Three years ago, on July 31, 2023, Plant Vogtle Unit 3 entered commercial service, the first new nuclear reactor completed in the United States in more than thirty years. Georgia Power, Governor Kemp, and Georgia Public Service Commissioners celebrated the moment as a triumph of American engineering and a milestone for the nation’s energy future. But completing a project with no cost cap and no deadline is not success. Success means delivering what you promised, when you promised it, for the price you promised.
And in that regard, Plant Vogtle is the costliest failure in state history.
On Aug. 1, 2023, the day after Unit 3 entered commercial service, residential customers saw their rates increase 7.8 percent, the largest rate increase in Georgia history. This came after years of assurances that both new reactors together would raise bills only about 2 to 3 percent.
What began as a $14 billion project became more than $36 billion and is now the most expensive power plant ever built on Earth.
Time for an apology
Yet no one has apologized. Georgia Power has never apologized for Vogtle going $17 billion over budget or taking fifteen years to build instead of seven. Governor Brian Kemp and legislators who continue to defend Vogtle have never apologized for saddling Georgia families with decades of higher electric bills.
There has, however, been political accountability: Georgia voters removed two of the five Republican commissioners at the first opportunity they had last November. A third commissioner lost her bid for a seat in Congress in May of 2026.
Yet, the General Assembly appears not to have received the same message. During this year’s legislative session, Republican legislators began to quietly lay the groundwork for another generation of nuclear construction.
Representative Don Parsons, chairman of the House Energy and Utilities Committee, sponsored House Bill 1320 to amend Georgia’s Integrated Resource Planning statute by explicitly adding nuclear generating facilities to the list of preferred electricity resources. The bill passed out of committee on Feb. 25, 2026.
Senator Tim Bearden sponsored Senate Resolution 482, creating a Nuclear Power Study Committee to examine how advanced nuclear reactors could meet Georgia’s future electricity demand. The Senate approved the resolution on March 31, 2026.
Senator Bearden stated in committee that nuclear power will strengthen Georgia’s economy. Yet Plant Vogtle produced approximately a 25 percent increase in residential and small business electric rates, costs that ripple throughout the economy because electricity is a basic input to nearly every product and service. Higher energy costs are a key driver of inflation.
Remarkably, Senator Bearden’s study committee includes only representatives of organizations that supported Vogtle, including Georgia Power, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, Electric Membership Corporations (EMC), and legislators. Missing are consumer advocates who represent the people paying for Vogtle, and energy economists, renewable energy executives, environmental organizations, and university researchers with expertise in modern electric systems.
Representative Parsons claimed in committee that commercial fusion power is just around the corner. That’s just not true: engineers and researchers say that fusion remains decades away from reaching commercial deployment, if it ever does.
Transformative wealth
It is clear that Georgia lawmakers would rather promote the next nuclear project than learn any lessons from the last one: neither Senator Bearden nor Representative Parsons has created a study committee to understand the failures of Vogtle.
Under the system created by the state legislature, Georgia Power earns billions of dollars in profits for building things like power plants, regardless of whether costs were managed. That system rewards spending rather than performance and was created 100 years ago when we needed rapid investments in grid infrastructure.
That system is now rewarding Southern Company shareholders with huge riches for the billions of dollars in Plant Vogtle’s cost overruns while profoundly harming Georgians. Georgia Power bills are eighth highest in the nation while Georgia Power earned an unprecedented $2.8 billion in profits last year, leading Southern Company CEO Chris Womack to term the year’s profits as “transformational.”
A technological achievement
The real technological revolution in America is not nuclear power: it is solar paired with battery storage whose extraordinary cost reductions and performance improvements have transformed electricity markets around the world, including the U.S. In 2024 and 2025, more than 90 percent of new generating capacity added in the United States came from wind, solar, and battery storage.
Last year, California powered its grid with two-thirds clean energy using solar and battery storage integration and reducing expensive gas and its harmful gas emissions by 40 percent.
Last year Texas surpassed California to become the nation’s leader, with renewables accounting for roughly 37 percent of the state’s total electricity supply.
Solar power is now the cheapest electricity in history and has been since 2020. But Georgia ranks 39th nationally in solar generation per capita despite having some of the nation’s best solar resources because state law rewards spending without performance, and that means big spending on nuclear and gas, not affordable solar.
A reliable grid?
Georgia Power’s failure to deliver Vogtle on budget did more than produce the largest rate increase in Georgia history. In 2025, Georgia Power disconnected 273,800 residential customers, or one in every nine households, for nonpayment, more than ten times the national average. Georgia Power’s supporters point to a grid that is reliable, but 11 percent of Georgia Power’s residential customers did not find it reliable when they were disconnected.
No business should be rewarded simply for spending a lot of money while meeting no performance requirements. If legislators want to reform Georgia’s energy future, they should begin by reforming the incentives that produced Plant Vogtle and are now causing Georgia Power to pursue expensive gas and high-voltage transmission lines for data centers.
Legislators who continue steering Georgia towards whatever financially benefits Georgia Power while ignoring the harm that results will find that voters notice them just as they did the three Georgia Public Service Commissioners who recently lost their seats.
