Since the 1880s, when the electric company began serving Atlanta citizens, the Georgia Power Company has grown to supply Georgia residents with electric power throughout the state. Now Georgia’s primary electric provider, the Company is a significant economic influence in the state as a large employer, a major taxpayer, and an instrument in bringing industry and business to Georgia.
The Early Years (1883-1911)
Georgia Power Company originated in Atlanta. The company has a complex genealogy, encompassing in its history five different name changes and five different Georgia Power companies.
Electricity came to Atlanta in 1884, when the Georgia Electric Light Company of Atlanta, chartered in 1883, began service. In the early years electricity mainly provided for street lighting and street railway transportation; only a few businesses were electrically powered. Henry M. Atkinson (1862-1939) was the driving force behind the development of the electric industry in Georgia and served as such for more than thirty-five years, building the small electric business in Atlanta into the present Georgia Power Company. A native of Brookline, Massachusetts, and a Harvard University graduate, Atkinson acquired controlling stock in the Georgia Electric Light Company of Atlanta in 1891 and formed it into an entirely new company, shortening the name to the Georgia Electric Light Company. That same year, he built the Davis Street Plant, a massive steam-electric generating plant.
Just before the turn of the century, Atkinson and Joel Hurt, an Atlanta streetcar entrepreneur, engaged in fierce competition to gain control of the electric, streetcar, and steam-heat franchises issued by the city council. The dispute lasted for years, ending in 1902 when Atkinson bought out Hurt’s interests and formed the Georgia Railway and Electric Company. Atlanta attorney Preston S. Arkwright became president at that time and personified the company until his death in 1946. He devised the slogan “A Citizen Wherever We Serve,” an enduring motto for company employees. (In the early days the power company advertised the state widely in national publications. To promote Georgia to the nation, Arkwright created another slogan, “It’s Great to Be a Georgian.”)
In 1903 the company added to its holdings the Atlanta Gas Light Company, which operated as the gas department of the electric company until 1929. For years the Butler Street Steam Plant, acquired from Joel Hurt, acted in conjunction with the Davis Street Plant and the Alabama Street Substation to provide electricity for Atlanta. Meanwhile the Atlanta Water and Electric Power Company began construction of the Morgan Falls hydroelectric plant, the first water-generated electricity used in the city. Even before its completion, Atkinson contracted to use the entire output. The Atlanta Journal reported on October 2, 1904, that for the first time the muddy waters of the Chattahoochee River were powering streetcars on the streets of Atlanta. Just east of downtown, to encourage streetcar ridership, the company developed the popular Ponce de Leon Springs as an amusement park. The number of riders increased further when the company drained the lake across from the park and erected a stadium in time for the 1907 season of the Atlanta baseball team that the company had just bought.
The Formative Years (1912-1959)
Many changes occurred during the company’s formative years. Needing more power for Atlanta after the first decade of the twentieth century, Atkinson made an agreement to acquire a financially strapped hydroelectric project on the Tallulah River in north Georgia, newly begun by the Georgia Power Company, which had been chartered by C. Elmer Smith and Eugene Ashley in 1908.
In 1912 Atkinson combined this first Georgia Power Company, the Morgan Falls hydro plant, and the Georgia Railway and Electric Company into the Georgia Railway and Power Company (GR&PC), which completed the Tallulah Falls development. Power was transmitted to the city by way of the Boulevard Substation in Atlanta, one of the earliest outdoor substations in the nation. Eventually the company built on the Tallulah and Tugaloo rivers a total of six hydro plants, which provided enough power for industrial growth. Although the company’s sales department had recruited industry to Georgia from early in the century, it was not until 1927 that the company formalized industrial and community development into a separate department.
The electric company was instrumental in developing radio throughout Georgia, particularly in Atlanta. Because noise on telephone lines and storm damage to wires made communication with plants and substations uncertain, in 1920 the company built the first radio broadcasting station in Georgia, 4FT, later WDAW. This station rebroadcast musical programs from another pioneer station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a public service, and aired some local programs as well. The Atlanta Journal became interested in radio and asked the electric company engineers to build a new station in the Journal building. This station was installed in 1922 and named WSB. Radio communications with the plants also proved to be uncertain because of the electrical noise in the plants and the vagaries of radio; one could talk to someone as far off as New England or California but not to a hydro plant a hundred miles away. Not long afterward, GR&PC donated its radio station to the Atlanta Constitution, which, in turn, donated it to the Georgia Institute of Technology to establish the station WGST.
GR&PC was acquired in 1926 by Southeastern Power and Light Company, a holding company. This changed to Commonwealth and Southern Corporation (1929), which became in 1947 the Southern Company, parent company of Georgia Power today. Southern Company is a leading energy provider in the nation and the world.
