Georgia Power

History

Originally the Georgia Railway and Power Company, it began in 1902 as a company running the streetcars in Atlanta and was the successor to the Atlanta Consolidated Street Railway Company. In the 1930s, the company published a free newsletter called Two Bells which was distributed on its streetcars. Two Bells was carried on being distributed into the 1960s on the buses of a successor Atlanta Transit Company (ATC). From 1937 until 1950, Georgia Power also operated trolleybuses in Atlanta, and in 1950 its network of 31 electric bus routes was the largest trolley bus system in the United States. After the Atlanta transit strike of 1950, the Atlanta Transit Company took over operations. In 2003, the nonprofit Atlanta Streetcar, Inc. was founded with a goal of returning streetcar service to the city, initially focused on a line along Peachtree Street; this advocacy eventually contributed to the opening of the modern Atlanta Streetcar system in downtown Atlanta in 2014.

The company built several dams, including the Morgan Falls Dam just north of the city, and some as far away as the Tallulah River in the northeast Georgia mountains. These hydroelectric dams form Lake Burton, Lake Seed, Lake Rabun, Lake Tallulah Falls, Lake Tugalo, and Lake Yonah, the last two of which straddle the Georgia – South Carolina border on the Tugaloo River.

Following cost increases in August 2018 for building two additional nuclear reactors at its Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, credit rating agency Moody's downgraded Georgia Power's credit ratings from A3 (upper medium) to Baa1 (lower medium).

In September 2018, in order to sustain the project, Georgia Power agreed to pay an additional proportion of the costs of the smaller project partners if completion costs exceeded $9.2 billion.

In 2019, Georgia Power's CEO, Paul Bowers, testified before state regulators seeking to get an approval for the company's request to add about $200 a year to the average residential customer's bills.