Tag: eminent domain

  • Georgia’s 1,000-Mile AI Grid Build Shows the Cost the Rate Math Misses: Easements

    Georgia’s 1,000-Mile AI Grid Build Shows the Cost the Rate Math Misses: Easements

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Georgia’s biggest power company is building more than 1,000 miles of new power lines, longer than the drive from Atlanta to New York City. About 80 percent of the new electricity it plans to add is expected to go to data centers, the giant warehouses of computers that run artificial intelligence.

    The lines must cross private land: more than 330 properties, including nearly 30 homes that will be torn down. The company starts its offers a quarter above a property’s appraised value and says it rarely forces a sale. But the right to run lines across land usually lasts forever, even after the owner sells.

    Fortune reported on July 26, 2026 that Georgia Power is contacting property owners along a 35-mile route through Fayette, Heard, Fulton and Coweta counties for the Ashley Park-Wansley Transmission Project, a new line between its Ashley Park Substation and its plant at Wansley. It is one of five projects that together make up more than 1,000 miles of new transmission in the utility’s plan. That plan spans more than 330 parcels of land and requires nearly 30 residential properties to be leveled.

    Georgia Power says land acquisition and easement negotiations are close to complete, with construction as early as 2027. It opens offers at 125% of appraised value and says eminent domain is used in fewer than 1% of its land transactions: five times in the past year, none on homes. The utility disputes describing the line as a data center project. The generation plan it agreed with the Georgia Public Service Commission in December 2025 says about 80% of nearly 10,000 new megawatts is expected to power data centers.

    Executive Summary

    Georgia Power is acquiring land and easements for one of five transmission projects that together add more than 1,000 miles of high-voltage lines to Georgia’s grid. Transmission lines are the long-distance wires that move bulk electricity from power plants to local substations. The buildout accompanies roughly 10 gigawatts of new generation that state regulators certified in December 2025, and about 80% of that generation is expected to power data centers.

    The story matters because it moves the cost of AI-era grid expansion out of abstract rate cases and onto specific parcels of land. Georgia Power argues that large data center customers will pay more, which it projects will cut residential bills by about $102 a year from 2029. That argument does not address the right-of-way. Nearly 30 homes are to be leveled, and permanent easements will cover hundreds of parcels.

    How utilities conduct those negotiations shapes how fast AI infrastructure can be powered and on what terms. So does how often they fall back on eminent domain, and how publicly they justify it.

    The Rate Math Counts Bills, Not Easements

    Georgia Power frames its public case for the buildout around electricity bills. The utility projects that the five transmission projects will save residential customers about $102 a year each starting in 2029. The mechanism is that large-load customers, meaning very big single users such as data centers, are required to pay more. Media Relations Manager Meredith Stone said those funds put “downward pressure on the rates for our residential customers.” That is a claim about tariffs, the prices customers pay, and it is the number the utility leads with.

    The land side of the same projects works differently. Delivering power over more than 1,000 miles of new line means securing rights across more than 330 parcels and leveling nearly 30 homes. Georgia Power says it opens negotiations at 125% of appraised value. Where owners grant an easement rather than sell outright, the utility gains a permanent right to use a strip of their land. David Needham, a Georgia attorney who has represented landowners in eminent domain cases for more than a decade, said those rights stay attached to the property after it is sold. They can prohibit permanent structures beneath the lines and can reserve broad rights for the utility to install additional infrastructure.

    The per-customer savings figure does not capture that cost. A bill saving is spread across the whole residential customer base and recurs every year. An easement is priced once, at the negotiating table, and its restrictions are carried indefinitely by whoever owns that particular piece of ground. For utilities and data center developers, the consequence is that AI-driven grid expansion depends on hundreds of individual land deals, not only on the generation plan regulators certified. Those deals determine how fast the expansion proceeds and how much public acceptance it wins.

    Condemnation Is Rare; the Room to Say No Is Narrow

    On the record, condemnation is uncommon. Georgia Power says eminent domain is a last resort that occurs in fewer than 1% of its land transactions. It says the power was used five times in the past year, none involving residential homes. Nothing disclosed contradicts those figures. The case that drew the most public attention also ended in a deal. It became widely known through social media posts by Ansley Brown and involved the office of U.S. Rep. Brian Jack, and Georgia Power said it reached an agreement with the family, without disclosing the terms.

    Residents’ description of the process is also consistent with how it works. “We don’t have a choice in this,” Brown said in one video. Once a route is chosen, a landowner’s options are a full sale or an easement, and keeping the line off the property is not one of them. Condemnation stands behind the negotiation as the alternative if talks fail. Needham called the resulting easement agreements “very much tilted in favor of the power company,” while noting that “there is compensation offered.” Both accounts can be accurate: forced takings are rare, and the bargaining position is uneven.

