Five Months Later: The Georgia Signal

Affordability is energy's new political fault line. Reform or risk collapse

I. The Prediction Meets Reality

On election night in Georgia, Crystal finally gave up trying to make the numbers work.

In Load to Ruin, she was the substitute teacher in Macon whose street transformer began humming after two neighbors bought electric cars — the stand-in for every ratepayer left holding the bill for progress. When the utility replaced the 25-year-old unit at a cost of roughly $10,000, it added about $11 a month to her $126 bill. That was before the latest round of increases.

This November, the envelope on her kitchen table carried two numbers that mattered more than any line item on her statement: the names on the Public Service Commission ballot.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, Georgia voters ousted two incumbent Republican commissioners. In District 3, Democrat Angela Speir Phelps defeated Lauren “Bubba” McDonald 61.4 to 38.6 percent; in District 4, Democrat Patty Durand defeated Fitz Johnson 63.1 to 36.9 percent. These were low-profile, down-ballot races that suddenly became a referendum on electric bills that, as one voter told Reuters, “look like monthly car payments.”

The backdrop was brutal. Georgia Power’s two new reactors at Plant Vogtle came online in 2023 and 2024, seven years late and at more than twice the original $14 billion budget — roughly $31 billion in total. Public Service Commission staff estimated customers will pay $36 billion to $43 billion more over the reactors’ lifetime than if the utility had built gas plants instead. That cost showed up quickly: summer bills for a typical household are now up 41 percent since 2021, driven by six rate increases in just two years.

On the same day, Jefferies Equity Research downgraded Southern Company from Buy to Hold, warning that the Republican loss of two PSC seats introduced material political risk to future rate-case outcomes and signaled that the era of automatic approvals for Georgia Power’s capital plans is likely over. Markets rarely care about down-ballot elections. This one, they did — because the entire cost-recovery model depends on political predictability.

In the same news cycle, Republican Ohio gubernatorial frontrunner Vivek Ramaswamy told his party that “lesson number one from this year’s elections: affordability — electric bills, groceries, housing, health care — is the issue that unites voters across party lines.”

Five months ago, Load to Ruin argued that affordability would become the defining political fault line in energy — that the real question isn’t how to build the grid, but who pays for it in an economy where AI is eroding the very wages that fund it.

Georgia just supplied the first clear signal.

Affordability now sits alongside reliability as voters’ statutory priority. Until regulators systematically track and price the relationship between employment, arrearages, and capital plans, today’s build-out risks hardening into tomorrow’s stranded debt — carried, once again, by people like Crystal.

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II. The Georgia Signal in Context

Georgia didn’t just validate the affordability thesis; it made it visible.

For years, energy politics lived inside committee rooms — debated in IRP filings, modeled in LCOE spreadsheets, translated through rate-case consultants. But the Georgia election moved the conversation to the ballot box.

Voters didn’t parse cost-allocation tables; they responded to a pattern that had become undeniable. The grid was no longer a public utility that happened to finance private growth. It had become a private growth engine funded by the public.

The recognition came faster than anyone expected. The speed wasn’t ideological — it was structural.

Scale. Georgia Power projected 8,200 megawatts of new load over six years — 27 times its previous-decade forecast. Every ratepayer could feel the magnitude of that ask.

Sequence. Vogtle’s overruns and the AI-driven load surge merged into one continuous price shock — six rate filings in twenty-four months against a backdrop of generational inflation.

Accountability. Georgia’s commissioners face voters directly —a mechanism present in only 11 of the 50 states.

Together, they created the first political feedback loop that Load to Ruin had only described in theory:

Rising bills → voter backlash → market repricing → policy reset

Jefferies’ downgrade of Southern Company wasn’t a moral judgment; it was math. Political risk now sits beside fuel and interest-rate risk in utility valuations. You can already see it in analyst notes — language that pairs “customer sentiment” with “regulatory headroom” for the first time. That marks a new era: affordability as measurable uncertainty.

For decades, affordability crises were treated as cyclical. Georgia suggests they’re systemic — a permanent constraint running parallel to carbon and reliability.

Inside boardrooms, that realization is quietly changing the question from “How much can we build?” to “Who can pay for what we’ve already promised?”

Investors are beginning to model what Load to Ruin defines as electoral elasticity — the threshold where affordability pressure becomes electoral risk for regulators and measurable uncertainty for capital deployment and rate recovery.

Five months after the hypothesis, the affordability signal has left the lab. Now we see how different laboratories respond to the same experiment.

III. Two Laboratories, Two Futures

Georgia — Where Voters Still Have a Voice

The old guard in Atlanta is still stunned. Two incumbents gone, Jefferies’ downgrade still blinking across the Bloomberg terminals. No new policy yet — just a chill through every rate case in the queue. Whether that chill becomes reform or retrenchment will define the next decade.

