Ten candidates are vying for two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission in the May 19 primary. Early voting is already underway.
The commission oversees utilities, including telecommunications, natural gas and electricity – notably Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric utility. The commission has final say over how Georgia Power makes energy and what it charges customers. This gives commissioners substantial power over Georgians’ energy bills and the state’s climate future, because burning fossil fuels to make electricity is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. By its own description, “very few governmental agencies have as much impact on peoples’ lives as the PSC,” according to the commission’s website.
Still, elections for the commission have rarely received much attention. That changed last year. After a years-long delay due to a voting rights lawsuit, two seats on the commission ended up as the only statewide races on the ballot. Amid frustration over rising energy bills, voters overwhelmingly ousted the two Republican incumbents, sending Democrats to the five-member commission for the first time in 20 years.
With two seats up for election again this year, majority control of the commission is at stake. Both elections are statewide, though the candidates are required to live in designated districts.
Most candidates, regardless of party, broadly agree on the issues commanding the most attention: that energy bills should be kept in check, and that the commission should do more to protect ordinary customers from the costs of serving data centers. But they bring different backgrounds and approaches to the job.
District Three
Republican ballot
- Fitz Johnson
- Brandon Martin
Democratic ballot
- Peter Hubbard (Incumbent)
The seat for district three, which encompasses the metro Atlanta counties of Clayton, Dekalb and Fulton, was also on last year’s ballot, but only for a one-year term. Republican Fitz Johnson was appointed to the commission in 2021 to fill a vacancy. A special election for the remainder of the term was canceled in 2022 due to the lawsuit. When the state legislature laid out a new schedule for commission elections, they set a vote for a one-year term last year to be followed by a race for a full six-year term this year.
Democrat Peter Hubbard won last year’s election and is now running for reelection as the incumbent. Before his election, Hubbard intervened in cases before the commission as the founder of the nonprofit Georgia Center for Energy Solutions. He also worked for large-scale solar developers.
Hubbard told WABE he’s running for reelection because he needs more time to enact changes like expanding renewable energy and ensuring Georgia Power is getting the most out of existing resources before building expensive new ones. A full six-year term would include the “big, meaty decisions” of Georgia Power’s long-term resource plan and rate case. Hubbard said he wants to take an active role in shaping those plans, rather than reacting to what the utility proposes.
“There’s just a baseline to acting as a shield to imprudent spending. But I also think that a proactive commissioner can find even lower cost solutions than what otherwise would be provided,” he said.
Johnson, an Army veteran and businessman, is running to reclaim his former seat because he’s “got some unfinished business,” he told WABE at a campaign event. While most other candidates in the race have said the commission should do more to shield ordinary customers from data center costs, Johnson said the commission has “100% without doubt” protected them.
“When it comes to the data centers and the large loads, we put the ratepayers first,” he said. “We said we’re not going to put any burden on our ratepayers.”
During his time on the commission, Johnson voted for the current rate freeze and the contract terms designed to ensure data centers pay for their own infrastructure, though critics argue those protections aren’t enough. He also voted in favor of Georgia Power bill increases that became the focus of last year’s election and for the utility’s multibillion-dollar expansion to serve rising demand coming mostly from data centers.
Another Republican, Brandon Martin, is running against Johnson for the party’s nomination. He did not respond to requests for an interview. According to his campaign website, Martin is a graduate of Georgia Tech and now works as a purchasing manager in a “multi-billion dollar industry.” His website stresses the importance of reliable energy for Georgia’s growing economy and calls for electricity generation that’s “flexible and as US-centric as possible” in light of uncertain global fuel markets, though the site does not offer specifics.
District Five
Democratic ballot
- Craig Cupid
- Shelia Edwards
- Angelia Pressley
Republican ballot
- Bobby Mehan
- Carolyn Roddy
- Joshua Tolbert
Libertarian (not appearing on May primary ballots)
- Thomas Blooming
District five covers a stretch of West Georgia from the Tennessee border to the LaGrange area, including Cobb County. Republican Tricia Pridemore has held the seat since 2018, but is running for U.S. Congress in District 11 instead of seeking reelection. Three Democrats, three Republicans and a Libertarian have all thrown their hats into the ring to replace her.
All three Democrats stressed that a third Democrat joining the commission, along with commissioner Alicia Johnson and Hubbard if he wins reelection, would provide a third vote in favor of renewable energy programs and other policies they support.
“Two commissioners can demand better analysis. Three can stop the rubber stamping of utility requests,” said electrical engineer and lawyer Craig Cupid, one of the Democrats seeking his party’s nomination. His opponents shared similar sentiments.
