Alicia Johnson is running to be a Georgia energy regulator in part because she knows firsthand what it’s like to be a customer of a for-profit monopoly utility.

“I’ve been a Georgia Power customer all my life, unlike our current Public Service Commission, who are not Georgia Power customers,” she said at a recent campaign stop on the riverfront in Savannah, her hometown. 

The five-member Georgia PSC, all Republicans, regulates the rates charged by Georgia Power but not the rates charged by the not-for-profit membership-owned electric cooperatives like the Jackson Electric Membership Corporation that provides residential service to her opponent incumbent Tim Echols in Jackson County. 

“We’ve had six rate hikes in the last two years. Why? Because the current Republican Public Service Commission rubber stamps for utility monopolies to impose rate hike after rate hike,” Johnson said, emphasizing that the current commissioners don’t feel the effects of these hikes on their own wallets. “They’ve added hundreds of dollars per year to your electricity bill.”

Johnson grew up on Savannah’s south side and graduated from Windsor Forest High School. Married to H. Pernell Johnson, a longtime professor of foundational studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design, she still lives in Savannah. The couple have an adult daughter and a son who’s in high school. 

She’s the only Coastal Georgian in this year’s PSC races. In the last completed cycle of PSC elections in 2020, Savannahian Daniel Blackman lost to Republican Jason Shaw of Lanier County. At that time, the PSC district 1 included all the coastal counties. Subsequent redistricting put Chatham in District 2, but left the other coastal counties in District 1. The state is divided into five PSC districts; while candidates must live in their district, the vote for each seat is statewide. The next opportunity to vote for Shaw’s seat is in 2028. 

Johnson, 52, is a graduate of Armstrong State University, now Georgia Southern University–Armstrong Campus. She has a master’s from the University of Phoenix and a doctorate in business administration from Northcentral University. Johnson has spent her career in consulting and public service, including nearly five years as executive director of Step Up Savannah, a nonprofit that promotes financial stability and opportunity.

Chatham County Commissioner Aaron “Adot” Whitely expects that experience to translate well to the PSC.

“When we talk about energy challenges or costs, when we talk about what role the PSC plays just in everyday Georgians’ lives, I think Dr. Johnson has her finger on the pulse of that,” he said.

Whitely worked with Johnson’s opponent, Tim Echols, to found the Savannah Sustainability Council, but is backing Johnson in the election.

State Rep. Anne Allen Westbrook (D-Savannah) said she’d known Johnson as a leader in nonprofits and economic development and participated with her on a panel organized by the Urban League.  She sees Johnson’s “eye for people” as the missing element she can bring to the PSC.

 “I’m excited about the kind of consumer-first view that she’s bringing to this important role,” Westbrook said. “Most voters don’t realize how much influence these not very well known electeds have on their daily lives in terms of cost.”

Almost half of all Georgians experience asset poverty, Johnson said. Because these same people struggle with high energy bills in rental homes, that presents an opportunity for the PSC to innovate solutions.  

“We have a lot of heirs’ property, for example, here in Savannah,” she said. “Would some of those heirs’ property owners be interested in making solar array fields? So that’s interesting, yeah, but I’m saying we’ve never even asked these questions.”

And then there are empty commercial rooftops. 

“We bring in a tremendous amount of business into Georgia, even in this region. Why are we not asking some of those businesses to tile their rooftops with solar and to require a percentage of it (to feed the grid), so instead of extracting from our community and overworking our existing grid, they could actually return credits?” 

She points to innovations elsewhere, like at the Boston Medical Center, which helps patients pay for electricity needed to power critical home medical equipment. 

“The hospital and the university system have tiled their rooftops in solar, and they’re writing power prescriptions,” Johnson said. “They’re actually given the credits to medically fragile families.”

Former Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson said he’s known Alicia Johnson, who’s no relation, for about 15 years. They worked together on Savannah’s Racial Equity and Leadership (REAL) Task Force.

“She’s always been interested in economic uplift, because that’s what the Step Up agency is all about, helping people move out of poverty and to create economic security,” Otis Johnson said.

Johnson said she’s thinking about creative ways to protect Georgia Power ratepayers from a surge of data centers. 

“We need to look at opportunities for them to do some creative, innovative things, like solar arrays, micro gridding, battery storage, so that they can actually return credits back to the grid. We need to do impact assessments. We  need to have Community Benefit Agreements so they’re actually reinvesting back into the communities that they’re extracting so much from and so and also, they need to be audited so we can have a clear picture of what’s actually happening with data centers and how they’re impacting our community.”

She’s also concerned that the PSC sets Georgia Power’s guaranteed rate of return on equity too high at 11.9%.

“Do you get a 12% return on any of your investments? I would say you don’t. And so this is an opportunity for us to also place that same demand on Georgia Power, and ask that some of that money be reinvested and not be passed on to us as rate payers. 

We’ve linked places you can get more information about or from the candidate.

This article appears in Georgia Public Service Commission election, candidates, 2025.

Mary Landers is a reporter for The Current in Coastal Georgia with more than two decades of experience focusing on the environment. Contact her at mary.landers@thecurrentga.org She covered climate and...