Power companies hold a monopoly on the electricity going ito the grid, and on the market as well. This has retarded the growth of solar energy. Even today, rooftop solar installations have to be isolated from the grid. They can’t contribute, can’t sell power back, can’t share their excess power with neighbors. But electricity is electricity. It’s a great waste
Way to go, Patty, for sticking your neck out and speaking the truth. I personally think that nuclear power could be a good part of clean energy, though perhaps in smaller micro-sized nuclear plants instead of massive pigs like Vogtle. Your point about solar+battery is, of course, spot-on.
Regarding how Southern Company (GA Power) makes money, your points are excellent. To further elaborate, my understanding is that GA Power profits are generally tied to a Return on Equity (ROE), currently set to around 10.5% (with an allowable earnings band up to 11.9%). The big problem is that GA Power is incentivized to increase the dollar amount of equity — which is mostly the assets they operate. Not only are they OK with cost overruns that you noted, but they literally get larger profits because the assets they now manage have a greater value. This also seems to explain why they don’t have policies to encourage solar at the home/local level — this involves increasing assets that aren’t under GA Power, so they can’t earn money on those assets. GA Power makes the most money when they own all assets. This is a stupid model. Their profits should be tied to the efficient, reliable, and safe generation/distribution of power, with much less emphasis on who owns the underlying assets.
Despite these policy failures, GA Power does do a pretty good job of keeping the power on. But better policies would encourage behavior that would promote more solar, resulting in lower bills and less pollution.
Thanks for keeping up the fight, Patty.
I agree as to your point on costs and overruns. Their (utility) stockholders need to pick up most of the cost. This is exactly why the US has government chartered but privately owned utilities. The utility uses the sales of stock to pay for the new development, they have even been conferred the government power of condemnation of rights-of-way and property acquisition. That has been the case since the 19th century (they just hope we do not remember). That said…who keeps approving all the data centers that are squandering the excess capacity…where are they located…most of them almost all of them, were located in metro Atlanta. Perhaps those communities that are enjoying their windfall in property taxes should assist the utilities with the costs.
I have lived in Georgia since 1998, and the PSC has clearly been in the lap of Georgia Power. My question is: what benefits did (or do) the PSC Commissioners receive for voting against the best interests of the public they presumably represented? Perhaps Patty Durand can shed light on this?
Years ago, Georgia separated production and distribution of natural gas. How has that gone?
Maybe it is time to consider the same thinking for electricity.
Always remember the millions of school tax dollars taken by headspinningly wrong disgusting surcharges and given for free to Georgia Power to help them finance their venture. Remember the school millions taken and for years longer as GaPo and the string of contractors struggled with time consuming mistakes and do overs… The history of atomic Vogtle Venture is so appalling and staggeringly expensive I might think it a crazy fiction if I were not paying every month for it in bloated electric bills. See TruthAboutVogtle.com
Nuclear power safely generated and monitored is much better for the environment than solar power. All of the rare earth minerals that have to be mined and refined for batteries cause much greater damage than the clean energy produced by nuclear reactors. Much of the expense of Vogtle was generated by opponents raising every obstacle and regulation possible to kill the project.
Nonsense. Nuclear and safety? Those days are over Ted, or are you not paying attention to what Trump has done to the NRC? As in, stripped almost all of the safety and review regulations that HAS kept nuclear safe for decades, well sort of. See Three Mile Island in 1979.
And your statement “much of the expense of Vogtle was generated by opponents”? Where in outer space did you come up with that? There WAS plenty of litigation but it was from partners to Georgia Power trying to get out of a horrible situation where costs were far above all estimates and expectations set by Georgia Power and litigation was flying: six lawsuits, I think, between the partners and Georgia Power and back.
Rare earth minerals is not really your objection here Ted. It’s not a thing: 90% of grid capacity expansion in 2024 and 2025 was solar and storage. Your objections to solar isn’t concern for rare earth minerals. It’s really that you hate renewables and are just looking for whatever you can to oppose them, and you are a conservative person who can’t get out of his own way.
As “transformational” as last year’s profits were for Chris Womack and Georgia Power, this year is shaping up to be even better. Despite the so-called “rate freeze”, the income figures for Q1 & Q2, 2026 compared with Q1 & Q2 last year tells the tale:
Q1 Earnings Before Income Taxes: $713 million, compared to $694 million in 2025.
Q1 Net Income for Common Stock: $628 million, up from $596 million in Q1 2025.
Q2 Earnings Before Income Taxes: $930 million, up from $843 million in Q2 2025.
Q2 Net Income For Common Stock: $779 million, up from $607 million in Q2 2025.
And we know who’s pockets those $$$$$$ are coming from…
Remember in November! Elect Peter Hubbard and Shelia Edwards to the PSC!
I don’t know if I agree with the premise that we shouldn’t build more nuclear power because this project went poorly. We (as a country) don’t really have the knowledge/capabilities to build these cheaply and if we don’t build more we never will.
However, two things here I think are 100% right. The underlying incentive structure for the electric companies are wrong. And we should be doing a lot more battery and solar to make the grid more sustainable.
In my mind it’s an and rather than an or.
I work at a company in Texas in this space, so take any opinion here with a grain of salt.