FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Georgia Conservation Voters
Oct. 7, 2026, Contact: christian@gcvoters.org
New statewide poll finds Georgia Power favorability plunging as two-thirds of Georgia voters report higher electric bills and a third blame data-center demand
ATLANTA, Ga. — Georgia Power’s public standing has collapsed since spring. A new GBAO survey for Georgia Conservation Voters finds just 24% of Georgia voters view the company favorably and 47% unfavorably, a 24-point net swing since April. The decline cut across party lines, with Georgia Power losing ground among Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike. A year earlier, in May 2025, a GCV Action Fund survey of likely voters had the company at 46% favorable and 24% unfavorable. By September 2026, voters had moved, en masse, towards the negative. Republican movement was largest, going from +40 net to -10, a 50-point swing.
“Georgia Power has a credibility problem,” said Brionté McCorkle, executive director of Georgia Conservation Voters. “It is asking millions of Georgians to trust that an unprecedented expansion of our electric system will ultimately save them money, while the contracts and financial assumptions underlying that promise remain largely outside public view.”
| Democrats | Independents | Republicans | |
| May 2025 | 40-30 (+10 net fav) | 42-31 (+11 net fav) | 55-15 (+40 net fav) |
| April 2026 | 27-43 (-16 net unfav) | 37-36 (+1 net fav) | 47-30 (+17 net fav) |
| September 2026 | 22-48 (-26 net unfav) | 23-53 (-30 net unfav) | 29-39 (-10 net unfav) |
Sixty-six percent of Georgia voters say their electric bills have recently gone up, including 69% of Georgia Power customers. Asked to pick two reasons, 48% chose inflation, 43% corporate greed from the power company and 34% demand from data centers or artificial intelligence. Sixty-one percent view data centers negatively; just 16% view them positively.
Those perceptions persist even though Georgia Power says a June fuel and storm-cost settlement lowered the typical residential bill by about $4 a month. That follows increases since 2023 that added about $43 a month to the typical bill, roughly 11 times the new savings.
Georgia’s numbers track a national backlash. A March 2026 Pew Research Center survey found three-quarters of Americans say their home energy costs have risen, and 64% say utility companies wanting to make more money is a major reason. An Ipsos poll for PowerLines found just 29% trust their state government to protect them in utility regulation, down from 38% a year earlier. A July AP-NORC/EPIC poll found 84% are concerned about data centers’ effect on local electricity prices.
The findings come as Georgia Power moves forward with a 25-year agreement to supply OpenAI’s planned Effingham County data center with as much as 3,200 megawatts, about the output of three Vogtle nuclear reactors. In a July 31 Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed, Georgia Power CEO Kim Greene wrote that the utility had established protections requiring large-load customers to pay infrastructure costs: “They pay more, so you pay less.”
The details deserve scrutiny. The OpenAI contract is redacted as a trade secret. Disclosed terms include minimum billing, financial security, termination provisions, responsibility for infrastructure costs (undefined) and up to 1,000 megawatts of flexible demand. Georgia Power says OpenAI will pay the full infrastructure costs, and protections added after PSC staff review bar the utility from charging residential customers for certain revenue shortfalls if a large customer leaves early. With the contract redacted, the public cannot see how those terms are written into it.
The agreement also commits Georgia Power to at least $15 a month in “downward pressure” on typical residential rates in 2029 through 2031. That does not guarantee lower bills, and it depends on data-center demand arriving as projected. A Greenlink Analytics and Science for Georgia report found the data-center growth Southeast utilities, including Georgia Power, are planning for has roughly a 0.2% chance of materializing. Three years of savings must also be weighed against the decades-long life of the power plants a lame-duck Republican commission approved unanimously in December 2025. One of those commissioners, Tricia Pridemore, has since resigned to join data center developer DC BLOX.
Georgia Power also brokered OpenAI’s first meeting with Effingham County’s development authority before negotiating the contract to serve the project, The Current reported.
“Georgia Power is helping recruit these enormous electricity users, their projected demand is helping drive massive new investments in Georgia’s electric system, and Georgia Power profits when it builds more,” McCorkle said. “That makes rigorous independent oversight essential. Georgians should not have to take the utility’s promises on faith.”
Georgians will decide who provides that oversight on Nov. 3, when two of the five PSC seats are on the ballot and control of the commission, now 3–2 Republican, is at stake.
GCV is calling on the PSC to make the OpenAI contract terms public, require greater transparency around large-load contracts, and keep residential and small-business customers protected from data-center costs and risks.
Polling methodology: GBAO surveyed 800 registered Georgia voters August 30–September 6, 2026, by live telephone interviews and text-to-web. The margin of error is ±3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Read the polling memo.