Georgia Has Left Electric Ratepayers Without an Advocate for 18 Years

Robert Baker has been showing up to Georgia legislative hearings for fifteen years carrying the same argument: the state's electric customers deserve someone in their corner. "I'm frustrated," he told the Senate's Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee in February. "I have been frustrated for 15 years." The object of that frustration is a gap in Georgia's regulatory architecture that has persisted quietly for nearly two decades — the absence of a Consumer Utilities Counsel, an office the state once had and then simply chose to eliminate.

Georgia abolished its Consumer Utilities Counsel eighteen years ago, and in the time since, the regulatory landscape has shifted dramatically in ways that make the absence of such an office feel less like a bureaucratic footnote and more like a structural wound. Georgia Power, the state's dominant electric utility and a subsidiary of Southern Company, operates as a regulated monopoly. Ratepayers cannot choose a different provider. They cannot vote with their wallets. Their only meaningful recourse is the Georgia Public Service Commission, a five-member elected body that is supposed to balance the interests of utilities and the public. But "balance" is a generous word when one side of that equation arrives to hearings with teams of lawyers, economists, and engineers, and the other side arrives as Robert Baker.

The core issue here is not corruption or bad faith — it is structural asymmetry. Regulated utilities like Georgia Power have every financial incentive to invest heavily in the regulatory process. Rate cases, which determine how much customers pay for electricity, can involve billions of dollars. Hiring expert witnesses, commissioning studies, and retaining specialized legal counsel is simply the cost of doing business when the stakes are that high. Ratepayers, by contrast, are diffuse. No individual customer has enough skin in the game to fund a comparable operation. This is a classic collective action problem, and it is precisely the kind of market failure that consumer advocacy offices were designed to correct.

When Georgia had its Consumer Utilities Counsel, the office could intervene in rate cases, hire independent technical experts, and present alternative analyses to the PSC. Without it, the commission hears one sophisticated, well-resourced voice on the utility side and a patchwork of citizen groups, environmental organizations, and the occasional frustrated retiree on the other. The information asymmetry that results does not just disadvantage consumers in any single rate case — it compounds over time, embedding assumptions favorable to utilities into the baseline from which future rates are calculated.

This dynamic has played out against a backdrop of significant spending decisions. Georgia Power's construction of the Vogtle nuclear expansion, Units 3 and 4, became one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in American history, with costs ballooning to more than $35 billion. Ratepayers are absorbing those costs through rate increases that a well-funded consumer advocate might have scrutinized far more aggressively at every regulatory checkpoint along the way.

The push to restore the Consumer Utilities Counsel is not just about fairness in the abstract. It points toward a second-order consequence that deserves serious attention: the quality of information flowing into regulatory decisions shapes the physical infrastructure that gets built, and that infrastructure locks in costs and carbon profiles for decades. If Georgia's PSC approves utility spending plans without rigorous independent challenge, the state risks overbuilding expensive assets, underinvesting in demand-side efficiency programs, or missing opportunities to integrate cheaper renewable resources — all of which translate into higher bills and a less resilient grid for ordinary Georgians.

Several other states maintain active consumer utility advocates, including offices in Connecticut, Maryland, and Illinois, that routinely intervene in rate cases and have produced measurable savings for ratepayers. Georgia's decision to eliminate its equivalent office stands out as an outlier, and the eighteen-year gap means an entire generation of rate cases has proceeded without that check.

Baker's persistence at the legislature suggests the political will to restore the office exists somewhere, even if it has not yet found a majority. The more interesting question is what it will take to move the needle. As electricity demand grows with the expansion of data centers, electric vehicles, and industrial electrification, the dollar amounts flowing through Georgia's rate cases will only increase. The cost of not having an advocate in the room is not fixed — it is growing.