Cupid emphasized his technical background in an interview with WABE, saying it gives him the expertise to act as a “watchdog against monopoly utilities.” He grew up in a working-class family, he said, after his parents immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to Augusta.
“Every penny counted,” Cupid said. “I understand when a rate increase affects someone, particularly lower income families.”
Democrat Shelia Edwards won the party’s district three primary in 2022 and was preparing to face Fitz Johnson in the general election when it was canceled because of the lawsuit. She joined that race, she told WABE, after getting a power bill of nearly $500. Edwards could pay it, she said, though it was “painful.”
“But what about the families that are struggling to keep a roof over their head, or food on the table or medicine,” she said. “How are they gonna afford this situation?”
Edwards worked with NASA engineers in the wake of the Challenger disaster, which she said gave her experience parsing complex technical material, which the commission needs to do. She’s also worked on political campaigns and local environmental advocacy.
Democrat Angelia Pressley told WABE she’s running because of commissioners’ “dismissal” of members of the public raising environmental and cost concerns.
“The public has to have more voice,” she said. “There has to be more balance at the commission between business concerns and public concerns.”
Pressley said if elected, she plans to host listening sessions around the state to hear Georgians’ concerns and educate them about the work of the commission. She teaches data analytics and primary research at Clark Atlanta University and works at what she describes as the intersection of business and the environment, work she said would help her promote sustainability and accountability on the commission.
The Republican candidates all stressed the importance of reliable energy. They said they support affordable clean energy as part of the utility’s overall mix, but would not impose a renewable mandate.
In a debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club, Republican Bobby Mehan pledged that he would not vote for new rate hikes and pushed his opponents to do the same.
“I’m willing to put my neck out there and say, ‘six years, not a single rate increase from Bobby Mehan,’” he said in the April debate.
He was more measured in a prior interview with WABE.
“I can assure you I’ll do the best I can to make sure that we keep the rates as affordable as possible, but we cannot forget about reliability,” Mehan told WABE. “That’s got to be part of the equation as well.”
Mehan has spent most of his career in healthcare records technology and now works as a mediator. He said that work has taught him “to be open-minded and kind of take this all the above approach,” a philosophy he said is key to innovating the energy grid.
Republican Carolyn Roddy is a regulatory lawyer who has worked for the Federal Communications Commission and on a rural electric service program in the first Trump administration. She told WABE her experience would help her keep utility costs in check.
“The Georgia Public Service Commission can do a better job of what they’re doing,” she said. “How dare you impose these kinds of rate increases when people’s family budgets are already stretched really thin?”
The commission, she said, should question and guide utilities but should not be either “a big impediment or a big rubber stamp” for their plans.
Republican Joshua Tolbert is an engineer who’s worked in several different types of power plants, a perspective he said is missing from the commission.
“I think it’s very difficult to make decisions in regulating a utility on multi billion dollar technical decisions without a strong technical background,” he told WABE. “I think there needs to be a nerd or two on the commission.”
Without technical expertise, Tolbert said, commissioners are less able to question and push back on proposals from utilities. That pushback is critical, he said, because Georgia Power is a monopoly, so the commission has to provide the kind of “consequences and feedback” that would normally come from free market competition.
The Libertarian party doesn’t have a primary, so the path to November’s election for Libertarian Thomas Blooming is different from the other candidates. He needs signatures from voters to appear on the ballot, though the party can collect those signatures for their slate of candidates as a whole.
Blooming is an electrical engineer who’s worked on data centers for Google and Facebook and now works for Utility Innovation Group, which builds microgrids with a focus on decarbonization and resilience. Through his work with data centers, Blooming told WABE, “I know they can afford to design and build their own power centers” instead of utilities building infrastructure that ordinary customers may end up paying for.
“There’s a little bit too much deference given to these large companies and I think they know it and they ask for the world,” he said. “I don’t think we should think of ourselves as second class or needing to cater to these large companies.”
Blooming stressed that he’s not against data centers, but that problems come up when the grid can’t support them. More nuclear energy could be one route to serving data centers, he said. Blooming also highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on any one source of energy. Too much natural gas could drive up costs, he said, while over-reliance on renewables could make the grid less reliable.
“You have to protect the ratepayers, but you also have to make decisions that keep Georgia Power healthy,” he said. “It doesn’t do anyone any good to just absolutely lock down on Georgia Power and then they’re not able to provide the power that they should.”
Rahul Bali of WABE contributed to this story.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
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