Consumer Updates from Advocate Patty Durand

Welcome new subscribers. This is a bi-monthly newsletter about Georgia Power gamesmanship that harms customers, the complicity of commissioners and staff at the Georgia Public Service Commission in that harm, and what you can do about it.

I had hoped to write a good news wrap for 2024 but once again the news intrudes. I was dismayed and frankly shocked at this article published yesterday the AJC:

It strains credulity to imagine that the timing of this story is a random coincidence: January is when Georgia Power’s Integrated Resource Plan is due to be filed at the Georgia Public Service Commission. It is expected to be a whopper of unprecedented new generation requests that could (and likely will) raise our bills by as much as 80% as several news stories have been reporting.

The point of the AJC article – that Georgia is a top state to import electricity, is mildly interesting and totally irrelevant. Utilities import and export electricity all the time because electricity must be consumed at the time it is produced unless it is stored, but we have very little of that here. Georgia Power sold electricity when prices were high and bought electricity when prices were low, based on supply and demand from neighboring states. That’s it. So?

But the headline of Georgia as a net importer of electricity leads a reader to conclude that there isn’t enough generation and so some had to be imported. If that wasn’t the conclusion the reporter wanted readers to reach, why write about it?  Did the article state that outright? No. It didn’t need to.

I have no idea why the AJC chose this angle to report on and then deny that a lack of generation capacity was the intended conclusion but that is what they did.

Not only did the headline miscommunicate an important truth, the article was misleading too. The reporter claims that there has been growth in electricity sales when there hasn’t been any growth. She chose to look at Georgia’s electricity sales trends back to literally 1990 to claim growth – an absurd timeframe and far too long. Of course a 30 year lookback will show growth: Georgia’s population doubled from 6 million to 11.5 million in that timeframe. Had she looked at the last 10 years, or even the last 17 years, sales growth for both Georgia Power and for all of Georgia’s utilities (EMCs, municipals, and our for-profit monopoly), shows zero electricity growth.  

It is common knowledge in the energy industry that sales have been flat since the aughts. I am frustrated that I must debate an AJC reporter on this point since it’s common knowledge that literally no one debates.

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