions — five times in the past year, none of them residential. Homeowners on the route tell reporters the opening offers ran well below what they think the property is worth. Attorneys who work these cases point out the quieter risk: a permanent easement is a contract that stays attached to the deed after you sell, and can bar you from building under the lines while reserving the utility’s right to add more infrastructure later.
Our take: The $102 is real. So are the houses. What makes this a business story instead of a zoning fight is the shape of the ledger: the benefit is diffuse, per-customer and starts in 2029; the cost is concentrated, immediate, and lands on about 30 addresses. Utilities have socialized infrastructure costs for a century — that is the regulated-monopoly bargain. What’s new is that the identifiable beneficiary is private, enormously profitable, and unnamed in the filings. That is precisely the condition under which “public use” stops being a formality and starts being a lawsuit. Georgia Power’s cleanest defense is also its weakest: it isn’t in the data center business, it just built 10 gigawatts the state says is 80% for data centers.
What to watch
- The public-use question. Landowners in Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere are already testing whether delegated eminent domain survives when the load it serves is privately owned. One adverse ruling reprices every transmission timeline in the country.
- Whether the $102 shows up in 2029. It depends on large-load tariffs holding, which depends on data centers taking the power they contracted for. Same gap we flagged this morning — fixed costs land when the steel goes up; the kilowatt-hours arrive later, if they arrive.
- Georgia’s tax exemption. A December 2025 evaluation by UGA’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government scored the net fiscal impact of the state’s data center sales-and-use tax break at roughly −$574 million. Lawmakers voted to suspend new exemptions in 2024; Gov. Kemp vetoed it. The legislature is back in January.
- Copycat tariffs. Georgia Power is loudly first on making large-load customers carry more of the fixed cost. If regulators elsewhere copy the structure, the cost of AI compute rises in a line item nobody has modeled.
Georgia has more than 200 operational data centers, roughly 170 of them around Atlanta. The state built the on-ramp with tax policy and is now building the grid to match. The bill arrives in installments — some on the monthly statement, some at the front door.