Georgia Power wants more fossil fuel generation. This contradicts its parent company’s goal

Hearings began Tuesday on Georgia Power’s request for a massive expansion of its electricity generation capacity.

If the state’s Public Service Commission approves the utility’s request, most of that new electricity would come from the burning of fossil fuels.

Georgia Power’s proposed plan — which it says is necessary because of an unexpected growth in the number of new industrial customers expected to move into Georgia in the coming years — involves building 1,400 megawatts of natural gas generation in Georgia as well as buying 750 megawatts of power from Mississippi Power, enabling that company to delay the scheduled shutdown of a coal plant there.

At the hearings, which will continue through Wednesday, the PSC will hear from expert witnesses testifying on behalf of the power company, consumer and industry advocates, and environmental organizations. A decision is expected in April.

But there is one particular subject the commissioners likely won’t hear much about from Georgia Power: Its parent company’s stated goal of reducing its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 — a target it’s difficult to square with the additional coal and natural gas involved in Georgia Power’s present request.

In the eyes of some observers, filings Georgia Power submitted to the PSC earlier this month demonstrated that the utility doesn’t hold itself responsible for helping the Southern Company, its corporate owner, meet that target.

In response to a question about whether it considered the net-zero goal while designing updates to Georgia’s transmission system — a crucial component of the transition to renewable energy — the company wrote, “Specific clean energy targets did not impact the selection of transmission solutions.”

In addition to Georgia Power, the Southern Company, a Fortune 500 corporation based in Atlanta, owns power companies in Mississippi and Alabama.

According to a report from the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog nonprofit, those utilities have historically made similar statements disavowing responsibility for helping the Southern Company achieve its companywide net-zero goal.

“Every subsidiary has said over and over again they are not really considering Southern Company’s goal in their state-level planning processes, which means that the goal doesn’t mean anything except the paper it’s written on,” said Daniel Tait, the Alabama-based author of the Energy and Policy Institute report.

“As Southern Company transitions to net zero operations, we believe having a diversified energy portfolio is crucial to reducing emissions while maintaining reliability and affordability for customers,” Georgia Power spokesperson Jacob Hawkins told the Telegraph in an email. “Southern Company’s enterprise-wide goals also consider its subsidiaries’ state-based planning processes and work with respective state Public Service Commissions.”

According to a report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Southern Company is responsible for the second-highest amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. of any company.

In Tait’s view, the company’s current plans make it hard to believe that will change anytime soon.

“Hitting net-zero targets when you’re continuing to add thousands and thousands of megawatts of new gas is impossible — it doesn’t matter how much nuclear or solar you add,” Tait said.

The hearings continue Wednesday and are livestreamed on the PSC’s YouTube page.