Georgia’s Energy Crossroads: Georgia Power’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan
As Georgia Power’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) hearings continue, Vote Solar is actively working to address an energy-affordability crisis affecting Georgia families. In recent hearings, Vote Solar and Georgia WAND presented expert testimony and faced cross-examination alongside other intervenors as we push for energy solutions that prioritize affordability and transparency.
Vote Solar’s Solutions for Affordability
We’re advocating for proven demand-side solutions that can reduce bills while supporting grid stability. This includes expanding access to customer-owned solar beyond an arbitrary 5,000-customer cap on net metering—a limit that should be reconsidered as part of the IRP’s comprehensive planning for Georgia’s energy future. This is particularly important since 46% of energy-burdened households own their homes and could benefit from these savings.
We’re also pushing for community solar programs with guaranteed discounts rather than uncertain corporate sponsorships, expanded heat pump adoption for low-income households, and robust demand response programs that match successful models in other states.
These solutions offer multiple benefits: reduced emissions, improved energy resilience during extreme weather outages, and more comfortable, safer and affordable homes for Georgia families.
Georgians Face an Energy Affordability Crisis
Dr. Yunus Kinkhabwala, our expert witness from PSE Healthy Energy, testified on affordability concerns on behalf of Vote Solar and Georgia WAND. His testimony revealed stark realities: approximately 620,000 Georgia households – nearly a quarter of Georgia Power customers – spend over six percent of their income on energy bills. His analysis also revealed a $540 million annual affordability gap. With 184,000 Georgia Power residential customers experiencing disconnections in 2024 alone, these statistics represent real-life families forced to make unfair and impossible choices between paying power bills and meeting other essential needs.
Procedural Concerns Threaten Transparency
Right before intervenors presented their testimony during the May IRP hearings, Georgia Power and PSC staff announced a settlement of the utility’s 2025 rate case. This rate case was originally scheduled to follow the conclusion of the IRP—a process that determines the state’s long-term energy strategy.
The timing and substance of the settlement raise important questions. While the agreement freezes base rates for the next three years, it does not freeze customer bills. In fact, bills are still expected to rise due to additional charges Georgia Power is allowed to collect—such as storm recovery costs from Hurricane Helene and fluctuations in fuel prices, which are passed directly to customers.
This disconnect becomes even more striking when viewed in the context of Georgia Power’s own testimony during the IRP. The utility argued that rising electricity demand, especially from energy-intensive data centers, would put downward pressure on rates. In fact, during the 2023 IRP update, Georgia Power pointed to a projected $2.89 per month net bill reduction for typical households. But that projected benefit is nowhere to be found in the settlement now before the Commission.By reaching a behind-the-scenes settlement ahead of the IRP’s conclusion, Georgia Power has sidestepped the usual sequence in which rate design follows resource planning. As a result, key questions remain unanswered about how customer costs are being calculated—and why anticipated savings have seemingly disappeared.
Even more troubling are the procedural and due process issues facing potential intervenors. The Commission’s scheduling order required organizations to file testimony by June 12, but intervenors are not required to actually intervene until June 24, two weeks later. Intervention deadlines are established to ensure that interested parties have sufficient time to confer and intervene to protect their interests.
Georgia Code Section 46-2-59(c) establishes that interested parties have 30 days from the first published notice of a proceeding to intervene. In this case, Georgia Power first published public notice of their settlement on May 25 in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. Following the intervention deadlines, typically intervenors would have time to review the utility’s testimony and assemble and submit expert testimony of their own. However, if an organization exercises their right under Georgia law to take the full intervention timeframe allowed, it will be effectively prevented from participating because the testimony deadline will have already passed, undermining their procedural and due process rights.
This impossibly short timeline effectively restrains meaningful participation in a process that will determine how Georgians pay for Georgia Power’s resource decisions. The Commission plans to render a final decision on the rate case settlement on July 1, just three days after the conclusion of the intervention period.
The Path Forward
Vote Solar will continue advocating at the Commission for energy planning that prioritizes affordable, people-centered solutions. As these critical decisions unfold over the next month, Georgia residents deserve transparency, meaningful participation rights, and solutions that address the real affordability crisis facing hundreds of thousands of families. The stakes are too high and too urgent for anything less.