After years of negotiations, data centers and other large customers of Georgia Power have finally won a pathway to pay for their own new clean energy projects to be built and connected to the utility’s grid.

If it works as planned, the new customer-identified resource, or CIR, program could help prevent data center growth from raising power bills for Georgia Power’s customers at large — and offer a template for other utilities and regulators wrestling with similar issues nationwide.

Georgia Power is planning one of the largest new fossil-fuel buildouts in the country. Over the next five years, the utility wants to build nearly 10 gigawatts of new capacity resources, roughly 60% of which would come from natural gas power plants. The utility says it needs this new capacity to keep the grid running as power-hungry data centers flood into the state.

Those new power plants may be justifiable if the proposed data centers get constructed and keep operating long enough for the utility to recoup the costs through electricity sales. But if the AI bubble deflates, as more and more industry observers fear will happen, then the cost of paying off those utility investments could fall on everyday customers.

Programs like CIR are meant to protect customers at large from that worst-case scenario as well as from upward pressure on utility rates linked to data centers.

Its effectiveness on that front will depend on whether it results in Georgia Power building a smaller amount of electricity infrastructure than it’s currently planning on through its normal processes, thus reducing cost burdens on customers.

But that effectiveness will be hard to measure, given how the program is designed. Under the program, Georgia Power does not have to include any CIR projects in its long-term grid planning. If regulators don’t rectify that and force the utility to incorporate those projects into its plans, it may wind up adding gigawatts of unnecessary power plants in addition to whatever clean energy moves through the new program. Customers at large would foot part of the bill.

This issue will likely come to a head in Georgia Power’s next integrated resource planning process — the sprawling regulatory proceedings aimed at determining how much power, and what mix of resources, a utility needs to develop or maintain to meet its future needs.

Still, the unanimous vote approving CIR indicates that state regulators want Georgia Power to ​“work with large loads on the system in a way that manages cost shifts and concerns related to affordability,” said Nidhi Thakar, senior vice president for policy at the Corporate Energy Buyers Association (CEBA), the trade group that negotiated with the utility to create the CIR program.

CEBA includes major hyperscalers — like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle — that signed a ​“ratepayer protection pledge” at the White House last month, promising to limit the risk that their data center expansion plans will increase everyday utility customers’ electricity rates. But most of the actions that could actually fulfill that pledge will rely on efforts from individual states and utilities, energy experts say — such as the CIR program from Georgia and Georgia Power.

“These large customers are willing to put down capital on the front end and take on the risk” to build the clean energy to supply significant portions of their demand, said Katie Southworth, CEBA’s deputy director for market and policy innovation in the South and Southeast. ​“This program opens up the procurement pathways.”

How Georgia Power’s ​“bring your own clean energy” program works

Starting this summer, large commercial and industrial customers in Georgia Power’s territory can use CIR to seek out and work directly with independent developers of solar, wind, battery, geothermal, and other carbon-free energy projects, Southworth said.

That’s a first for Georgia Power. As with many utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, it is vertically integrated, meaning it has exclusive rights to build and operate power plants. The utility already lets big customers subscribe to clean energy projects that Georgia Power selects and contracts with, but it hasn’t previously allowed customers to bring their own specific clean energy projects to the table.

States without vertically integrated utilities let independent power producers contract directly with big customers. Big power users, and tech giants in particular, have taken advantage of this arrangement where available. U.S. corporate clean-energy procurement surpassed 130 gigawatts of new generation capacity between 2014 and 2025, according to the latest CEBA data. That’s roughly 44% of all new generation capacity built in that time, CEBA told Canary Media.

Under the CIR option, these large customers still won’t directly purchase energy from the projects that they have identified. Instead, they will pay Georgia Power a monthly tariff designed to cover the projects’ construction and operating costs, plus a reasonable rate of profit for the projects’ owners, in an arrangement commonly known as a ​“sleeved power purchase agreement,” or sleeved PPA.

Solar and batteries will probably make up the lion’s share of that new CIR capacity, given that more than 20 gigawatts of those resources are being developed and seeking interconnection in Georgia, according to data from the Southern Renewable Energy Association trade group.

