Georgia Power has a massive plan for new power lines

(GPB News) – On a recent morning, Claudia Moore was at home, with her kids, watching them do what kids love to do in the summer.

“Watch!” Moore’s daughter shouted from the aboveground pool just off the driveway and at the edge of the woods.

“I’m watching,” Moore said. Then came the pool trick and a ton of splashing.

“Good job!”

It’s the kind of day Claudia said she and her husband, Blake, who she described as a “country boy,” wanted for their two children when they moved to this suburban neighborhood in Coweta County, southwest of Atlanta.

“We specifically chose this place because it was nestled in the woods and we had kind of the serenity of that,” Blake Moore said. “It seems like that might be going away, unfortunately.”

That’s because now the neighborhood is changing.

“So these two houses in our neighborhood are going to be demolished,” Claudia said, pointing to houses peeking through the hardwoods. “And yeah, they’re bought out.”

The neighbors sold their houses to Georgia Power before the utility could take them. Claudia said she and Blake aren’t on what she described as the “chopping block,” per se, but they still stand to lose.

“Luckily we are not getting demolished,” she said. “They are just going to claim eminent domain on some of our land.”

That means the woods that drew the Moores to this home have to go.

They are between the pool and Georgia Power’s current transmission line. Now, the utility wants to add twice as much the amount of electricity carrying capacity along an existing 35-mile easement from their Plant Wansley, where Georgia Power is installing new, fossil gas generators.

For that, the utility needs a wider easement, meaning land. If there are houses on the land, they need those, too.

So, like a lot of people in this area, the Moores are asking: Who is this even for?

“We think it’s about the betterment of the data centers that they’re trying to put up everywhere,” Claudia said, though she added that the utility company claims otherwise.

Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Bob Sherrier said that’s not true.

“Before the data center boom happened, the transmission plan at that time said, ‘We’re going to build 50 miles of new right-of-way, high-voltage transmission across the entire state in the next 10 years,'” Sherrier said.

That was part of Georgia Power’s 2022 Integrated Resource Plan, approved by the state regulators at the Georgia Public Service Commission. But then last year, just three years later, Georgia Power went back to the PSC and said data center growth meant they needed an unprecedented amount of more electricity to sell.

Sherrier said the transmission line plan changed in scope and scale, too.

“It’s now 1,000 miles of new transmission lines in the next 10 years,” Sherrier said.

The exact mileage, as described in public disclosures by Georgia Power, is 1,065 miles. The 35-mile project running through the Moore’s woods is a tiny fraction of that.

“I think this is just the beginning of it; these projects that you’re hearing about are the first round of transmission construction,” Sherrier said. “And the only thing that’s really changed is this data center interest in the state.”

In one sense, Georgia Power does not dispute this.

“80% of the growth that we are seeing in the state of Georgia is data centers,” said Georgia Power spokesperson Meredith Stone. “They’re here. They’re coming. There’s no way around that.”

But in the next breath, Stone offered a counterpoint.

“Georgia is also the fourth-largest growing state, meaning people are moving to Georgia because there’s opportunity here,” she said.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the state population was already growing at that clip under the older, far less expansive plan for grid expansion through 2032. But Stone said Georgia Power has a duty to reliably serve its customers.

“Whether they’re large load customers like data centers or they’re small businesses or residential customers,” she said.

In this case, serving that customer base means taking property. That’s some 300 properties along the Plant Wansley expansion alone.

Stone said Georgia Power prefers to strike a deal to buy rather than resort to taking through eminent domain. Stone said the utility offers 125% over fair market value as their first offer.

From her backyard with its own pool, Cynthia Van Epps said she wasn’t interested. She said she’s a holdout.

“100%. And now, when I say I am a holdout, our price hasn’t changed,” Van Epps said as hummingbirds whipped by and three small, motorized waterfalls poured into her pool. She called Georgia Power’s starting offer a “lowball.”

“They’re going to start there, and then they’re going to try to look like good guys by increasing it a little bit,” she said.

Van Epps said she wants “like for like” for her property, but for what Georgia Power has offered, there just isn’t another home near hers in the town of Palmetto that offers the same comforts. At her age, she isn’t interested in rebuilding, either.

“I’m going to be 58 here shortly,” she said. “This house wasn’t for sale.”

And so she is prepared to wait for what she expects to be a kind of court-based arbitration for her final deal. She expects the new 500-kilovolt power lines to be about 12 feet from her bedroom window after Georgia Power takes what they need.

Claudia and Blake Moore are still wrestling with what to do next.

“You know, we bought only three years ago,” Claudia Moore said. “So, it’s like we had all these dreams, aspirations for this land. And also, I just don’t think that we’re going to get what we want for it now.”

Cynthia Van Epps can’t understand how any of it is legal.

“That isn’t something that a publicly held company should be able to do to individual homeowners,” Van Epps said.

But attorney Bob Sherrier said it is all allowed under Georgia law.

“These rules haven’t been updated in a long time,” Sherrier said. “And things have changed.”

He said changing the rules would fall to the Georgia Legislature, which won’t be in full session until January 2027.