Georgia’s Green Manufacturing Boom Is Keeping Coal Plants Open

Georgia is arguably the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act economy. The state has been a magnet for manufacturing companies seeking to supply batteries, electric cars, and solar cells in order to capture the law’s generous tax credits for domestically built green technology.

While some of the power that supplies these facilities (not to mention data centers also flocking to the state) is clean — the only new U.S. nuclear reactors built this decade are in Georgia, and 38% of electricity generation for the state’s largest utility, Georgia Power, came from non-carbon-emitting sources in 2024 — the state is now planning to bolster its natural gas and coal fleets to support its enormous projected load growth.

Georgia Power released its 2025 Integrated Resource Plan on Friday, laying out to state regulators its forecasts for electricity demand and how it intends to bolster and adjust its fleet to meet the new usage. These exercises almost always feature eye-popping demand estimates and corrections and addendums to older plans to account for even more electricity growth than had been previously projected.

This time around, Georgia Power says it expects 8,200 megawatts of load growth through the end of 2030, which is already about 2,000 megawatts more than what it expected during its last planning exercise, when it updated its 2022 plan in 2023. To get a sense of the scale of this growth, the new Vogtle nuclear reactors have a little over 1,000 megawatts of capacity each. Together, they took 11 years and over $30 billion to build.

Georgia Power also expects 7% annual growth through the end of 2030, more than double the 3% annual growth through the end of the decade that utility planners expect nationwide.

That new power won’t just be powering data centers. It will also run much of the green economy that the Biden administration tried to build up.

“New and expanding economic development projects in Georgia have progressed more rapidly and on a larger scale than in previous years,” Georgia Power said in its filing. “Growth in emerging industries such as electric transportation (‘ET’), data centers, and solar manufacturing have accelerated since 2021.”

The report also said that by the middle of last year, “the manufacturing sector led in both investment and job creation in Georgia, representing 53% of job growth and 54% of capital investment in the state.”

Hyundai opened a plant making electric SUVs outside of Savannah in 2024, while Kia makes electric SUVs near the Alabama border after making a $200 million investment in the plant. Also last year, the Korean solar company Qcells started making solar panels in Dalton, Georgia and other components in Cartersville; another Korean company, SK Group, has plants in Commerce that make batteries for Volkswagen and Ford. And in the final days of the Biden administration, Rivian got a $6.6 billion Energy Department loan for its planned plant between Atlanta and Athens.

One reason manufacturers come to Georgia is for the power, Tim Echols, the vice-chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, argued in an Atlanta Journal Constitution op-ed Thursday: “Southern Co. and Georgia Power have a reputation for reliability,” he wrote.

And for the foreseeable future that Georgia Power plans for, that means some of its most polluting and carbon-emitting power plants will stay open.

The utility said it would continue operating its four-generator Plant Bowen coal facility, two units of which were previously scheduled to retire by 2028, as well as maintaining over 1,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity at two other plants that had previously been scheduled to shut down at the end of 2028. Georgia Power is asking state regulators to approve operation of the coal plants through at least 2034.

In the update to its previous IRP, Georgia Power extended the life of a coal plant operated by its sister utility Mississippi Power and proposed adding 1.4 gigawatts of generators that could run on natural gas or oil.

Compared to 2022, “the Company now projects capacity needs that necessitate both the extension of existing coal and gas-steam units along with the procurement of new capacity resources,” Georgia Power said in its IRP Friday.

Georgia Power’s parent company, Southern Company, still has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, but said in the filling that “the feasibility of continued progress toward a low-carbon future, including a net-zero future, is highly dependent on the continued use of natural gas and continued technological advancements that will facilitate a reliable and economic low-carbon electricity supply.”

The utility also wants to upgrade existing gas-fueled and hydroelectric plants, as well as acquire an additional 1,100 megawatts of new renewables, adding up to 4,000 megawatts of procurements. Georgia Power’s previous update to its 2022 IRP called for the construction of new oil and gas plants, which were approved by regulators last year.

"Georgia Power's 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) includes adding up to 4,000 megawatts of new renewable energy resources by 2035, including 1,000 MW by 2032, and more than 1,000 miles of new transmission lines. Clean energy resources and transmission solutions are vital to reducing customer costs and maintaining the high level of reliability Georgians have grown accustomed to,” Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, said in a statement.