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- Limited transparency: contract approval avoided public hearings, leaving communities like Effingham County without public scrutiny.
- Uncertain cost impacts: protections depend on Georgia Power assumptions, possibly shifting incremental costs to residential ratepayers.
- Risk allocation: negotiated terms shift more risk to large customers such as OpenAI, yet hinge on conditional ifs.
PSC Staff reviewed the OpenAI contract originally filed by Georgia Power and determined that additional risk mitigating mechanisms were needed to comply with the Commission’s requirements for serving new Large Load Data Center customers. Once changes were made, the Staff sent a letter to the Commission signing off on the contract without requiring any further review by the Commissioners themselves or any public proceeding.
While the Staff negotiated some additional protections and benefits for residential customers, shifting more risk to OpenAI and other Large Load Data Center Customers, they relied on assumptions put forth by Georgia Power that adding massive data centers to the grid would spread the utility’s costs over a larger customer base, potentially lowering costs for residential and other ratepayers.
But the letter to Commissioners is full of “ifs” that leave open the possibility that incremental costs could be shifted to other ratepayers in future proceedings. It lets the Commissioners off the hook for holding public hearings on the terms of Large Load Customer contracts. This compounds the lack of transparency that occurred when Georgia Power, OpenAI and a handful of local elected officials approved the deal to site the data center in Effingham County without any public scrutiny.
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