MOULTRIE — Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols acknowledged concerns about loss of farmland to solar farms during a speech last week to the Moultrie Rotary Club, but he said the problem is about to take care of itself.

Echols, who also spoke with The Moultrie Observer ahead of the Rotary Club meeting March 11, said many rural Georgia counties became home to solar farms because their county governments offered tax abatements for developers to bring them there. During his speech he said Colquitt County had made such incentives, but in an email to The Observer later the same day he corrected himself: Although some South Georgia counties had done so, Colquitt County did not.

Those tax abatements made the difference as developers decided where to place the solar farms, Echols said, but other factors are in play too.

First, he said, a solar farm has got to be close to an electric substation. It’s got to have an easy way to get the electricity onto the grid. Most available land close enough to a substation to be viable is already spoken for, he said.

Second, he said, the PSC is incentivizing developers to put solar farms closer to Atlanta. That’s where the electricity is needed, and it costs more money to transmit it there from South Georgia than it would from someplace closer.

He said solar power generation in South Georgia has already seen its best days because of those two factors, so he did not expect much more arable farmland to be transitioned to solar farms.

Rising demand

Echols also addressed a Georgia Power plan that the PSC recently approved that called for a significant increase in the utility’s capacity. Georgia Power said at the time that its projections of the electricity the state would need had risen by a lot.

Echols attributed that growth to four things: data centers, manufacturing, electric vehicles and human activity. His speech moved quickly through all four but focused a bit more on data centers.

The state has welcomed data centers, which house large banks of computers to power internet applications and artificial intelligence. AI does wonderful things, Echols said, but it takes a lot of electricity to do them. A data center near Fayetteville uses five times the electricity of the new Hyundai plant near Ellabell, he said.

Echols said the growth in demand for such large sites should not affect residents’ electric bills; the PSC forced Georgia Power to structure their contracts with new, large users to offset the cost of the growth.

Rising rates

The PSC regulates Georgia Power’s rates, and it has taken some heat for recent repeated increases. Echols said the increases were appropriate, but the way they were handled was a mistake.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the cost of just about everything went up, Echols said, but the PSC did not allow Georgia Power to increase its rates during that time.

So when the pandemic eased, Georgia Power was due for a 12% increase in its rates. PSC members said that was too steep to implement at one time, Echols said, so they split it in three increments.

Unfortunately, he said, that came out looking like the PSC had approved three separate rate increases just a year or so apart.

In spite of that, though, he pointed out that electric bills are only 2.2% of the average family’s budget.

But Georgia Power customers may see another rate increase anyway. Blame the weather.

Echols said Georgia Power sets aside money in its budget to recover from natural disasters, but that fund has been seriously depleted following three hurricanes in 13 months — Idalia in August 2023, Debby in August 2024 and Helene in September 2024.

“We build into rates for storm money,” Echols said, “but we don’t build in that much for that many storms.”

Such storms cost utility providers to stage response crews, labor and overtime as the linemen work, warehousing supplies and so forth. Echols said a 1991 law entitles Georgia Power to recover “prudently incurred expenses,” which such storm response would certainly be. He said the PSC has asked Georgia Power not to request such a rate increase this year, but at some point the bill will come due.