Solar industry spends to flip control of Georgia utility commission

Voters will have a chance to pick their utility regulators in nine states this November. But Georgia is one of the only states that could flip party control of its public utility commission, an often overlooked institution that determines how much people’s energy bills will rise.

Last year, as energy affordability bubbled to the surface of the American political scene, Democrats won two of the five seats on the previously all-Republican Georgia Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities’ spending and how much those companies can charge their captive customers. One of those new commissioners — Peter Hubbard — has to run again this year due to a quirk of scheduling. Another Democrat, Shelia Edwards, is running for an open seat on the commission.

The race has attracted attention from advocates and wonks who follow utility regulation and consumer protection. It also touches on the combustible topic of data center construction, as utility Georgia Power seeks to build massive new fossil-gas plants to serve AI customers in the state. Now, the solar industry is hoping to sway the outcome for the candidates more supportive of clean energy deployment — in this case, the Democrats.

A super PAC tied to the Solar Energy Industries Association is spending $250,000 to run ads on behalf of Hubbard and Edwards, on digital platforms and connected TV, like streaming services.

That’s a slight sum compared to, say, the $77.6 million that has been spent on Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. But it’s also the solar trade group’s largest investment in an election in the aftermath of a bruising policy loss in last year’s congressional budget law, which ended up slashing tax credits for renewable energy despite the industry’s lobbying. Emerging from that fight, SEIA took a ​“hard look” at what it needed to do to build durable political power, said Steph Bosh, the organization’s senior vice president of communications.

The solar industry has grown from a power-sector sideshow to a driving force in the last 20 years. But it has yet to build a political operation to compete with the likes of incumbent fossil-fuel lobbies. To help rectify this, Bosh took the helm at SEIA’s 501(c)(4) nonprofit, the Community Clean Energy Coalition, and raised $2 million from industry and philanthropic sources to disburse through its affiliated American Power Forward PAC in this cycle.

Meanwhile, a separate group of clean energy investors and entrepreneurs recently launched the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC, a truculent effort to exact electoral revenge on politicians who led the charge against clean energy policies in last year’s federal budget process. In the primary cycle this year, the coalition batted a perfect score: Five of its targets lost their races, while a pro-renewables Republican the PAC supported won hers. This month, the PAC announced a new slate of targets for the general election, committing $15 million to hounding them with negative ads.

SEIA has kept its distance from that effort, with CEO Tim Pawlenty previously telling Canary Media that his group is ​“in the business of making more friends, not more enemies.” SEIA’s involvement in the Georgia race reveals a more nuanced strategic orientation: Engage in elections where the smallest check can produce the biggest benefit for clean energy.

“If you’ve got one or two million, you need to spend that money really wisely. And so it’s not our goal to be everywhere across the whole country,” Bosh said. SEIA analyzed where politicians were getting in the way of clean energy, then looked for tight vote margins and levels of election spending that were more approachable, ​“so that if we had a limited amount of resources, we knew where we could actually move the needle the furthest.”

Public utility commission races don’t attract the kind of money and attention that congressional races or higher-ranking statewide contests do. A few hundred thousand dollars could make a dent, and with such low general awareness of the race, simply letting voters know it’s happening can help.

As for the potential rewards, Georgia stands at the precipice of massive new grid investment, making the next few years crucial for determining what Georgia Power builds. 

On one realistic extreme, the utility could tally up all the proposed data centers that tech giants say they want to build in the state, and then construct as many gas turbines as it would take to provide that new capacity. 

However, if the regulators overseeing the utility had a more critical mindset, they could push for a higher share of cheap solar generation paired with batteries as part of the portfolio. Gas turbines keep getting more expensive, and their timelines for delivery keep stretching further into the future, but solar and storage together offer a low-cost and relatively quick-to-build alternative. This approach could protect consumers from the inflationary pressure on gas power plants by locking in stable, fuel-free electricity sources.

If voters are skeptical that the current Public Service Commission majority has their pocketbooks firmly in mind, it may be because they’ve familiarized themselves with the PSC’s recent activity.

The body has approved six utility requests to raise customer rates since 2023, SEIA noted. Last December, the commission responded to the surprise Democratic wins by passing, on the eve of the new commissioners’ swearing-in, a sweeping approval for Georgia Power to build 10 gigawatts of new gas plants and batteries in anticipation of data center demand, raising average household bills by an estimated $20 per month.

Then there’s the case of Republican Tricia Pridemore, who resigned from her commission seat on Sept. 4 and, before the dust could settle in her old office, began lobbying for DC Blox, one of the largest AI infrastructure developers operating in Georgia. (Pridemore told The Georgia Recorder that she won’t appear at the commission on behalf of her new employer, at least for the first year, a time frame stipulated by Georgia’s revolving-door policy.)

If the Democrats flip control of the PSC, SEIA could build credibility in its effort to spend dollars sparingly but effectively. ​“Our goal is to raise a lot more in the future,” Bosh said.