Georgia Power, the utility company that covers the state of Georgia, recently released its 2025 integrated resource plan (IRP). This document lays out the utility’s plans to continue to meet its customers’ demands in the coming years.
This IRP is particularly notable because it reverses plans to close two coal-fired power plants. In Georgia Power’s last IRP, the coal plants Bowen and Sherer were set to close in 2028, but the new plan extends their operating lives until at least 2035.
These plants, with four coal-fired units each, can produce 3,376 and 3,720 megawatts (MW), respectively. In an environment where power demand is rising, and the full extent of that rise is as yet unclear, it makes sense to keep existing units online as long as possible. This is especially true for dispatchable power plants that can be ramped up and down to meet demand.
In their press release for the new plan, Georgia Power acknowledges the rise in power demand that the state is beginning to see: “Georgia Power continues to see positive economic development trends, in the short and long term, with many of the businesses coming to the state bringing large electrical demands.”
A major contributor to national power demand growth is attributed to the burgeoning data center sector as developing AI technology requires increasingly large computational power and, with it, greater electricity consumption. There are currently 139 data centers under construction in the U.S., with another 268 planned. This will constitute a significant increase in power demand. Georgia, alone, has 12 data centers currently under construction and six more planned. These data centers are a major component of the state’s power demand growth.
Over the next six years, the electrical load is projected to grow by 8,200 MW (a 2,200 mw increase in peak demand by the end of 2030 from the last IRP’s estimate). Keeping coal plants online isn’t the only dispatchable power focus in the IRP, it also includes uprates (upgrades that allow a power plant to produce more electricity) at existing power plants including a 268 MW uprate at Plant McIntosh, a gas plant near Savannah, and at the state’s nuclear power plants, Hatch and Vogtle, which would increase output by 112 MW. The plan also includes additions to renewables with 1,100 MW of new renewables proposed.
This plan shows shifting expectations as power demand rises and for many the economics (and politics) behind keeping coal plants online makes sense again. It’ll be interesting to see if the Trump administration takes action to repeal the Biden administration’s Power Plant Rule, which would require the closure of all coal and most gas plants by the 2030s. Congress introduced a bipartisan bicameral resolution to undo the final Clean Power Plan 2.0 last year, but it wasn’t acted on. President Trump and his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are expected to undo the Biden-Harris-era rule.
As power demand grows across the country, we’re likely to see other utilities protect existing plants online as long as possible, uprate the plants that have room for productivity gains, and bring new plants online as quickly as possible.