In 2025, Georgia Power got permission from the Public Service Commission to substantially expand the volume of electricity the utility creates and sells.
The reasoning behind this increased demand was the expansion of data centers across the state. The question that naturally follows from this increased demand is whether the state can provide the amount of electricity that it has promised.
Amy Sharma, executive director of the nonprofit organization Science for Georgia, sat down with Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Peter Biello for a discussion on this increased demand and what it will mean for the state.
Biello started the discussion by asking about Sharma’s estimate of how much electricity data centers are demanding in Georgia, as opposed to what the state can actually give.
Sharma responded, “The range [of electricity] is between 29 gigawatts and 58 gigawatts.”
She then went on to describe the power of a gigawatt, saying, “A gigawatt is about the output of one nuclear reactor or half of Hoover Dam.”
She then put a gigawatt into context: “[Plant Vogtle] has four nuclear reactors that produces a little over 4 gigawatts of power.”
Recently, Georgia Power CEO Chris Womack informed the company’s stockholders that when the Effingham County OpenAI data center deal is finalized, the company will have pledged 1 gigawatt more of electrical bandwidth than it has been approved to provide.
Sharma understands how Georgia Power came up with its figures, but her organization used a different methodology to calculate energy needs.
This starts with the increased plans for data centers in the Peach State. “We have over about 81 proposed new data centers for the state of Georgia,” she said. However, she added, out of the proposed data centers, only 25 have announced how much power they will require.
Sharma described how the square footage of data centers is another avenue for estimating power needs.
She said, “The problem is there are 81 proposed data centers.”
“Of that, we could find 57 that had listed their square feet, which is the other way that you can use to estimate power. So that’s over twice as many as the ones that have listed their proposed power.”
Biello told Sharma that Georgia Public Broadcasting looked over Sharma’s data. He inquired about the change in data centers, specifically, how the demand from data centers is about double what it used to be.
Data centers are not what they used to be, she responded. “New data centers are the AI hyperscale data centers.”
“AI, hyperscale AI, is very processor-intensive, which means it’s very energy-intensive. So they’re going to need a lot more power.”
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