    Who the Line Serves Depends on Which Number You Read

    Georgia Power says it is “not in the data center business.” It says the Ashley Park-Wansley line will serve the broader needs of the communities and customers who rely on reliable service. CBS reported that 70% to 80% of the power from this particular line would go to AI data centers. A Georgia Power representative was unable to confirm that estimate.

    At the portfolio level the question is less open. In December 2025 the Public Service Commission and Georgia Power agreed to certify nearly 10,000 megawatts of new generation, and the agreement said approximately 80% of it is expected to power data centers. Transmission lines are shared assets, and the same wires feed homes, hospitals and server halls. The utility’s framing is therefore defensible for any single line. Still, the regulator-approved document says the new demand justifying this much new capacity comes mostly from data centers.

    The distinction matters because eminent domain rests on public use. The more visibly new corridors are tied to a small number of very large customers, the more utilities and regulators have to show the broader benefit. The $102 savings projection plays exactly that role.

    Georgia’s Welcome for Data Centers Is Getting Conditional

    Georgia hosts more than 200 operational data centers, nearly 170 of them in Atlanta, including facilities owned by Microsoft, Amazon and Google. A sales and use tax exemption dating to 2018 waives 100% of state and local sales and use taxes on equipment purchases for projects that meet a minimum investment of $100 million to $250 million. In 2024 lawmakers voted to suspend new exemptions, and Governor Brian Kemp vetoed the measure. A December 2025 evaluation by the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government projected the exemption’s net fiscal impact at roughly negative $574 million.

    Georgia is now scrutinizing its tax incentives, charging large loads more, and facing land disputes in public view. The pattern for operators is that the state remains open to data centers but is pricing more of their wider costs explicitly. “The policy direction has clearly shifted,” said J. Thomas Perdue, a policy analyst at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. For developers weighing sites, power in Georgia increasingly comes with public questions about who bears the cost of delivering it.

    Background

    Georgia Power is the state’s largest electric utility and a subsidiary of Southern Company. It plans its generation and transmission through an Integrated Resource Plan, a long-range forecast of demand and the resources needed to meet it. The plan requires approval from the Georgia Public Service Commission, the elected body that regulates the state’s utilities. The commission approved the 2025 plan, which cited continued power needs driven by AI investment. In December 2025 it certified nearly 10,000 megawatts of new generation. It also approved a formal process to evaluate grid-enhancing technologies that can squeeze more capacity from existing lines.

    Georgia has courted data centers since 2018 through sales and use tax exemptions and now hosts more than 200 operating facilities, most of them around Atlanta. Legislative support has cooled: a 2024 vote to suspend new exemptions was vetoed, and a 2025 state-commissioned evaluation found the incentive to be a net fiscal cost. Eminent domain, the power to take private property for public use with just compensation, is available to utilities building infrastructure. Georgia Power says it treats it as a last resort.

    Sources

    Source: ‘My childhood home is being taken’: Eminent domain for data centers targets properties across a thousand miles of grid expansion in Georgia (Fortune, July 26, 2026). The article reports on Georgia Power’s land acquisition for the Ashley Park-Wansley line and its broader 1,000-mile transmission plan.

  • 70% Oppose AI Data Centers Nearby. Their Power Lines Hinge on In-State Benefit

    70% Oppose AI Data Centers Nearby. Their Power Lines Hinge on In-State Benefit

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Power companies building electricity lines to feed new data centers, the warehouses of computers that run tools like ChatGPT, are using the government’s power to force landowners to sell.

    That power is only supposed to be used when the public benefits. Courts have usually allowed it when a line makes local electricity more dependable. One state’s top court blocked a line that crossed the state without serving anyone who lived there.

    With 7 in 10 Americans against data centers near them, expect more fights over farms and backyards.

    Power companies in states including Georgia and Pennsylvania have turned to eminent domain, the government power to take private property without the owner’s consent, to secure land for transmission lines serving the data center buildout. The practice is drawing opposition as polling shows 7 in 10 Americans oppose AI data centers in their own communities, University of Dayton law professor Aaron Walayat wrote in an essay published by The Conversation and republished by Fortune on July 19, 2026.

    The United States has more than 3,000 data centers, with another 1,500 in development, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Data centers accounted for more than 4% of national electricity use in 2024. The legal question now in play is whether a line built to serve a private data center meets the Constitution’s “public use” requirement for taking land.

    Executive Summary

    Local opposition to data centers has mostly focused on the buildings themselves: utility bills, noise, pollution, water use and lost green space. It is now spreading to the transmission lines that carry power to those buildings. Transmission lines often have to cross private land, and when owners refuse to sell an easement, which is a right to use a strip of their property, utilities can ask a court to force the sale through condemnation.

    This matters because transmission is already one of the slowest parts of bringing new data center capacity online. A line that faces a credible legal challenge on public-use grounds adds legal risk to a project’s schedule. Precedent points to a consistent dividing line. Courts have upheld takings when a line delivers power or improves grid reliability for customers inside the state. They have been more skeptical when a line serves nobody in the state it crosses.

