Last year, Georgia Power got permission from the state’s Public Service Commission to radically increase the amount of electricity the utility generates and sells. The reason data centers. Now as communities across the state make deals with data center developers, there’s reason to believe Georgia has promised more power than it has to offer — even after Georgia Power’s expansion. These are the findings of the nonprofit Science for Georgia, of which scientist Amy Sharma is executive director. She spoke with GPB’s Peter Biello.
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Peter Biello: So first question: What’s your bottom-line estimate of how much electricity data centers may be seeking in Georgia versus how much the state has on offer?
Amy Sharma: So I wish I could give you a super simple answer, but the range is between 29 gigawatts and 58 gigawatts.
Peter Biello: That’s a huge range, and just so we can wrap our heads around that, what is a gigawatt?
Amy Sharma: So, 1.21 gigawatts will send a DeLorean through time, but in real-life land, there’s like entire webpages on what does that mean. But a gigawatt is about the output of one nuclear reactor or half of Hoover Dam. And so, to put that in perspective, we now have Plant Vogtle, which has four nuclear reactors at it. We were really excited about its opening a couple of years ago, yay! Uh, that was big fanfare. That has four nuclear reactors that produces a little over 4 gigawatts of power.
Peter Biello: Recently, Georgia Power CEO Chris Womack told company shareholders that once Effingham County OpenAI data center contract is confirmed, Georgia Power will have promised one gigawatt more electrical capacity than it has permission to provide. So that’s far lower than the number — the range you just provided. Why? Why is there such a difference between your numbers and his?
Amy Sharma: There are approximately, according to our stats — we have over about 81 proposed new data centers for the state of Georgia. Of those, only 25 have released how much power that they’re going to need. And so those 24, in their official documentation, and press releases, DRIs, stuff like that, say they’re gonna need about 16 gigawatts of power. And Georgia Power has permission to build about 14 gigawatts of power, so rounding the numbers and fudging the errors, he’s about right that it’s about one gigawatt more. So that’s not wrong. The problem is there are 81 proposed data centers. Of that, we could find 57 that had listed their square feet, which is the other way that you can use to estimate power. So that’s over twice as many as the ones that have listed their proposed power. And of those, you have to use like some math and figure out how to do it. And so that’s where we get the number of 29 gigawatts to 58 gigawatts; it’s based on the square footage of the facility.
Peter Biello: So it seems like there’s a lot of unknowns in the state of Georgia. If you tried to compile a list of all the data centers, you may have the locations, but you may not have the size of each data center, or you may not have the expected power usage in that list.
Amy Sharma: Yeah. So this just points out the startling lack of transparency around all of these developments anyways, right? So if you think about it, 25 of them have declared their proposed power needs. We only know 57 actual square footage. There’s another 25 some-odd that we don’t know anything about and we can’t even estimate how much power because we don’t even know how, like, large of facility they’re going to be.
Peter Biello: Here at GPB, we looked at your data. We saw something we didn’t really understand, and that’s that the average needs of the data centers on the way — that we know about anyway — seem to be about twice that of the older existing data centers. How can that be?
Amy Sharma: How can that be? So two things. One, old school data centers. Data centers have existed since the internet was created. They’re — they used to just be like random office buildings or in the basement of the bank, right? And they were just holding cloud storage and backup and stuff like that. So those old places were mainly storing data and information, and when you store data and information, it requires a lot less power. It’s just not a very intensive thing, to store things. New data centers are the AI hyperscale data centers. AI, hyperscale AI, is very processor-intensive, which means it’s very energy-intensive. So they’re going to need a lot more power.
Peter Biello: Hmm. A number of data center-related bills failed in the state legislature this year. In your view, would any of them have made it easier for the public to get an accurate handle on what these data centers are going to need energy-wise?
Amy Sharma: Yes. So there was one bill, HB 528; it was called the High Use Facilities Transparency Act, and it would require any high-use facility to disclose how much power and water it was going to need. So that would have been a good one. There was also Senate Bill 421, which was transparency of research use, and that basically would have said that no government body can enter into an NDA around power and water use. And so either one of those would have really made most of these deals a lot more open and transparent to the public.
Peter Biello: The NDA one strikes me as particularly interesting because several companies had been using NDAs and that led to a lot of secrecy leading up to public approval of some of these more controversial projects, not necessarily in Georgia, but nationwide.
Amy Sharma: NDAs are nothing new. They make sense, right? So if you’re a Hyundai plant and you’re coming into Georgia, you’re probably shopping around Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, blah, blah blah. So the NDA makes a little bit of sense because otherwise people are undercutting and there’s a lot of deals and stuff like that. So, like, the NDA in large facility, like industrial things, is not a new trick of the trade. The problem is, is they consider everything now is covered under the NDA, and for some reason data center companies say the amount of power and water they’re gonna need is a trade secret, which makes absolutely no sense. None of us could replicate their technology or figure out what they’re doing if we learned how much power and water they were using. And so they’ve just taken the NDA, like, a bridge too far. And so what’s really hamstringing a lot of these things is they can’t say anything. Like, we’ll be at a town hall, and I’ll say, “This one, based on its square footage, is gonna use this much power and this much water,” and someone will come up and be like, “That’s not the right number.” And I’ll be like, “Well, can you tell me the right number?” And they’re like, “No.” And you’re like, “I don’t, like — we would love to know the right number.” I would love to have better numbers to estimate off of.
We asked Georgia Power how they plan to manage the 1 gigawatt of power required by OpenAI but which the utility does not have permission to generate. They point to a stipulation in ongoing contract negotiations that OpenAI agree to reduce their energy use at times when Georgia Power says the larger grid demands it.