Georgia showed that electoral accountability still works. Voters reached into the machine and pulled a lever that mattered. Wall Street noticed within hours. The feedback loop closed: rising bills became voter backlash became market repricing. Political risk is now measurable, which means it can be managed — if regulators act.

That’s the Georgia path: pressure forces adaptation. The system can still self-correct when voters have direct power to fire commissioners.

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West Virginia — The Logic of Extraction

Governor Patrick Morrisey announced his “50 by 50” plan in Wheeling with the kind of certainty that comes from repetition: more capacity, more exports, more revenue. PJM’s capacity prices are up, data-center demand looks endless, and coal is the one asset West Virginia still controls. Build and sell. Lock in the contracts. Restart the engine.

In market terms, it’s rational. When PJM raises capacity payments, states with dispatchable generation see a short-term windfall: every new megawatt cleared earns regional revenue, no matter where it’s consumed. The budget benefits through severance taxes and payroll. On paper, it’s growth.

But the arithmetic is brutal. The plan would more than triple the state’s current generating capacity and require new high-voltage transmission to move it west into Ohio and north into Pennsylvania. Those lines don’t stop for the ratepayer in Morgantown or Parkersburg — they bypass them. The power will leave; the costs will stay. PJM’s regional cost-sharing spreads the expense across the footprint. Still, in practice, poorer states bear proportionally higher rate impacts because their load base is smaller and their household incomes are lower.

That’s the paradox. West Virginia’s grid is already fragile, built for a smaller, slower economy. Its rural counties need distributed resilience — microgrids, local generation, targeted modernization — not gigawatts of export capacity. Yet every dollar of new investment is being routed toward infrastructure designed to serve someone else’s load. A 233 percent capacity increase might look like ambition from the Capitol, but at the meter, it’s austerity.

The contrast with Georgia is structural, not moral. Georgia’s voters could register frustration; West Virginia’s can’t. One state converted affordability pressure into political feedback, the other into fiscal dependency. Both are responding to the same signal — rising load and falling patience — but only one has the means to course-correct before the next cycle of debt and dislocation begins.

And that cycle is already shifting from infrastructure to employment. The same impulse driving West Virginia’s buildout — secure cash flow in uncertain markets — is appearing inside corporate payrolls, where “Day One” efficiency replaces reform. Georgia’s voters felt the strain through their bills; West Virginia’s workers will feel it through their paychecks.

IV. The Converging Trends

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Macon or Morgantown. The crisis comes everywhere because it rides on the same social contract: that wages will keep pace with the wires.

That contract is failing in slow motion.

The headlines call it a tech layoff cycle. It’s not. It’s Day One culture — the quiet prelude to automation. Companies are flattening org charts not because AI has replaced the worker, but because it soon will. Over 150,000 workers lost their jobs in October 2025 alone; roughly 33,000 in tech. Industry reports cite “AI adoption” or “efficiency initiatives” as the driving factor in approximately one-fifth of announced reductions.

That isn’t the robot uprising. It’s management performing preemptive surgery on its own payroll—a cultural rehearsal for automation, a cleansing of the middle before the machine arrives.

None of this is malicious; it’s mechanical.

And the grid? Most utilities still model steady wage growth in their load forecasts — typically 2-3 percent annually.

Utilities are issuing 30-year bonds to build out data-center infrastructure for firms that are simultaneously removing the income that pays for it. The same technology driving the new load is hollowing out the load-payer. Every dollar of “productivity” on Wall Street is an arrearage risk on Main Street.

The AI boom isn’t killing jobs directly; it’s killing the idea of latency. When models improve monthly, reorgs follow quarterly.

Markets move at inference speed; wages move at regulatory speed.

Five months ago, Load to Ruin warned of the “double-build trap” — that 30-year infrastructure financed by households would collide with five-year labor disruption cycles driven by AI. It’s happening faster than forecast. The system we’re modernizing for a digital future is being financed by a disappearing present.

Affordability isn’t a slogan anymore. It’s the denominator of civilization — and it’s cracking.

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V. The Narrowing Window

Georgia fired the first shot, but the echo is everywhere.

Everywhere, the same math hums: 30-year debt, 5-year labor cycles, and fewer people earning the wages that keep the grid alive.

The new gospel isn’t replacing the worker — it’s never hiring them at all. “Day One” culture treats human payroll like spinning reserve: an inefficiency to be optimized. The middle is being hollowed out before the machines even arrive.

Crystal feels it. She still teaches in Macon, still budgets her paycheck, but the second job she once relied on — remote grading work — vanished when the company “streamlined with AI.” Her electric bill, once $126, is climbing toward $180 — the exact $11 transformer surcharge multiplied across six rate cases. Her side income is down 30 percent. That’s the loop: the same system billing her for modernization is deleting her work. She’s paying for her own obsolescence.