    For developers, utilities and regulators, how a line is justified in the record, and whom it demonstrably serves, is becoming as consequential as where it is routed.

    The Siting Fight Moves From the Building to the Wire

    A data center can be sited on a single parcel bought from a willing seller. The power it needs usually cannot. High-voltage transmission lines run for miles across many owners’ land, and every parcel on the route has to be secured. With more than 3,000 US data centers operating and another 1,500 in development, and with data centers already using more than 4% of the country’s electricity in 2024, utilities are planning new lines at a pace that makes holdout landowners a practical problem, not a rare one.

    The standard sequence is negotiation first and condemnation second. A utility offers to buy an easement. If the landowner declines, the utility, exercising power delegated by the state, asks a court to compel the sale at a court-determined “just compensation.” That is how power companies in Georgia and Pennsylvania have approached land acquisition for new lines. The 7-in-10 opposition figure measures attitudes toward data centers rather than transmission specifically, but the objections voters cite, higher bills and loss of green space, apply directly to a line crossing someone’s farm.

    Why In-State Benefit Is the Test That Decides These Cases

    The federal “public use” standard is permissive, so the contest shifts to state courts and state law, where a clear pattern emerges. The supreme courts of South Dakota and Vermont upheld utility takings because the lines provided at least some energy and improved grid reliability for in-state customers. In 1984, the Mississippi Supreme Court rejected a condemnation for a line that would have run from Mississippi into Louisiana without serving any Mississippi customers. In Texas, the state Supreme Court has held that a common carrier’s project must “serve the public” and “cannot be built only for the builder’s exclusive use.”

    Put together, those rulings describe the mechanism. A line documented as reinforcing reliability for a state’s own ratepayers fits well-established precedent, and the growing strain data centers place on the grid strengthens that case. A line whose practical function is to feed one private campus, or to carry power across a state border to load elsewhere, gives landowners a specific legal argument. Walayat’s reading is that reliability-driven takings will likely qualify as public use, while disputes over whether a line actually serves in-state customers remain the opening for challenges.

    The people most affected are the ones who write the justification. Utilities and their regulators decide how a line’s purpose is described in planning and certificate proceedings. Developers decide whether to take power from a dedicated feeder or from broader network upgrades. Landowners’ lawyers will look for evidence in that record that the public benefit is incidental. Projects that can show real benefit to in-state customers stand on firmer ground. Projects that cannot are carrying legal risk that belongs in their schedules.

    Kelo’s Long Shadow Makes State Lines Matter

    The backdrop is Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 decision in which the US Supreme Court allowed a city to take homes for private redevelopment near a Pfizer facility on economic-development grounds. The redevelopment never happened, and Pfizer later left the city. The backlash was lasting: 45 states enacted eminent domain reform laws, and the supreme courts of Michigan, Ohio and Oklahoma have barred taking private property to hand it to another private party purely for economic development.

    For data center infrastructure, that history means a landowner’s odds depend heavily on the state. Challenges under a restrictive state constitution may succeed where a federal claim would not. Courts still routinely permit utilities to condemn land, so this is not a veto over transmission. It does mean that justifying a line as good for local economic growth, the argument Kelo accepted, is a weaker footing in many states than justifying it as necessary for reliable service to local customers.

    Weighing the Claims on Both Sides

    Each side’s argument deserves scrutiny. The industry’s position, that new lines are needed to keep the grid reliable as demand rises, is supported by the demand figures. It is also the same argument courts reward, which gives utilities an incentive to frame data center lines in reliability terms whether or not that is their main purpose. The opposition’s position, that private companies are borrowing a public power for private gain, echoes Kelo, where the promised public benefit never arrived. It has to be tested line by line, though, because many transmission projects do serve broad customer bases.

    The 70% figure is a strong signal of political headwind. It is not a legal standard. Public use is decided on the facts of each project, not by polling. The practical question for each contested line is the one courts have already asked: who in this state actually gets power from it?

    Background

    Eminent domain rests on the Fifth Amendment, which allows the government to take private property for public use if it pays just compensation. Most condemnations are carried out by state and local governments, which can delegate the power to utilities such as power and water companies. The US Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo v. City of New London ruling read “public use” broadly to include economic development. The resulting backlash led 45 states to pass reform laws, and several state supreme courts, including those of Michigan, Ohio and Oklahoma, interpret their own constitutions more strictly.

    The AI boom has brought a matching surge in data center construction, to more than 3,000 facilities in operation and about 1,500 in development. Those facilities used more than 4% of US electricity in 2024, which pushes utilities to build new transmission. Those lines increasingly cross land whose owners do not want them.

    Sources

    Source: Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers as 70% of Americans say not in my backyard (Fortune, republished from The Conversation). An essay by University of Dayton law professor Aaron Walayat on the legal limits of taking land for data center transmission lines.