Black voters went to the polls with their electric bills on their minds and a message: The rates are too high.
As a result, Georgia voters elected two Democratic commissioners Peter Hubbard and Sheila Edwards Tuesday.
The five-member Public Service Commission is the regulatory board that decides whether monopolistic utility companies like Atlanta Gas Light and Georgia Power, which provides electricity to an estimated 2.8 million customers across the state, can increase how much they charge for energy services.
PSC elections have even greater implications for many Black Georgians, who tend to carry a higher energy cost burden due to having less energy efficient homes.
The PSC impacts how much Georgia Power and Atlanta Gas Light customers pay for electricity and natural gas in the coming years. It will also determine whether residential customers, or tech giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta bear the brunt of the cost for new energy infrastructure to power developing data centers.
Tax breaks helped make metro Atlanta the No. 1 market in America for new data center construction this year, according to a CBRE investment firm analysis.
The PSC will be in charge of ensuring the cost for building those plants and additional electric infrastructure aren’t passed on to residential consumers in the form of rate hikes.
The estimated 200-plus active, planned, and proposed data centers in the region are enough to make metro Atlanta the second-largest data center market in the world.
“Black voters in particular are concerned about where these data centers are going … and ultimately whether or not the data centers are going to make their bills go up,” Brionté McCorkle, executive director of Georgia Conservation Voters, a group that specializes in mobilizing Black voters on environmental justice issues, told Capital B Atlanta.
PSC commissioners don’t decide whether new data centers get built, but they do determine who pays to build the infrastructure used to power those data centers. In recent years, PSC commissioners have been accused of rubber-stamping rate hikes for Georgia Power and Atlanta Gas Light to support the state’s data center and artificial intelligence boom.
This year’s PSC elections will decided the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans on the five-member regulatory body for the first time in recent memory.
