More than a dozen other students sat behind her, awaiting their allotted three minutes in front of the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC). One after another, they called on the commission to reject a request from Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility, to add new natural gas capacity to the grid. Instead, they repeated at the podium, they want the company to expand renewable energy and take other steps to combat climate change.
“You can help get Georgia Power to take the right actions in the essential timeframe,” said high school senior Evelyn Ford, the last of the students to speak across two days. “Actually, you’re the only five people in Georgia who can.”
Ford is substantially correct. The PSC is the only government body with direct authority to regulate whatever Georgia Power does.
The panel sets the rates people pay for electricity and approves the utility’s plans to make or buy that power and deliver it to customers. Georgians routinely attend PSC rate-setting hearings to plead with commissioners not to raise rates, sharing stories of high bills and hard choices between paying for power and other essentials like food and medicine.
“This is real. Life is real,” Shemika Simmons of Savannah told the commissioners during rate hearings in 2022. “When rates go up, lights go out.”
According to the commission’s own website, “very few governmental agencies have as much impact on people’s lives as the PSC.”
There is a small panel of regulators in every state that holds a similar power over electricity generation and, by extension, an enormous segment of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. By setting electricity prices, they also substantially impact people’s lives and pocketbooks.
Yet, in Georgia and elsewhere, these groups — known as public service or public utility commissions — often get little attention or scrutiny outside of energy wonk circles….
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