Solar and batteries are also the cheapest source of new generation capacity available nationwide, which could drive lower energy costs for the big customers contracting for it and for Georgia Power customers at large. Together, solar and batteries are expected to account for nearly 90% of new energy capacity built nationwide this year.

Under the CIR structure, if the power from these projects is cheaper than the equivalent cost of power generated and delivered by the utility, 75% of the resulting savings will go to participating customers, while 25% will be shared with other Georgia Power customers, Southworth said.

That could help get large-load customers — namely AI data centers — the massive amounts of energy they need without increasing utility rates for customers at large.

Georgia Power’s previous renewable-procurement structures have helped ​“diversify our generation mix and increase reliability,” Wilson Mallard, the utility’s director of renewable development, told Canary Media in an email. Adding CIR to those existing structures ​“offers the opportunity for the procurement of additional renewable resources at competitive prices to meet customer needs,” he said. ​“We expect these projects will provide energy and capacity benefits to the system value for all Georgia Power customers.”

Can new clean energy replace gas plants?

CEBA fought for some key features that made it into the final CIR program approved by Georgia regulators last week. 

For one, Georgia Power removed a contentious provision that would have allowed the utility to terminate CIR contracts at any time and without penalty, Southworth said.

Additionally, small commercial and industrial users of power can now band together to collectively achieve the 3-megawatt minimum required to participate, Southworth noted. That could expand options for retail chains, hotels, local businesses, or local governments to secure their own clean energy resources. And customers will be allowed to transfer in and out of those arrangements, which allows for more flexible participation.

But CEBA wasn’t able to secure one feature it had wanted — a way for CIR customers to earn credits for the capacity value of the projects they bring online. Capacity is how utilities measure the impact that power plants, solar and wind farms, batteries, and other resources have on meeting the peak demands on their grid.

Those peak demands are important because they determine how much generation and grid infrastructure that utilities ultimately build. What’s more, large utility customers typically have to pay demand charges, which are based on how much power they use during those handful of hours when electricity use hits its upper limit.

The CIR program’s monthly tariff is an energy-only tariff. That means participating customers won’t be able to reduce their demand charges on the basis of the projects they’ve enabled to be built under CIR — even if that infrastructure helps Georgia Power reduce its peak demand.

But sooner or later, Georgia Power and its regulators will need to consider how to capture the grid value these CIR projects provide.

That’s likely to play out in the utility’s future integrated resource planning, Southworth said. ​“When we get to the next IRP, I’m confident there will be some resources — solar and storage — that will be brought on” under CIR, Southworth said. ​“Those will be resources on the Georgia Power system, and through that modeling, they will absolutely show up” as part of the capacity calculations.

The question then will be whether that newly unveiled CIR capacity will alter Georgia Power’s current power plant expansion plans, which were approved in December through a regulatory process that has unfolded largely outside the utility’s standard IRP proceedings. Georgia Power and regulators justified this approach to deal with a massive increase in the utility’s forecasts of how much power and capacity it will need to supply in future years, which have surged from 400 megawatts in 2022 to 6.6 gigawatts in 2023 to 8.5 gigawatts in 2025.

But environmental groups, consumer advocates, and others say Georgia Power’s latest expansion plan for gas power plants and batteries allows the utility to overbuild for a data center boom that may fail to emerge. Georgia Power will be able to earn guaranteed levels of profit on the $16.3 billion in ​“company-owned projects” in that plan, giving it an incentive to overestimate its power needs.

Last month, a group of environmental and faith groups brought a legal challenge against the decision. ​“The commission still has to apply its rules to protect its ratepayers from overbuilding,” said Isabella Ariza, a staff attorney with the Sierra Club, one of the groups filing the legal challenge. ​“And we think those rules are the only protection that ratepayers have at this point.”

Ariza noted that the final version of the CIR program wasn’t yet posted by the Public Service Commission, which limited her ability to discuss how the resources brought online under the program might impact future capacity planning.

Even so, ​“in future IRPs, Georgia Power would have a hard time theoretically explaining to the commission why the clean resources shouldn’t offset some of the peak demand,” she said. ​“But we’ll see.”

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