Across the country, families are living inside that paradox. The grid is expanding, but the payrolls that sustain it are contracting.

Like your 401(k)? Then you’d better hope the machine eats your job. If it doesn’t, the bubble bursts; if it does, the wage base collapses. Either way, the grid’s math fails before the bonds mature.

Georgia proved voters can still interrupt the feedback loop — for now. But interruption isn’t the same as reform. Each model release, each rate case, each merger tightens the circuit between energy and employment, until one outruns the other.

Crystal doesn’t read analyst notes. She just knows the envelope on her kitchen table feels heavier. And that’s where the affordability war is really being fought — in living rooms lit by the system that’s pricing them out.

Five months ago, Load to Ruin called this a hypothesis. Now it’s an observation.

The fuse is lit. The timer isn’t fixed.

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Endnotes & Sources

Part I: The Prediction Meets Reality

[1] Georgia PSC Election Results — “Georgia voters oust GOP utility commissioners over rising electricity rates,” Reuters, November 5, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/georgia-voters-oust-gop-utility-commissioners-over-rising-electricity-rates-2025-11-05/; vote margins from “2025 Georgia Public Service Commission special election,” Wikipedia, accessed November 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Public_Service_Commission_special_election (citing Georgia Secretary of State data).

[2] “Monthly Car Payments” Quote — Voter quoted in “Georgia voters oust GOP utility commissioners over rising electricity rates,” Reuters, November 5, 2025.

[3] Vogtle Cost Estimate — “Georgia Power customers to pay billions more for Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion,” Associated Press, August 27, 2024; “Georgia PSC staff warns Vogtle overruns saddle customers with $40B tab,” E&E News, July 2024.

[4] Rate Increases and Bill Growth — “Georgia Power customers see rates climb again as PSC approves fuel costs,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 16, 2024; “Georgia Power rate hikes to continue as Vogtle costs mount,” Utility Dive, June 2024.

[5] Jefferies Downgrade — “Southern Co. stock rating downgraded by Jefferies on Georgia PSC election,” Investing.com, November 5, 2025, https://www.investing.com/news/analyst-ratings/southern-co-stock-rating-downgraded-by-jefferies-on-georgia-psc-election-93CH-4332972; “Southern Company Shares Fall After Jefferies Downgrade,” MarketScreener / MT Newswires, November 5, 2025, https://www.marketscreener.com/news/southern-company-shares-fall-after-jefferies-downgrade-ce7d5cdddb89f027.

[6] Vivek Ramaswamy Statement — “Ramaswamy launches Ohio governor bid, vows affordability focus,” WKYC Cleveland, November 6, 2025; see also X post, @VivekGRamaswamy, November 6, 2025, 8:14 AM ET.

Part II: The Georgia Signal in Context

[7] Georgia Power Load Projection — Georgia Power Company, 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (January 2025); “Georgia Power projects 8,200 MW of new load growth through 2030,” Utility Dive, June 2025, https://www.utilitydive.com/news/georgia-power-8200-mw-load-growth-2025-irp.

[8] Elected PSC Commissioners — Eleven states elect PSC commissioners: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Source: National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), 2024 State Commission Profiles,

https://www.naruc.org

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Part III: Two Laboratories, Two Futures

[9] West Virginia 50 by 50 Plan — “Morrisey shares new energy plan for WV relying heavily on coal, natural gas to grow power creation,” West Virginia Watch, September 11, 2025, https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/09/11/morrisey-shares-new-energy-plan-for-wv-relying-heavily-on-coal-natural-gas-to-grow-power-creation/; West Virginia population and median income data from U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 American Community Survey.

Part IV: The Converging Trends

[10] Tech Layoffs and AI Adoption — Layoff figures compiled from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., Monthly Job Cut Report, October 2025; Layoffs.fyi database, accessed November 2025. “AI adoption” and “efficiency initiatives” language from company announcements compiled by TechCrunch Layoff Tracker and Bloomberg Technology, October-November 2025.

Definitions

Electoral Elasticity — The threshold at which affordability pressure translates into electoral risk for regulators, creating measurable uncertainty for capital deployment and rate recovery. In states with elected commissions, this threshold is observable through polling and election outcomes; in states with appointed commissions, it manifests through legislative pressure, gubernatorial intervention, or credit rating adjustments.

Double-Build Trap — The phenomenon where households fund two simultaneous infrastructure expansions: massive generation and transmission systems for AI loads, plus local distribution upgrades for their own electrification needs (electric vehicles, heat pumps). Originally defined in Load to Ruin: The Infrastructure Paradox (June 2025).

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Wesley Whited is Principal Consultant for VPP & Flexibility Strategy at DNV and author of Load to Ruin: The Infrastructure Paradox. The views expressed are his own.