Report puts Ga. Power profits at 23% of bills, a figure the company disputes

Georgia Power’s profits accounted for almost 23% of each customer’s bill last year, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Energy & Policy Institute.

That means that for an average summertime bill of $200, a customer paid about $46 toward company profits.

Georgia Power was one of 79 investor-owned monopoly utilities EPI examined using publicly reported financial data for last year. The company reported 2025 profits of $2.85 billion. Georgia Power’s profits were among the highest examined, topped only by Florida Power & Light (27.44%), the Midwestern company MidAmerican Energy (27.16%), and California’s SoCal Edison (26.11%).

Through spokesman Joshua Peacock, Georgia Power disputed EPI’s findings.

“This advocacy-oriented calculator is based on data from high‑level public financial filings, and even the Energy and Policy Institute notes that it’s a ‘deliberately straightforward calculation’ in its disclaimer,” he wrote in an email. “The assertion that more than 22% of a customer’s bill payment goes to Georgia Power profits is incorrect and misleading largely because it is based solely on overall revenue and includes multiple revenue streams that never touch a customer’s bill.”

Daniel Tait, EPI Research and Communications Director and a co-author of a report that accompanied the calculator, said that the nonprofit’s methodology was to divide a utility’s net income by its operating revenue.

“So if we took their advice and we removed things from operating revenue that would actually make its operating revenue less, it would make it look like there’s actually a higher percentage of profit, not lower,” he told The Current GA.

The rising cost of electricity has become a major consumer and political issue in Georgia. Two Republican incumbents on the Public Service Commission lost their seats on that regulatory board in November after they voted to approve six rate increases over the prior two years, resulting in an estimated increase of about $500 per year for the average household.

Peacock explained that regulators set Georgia Power’s return on equity, or ROE, for its capital investments in new power plants and other infrastructure.

“In exchange for maintaining and improving the power grid, and delivering reliable, affordable service to every customer in our service territory, we are allowed (not guaranteed) to earn a reasonable return on our investments, which is set and approved by the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC),” he wrote. “This band is locked at 9.5% to 11.9% – this range is the best representation of what is included on customer bills as profit. If we earn above this range, we are required to share most of those profits back to customers.”

But most of the 2022 earning above that band didn’t get returned to customers in 2022, according to the PSC. It found that Georgia Power earned a 13.69 percent ROE that year, resulting in $292.8 million in excess revenues. Of that, $117.1 million, or 40%, was refunded to customers, $117.1 million was applied to regulatory assets, and Georgia Power kept $58.6 million.

Tait said the common misunderstanding of ROE’s actual impact is part of what motivated his organization to make the calculator, the first such public-facing tool they’ve created.

“Utility bills are really high and have become a big part of the public discourse,” Tait said. “But actually, this very dynamic is what motivated us to do this.”

People talk about ROE being too high, but they may not fully understand its impact.

“That’s true, but it is missing the larger picture of what does that ROE decision, that profit decision that a public service commission makes, how does that actually impact somebody’s end bill?” Tait said. “And that’s what we’re trying to show here. Is like, how much of your actual bill is going towards the profit.”

He offered an hypothetical example: Georgia Power builds a $1 billion power plant, and 50% of that cost is equity. If the ROE is 10% they charge that on the $500 million.

“But here’s the thing that people miss: That’s just year one,” he said. “Year two, it depreciates a little bit. Let’s say $490 million is left. I get to charge that ROE on it again. And then the next year, $480 million again. And so that happens every year until the plant is fully depreciated. And then you add all those up for all the power plants, and this is how you get a smaller ROE number, but you have a huge base of investments that they’re charging that to. That bloats your bill.”

He likened utility profits on your bill to how a 30-year mortgage works. Over the life of the loans, homeowners typically end up paying as much in interest as they do for the house itself.

“The same thing is true for power plants and the things that utilities build. In fact, it’s actually even higher,” he said.

The Tide brings regular notes and observations on news and events by The Current staff.