In 1926 the company began a string of acquisitions of smaller municipal and independently owned electric systems. The second Georgia Power Company was formed from the consolidation of several utilities controlled by Southeastern Power and Light Company. Shortly thereafter, this company combined with Georgia Railway and Electric Company and Georgia Railway and Power Company, Athens and Rome electric properties, and East Georgia Power Company to form the Georgia Power Company (the third), which received its charter in 1927. With consolidation in 1928, the company acquired electric and street railway properties in Macon under the same name, Georgia Power Company (the fourth).
When the company acquired Columbus Electric and Power Company in 1930, yet another Georgia Power Company was chartered. It is that charter under which the current company operates. With a severe drought in Georgia in the mid-1920s, the company, relying upon hydroelectric facilities, could not produce sufficient electricity, and Arkwright decided that the company could not afford ever again to rely largely upon hydropower sources. In the years that followed, the company undertook the construction of multiple steam-electric generating plants. Plant Atkinson (1930) on the Chattahoochee River in Cobb County was the first of the steam plants built under this new directive.
During the Great Depression era, the company organized teams of salespersons outfitted with cars and trailers (called “kitchen coaches”) to demonstrate and sell home appliances in rural areas. The company made little from the sale of appliances but profited from the additional use of electricity.
The Later Years (1960-2002)
Turbulent years for Georgia Power began in the late 1960s and continued through the mid-1970s. A massive construction program, high equipment inventories, the oil embargo, runaway inflation, and a recession all contributed to the crisis. Two nuclear power plants—Plant Hatch, near Baxley, and Plant Vogtle, near Waynesboro—were planned and ultimately completed. Costs rose, construction was halted on many projects, jobs were eliminated, and assets were sold. By 1976 the company emerged a leaner but stronger business and resumed work on suspended projects. One of the projects finished was the Wallace Dam on the Oconee River, a pump storage facility. Completed in 1975, Plant Bowen on the Etowah River is one of the company’s largest steam-electric plants.
In 1986 the company established the Georgia Power Foundation to manage its charitable giving. That same year Georgia Power received a Governor’s Award in the Humanities.
In the 1990s the company accelerated the construction of combustion turbine plants fueled by natural gas. In 2002 Georgia Power’s parent company, the Southern Company, entered the gas distribution business again, but it was sold after a few years.
Enter the Twenty-First Century
As the company entered the mid-2000s, demand for electricity flattened due to a marked increase in energy efficiency. But by the 2020s, demand began to surge as a result of several cultural and technology-driven shifts. The increase of remote work, use of online streaming services, online shopping and delivery applications, in addition to the data centers to power them, all accelerated demands for power, as did the general rise of artificial intelligence and electric vehicle innovation.
Federal and state incentives in Georgia resulted in the quick rise of electric vehicle manufacturing and battery production sites in the state. Georgia Power reported in its 2023 Integrated Resource Plan that, due in large part to this industrial growth, electricity demands by the mid-2030s would reach seventeen times 2022 levels. In response to those projections the company proposed the development of additional sites that would burn coal and fossil gas. They also proposed postponing the retirement of several coal plants until 2035. In April 2024 the Public Service Commission approved the company’s measures to help meet the state’s projected demands.
The company faced criticism from clean energy proponents as well as consumer advocacy groups for their failure to invest in more renewable energy options, both for the sake of emissions levels and the likelihood of rising customer costs when fuel demands spike. Inadequate planning, resistance from private landowners, and permitting issues delayed the development of renewable energy facilities throughout the state. Problems related to the transmission of solar energy also slowed renewable momentum, given that conditions for panels are most suitable in south Georgia while demand is concentrated in the Atlanta area. Despite these hurdles the state’s largest electricity supplier released plans to create new solar facilities and solar battery storage in 2026 and 2027.
In 2009 the company initiated work on its largest sustainable energy undertaking to date, breaking ground on two new nuclear reactors at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Engineering Plant in Burke County, a project jointly owned by Georgia Power, Oglethorpe Power Corporation, Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, and Dalton Utilities. Unit 3 opened for commercial operation in July of 2023 and Unit 4 debuted in April 2024. Together the units can power one million businesses and residences across the state for a projected sixty to eighty years.
The 2023 completion of Vogtle’s Unit 3 reactor made it the first newly constructed nuclear unit in the United States in over thirty years. With the addition of Unit 4, Plant Vogtle became both the nation’s largest nuclear power plant and the largest generator of emissions-free electricity in the country at the time. But construction of the reactors was marred by considerable delays, design adjustments, and cost overruns that ultimately diminished enthusiasm for nuclear projects nationwide. Particularly in the utilities industry, long-term project planning pivoted to small modular reactors, or SMRs, which offer shorter development timelines, less prohibitive costs, and more effective economies of scale.
