POWER4Georgians! - New Generation Resources

New Generation Resources

The EMCs involved in this project want to assure reliable and affordable power for the nearly 700,000 Georgia residents and businesses they serve. The EMCs want to control their own power supply, what they pay for it; and minimize any impact on costs associated with market forces that are beyond their control.
While the percentage of energy derived from alternative sources such as wind, solar and biomass continues to increase, these combined sources represent less than five percent of the total power generation in the state, and at prices that are not affordable for most consumers or competitive for businesses.
As the least expensive and most abundant energy resource in the U.S., coal continues to be the most cost-effective and reliable source of critical base load power generation. In addition, tremendous advances in coal technology allow more power to be generated from less coal, and with lower emissions, than ever before.
A modern, efficient coal-fired generating facility using the best available technology represents a proven and economically viable first step in achieving those ends. This plant is an important step forward in ensuring that EMCs can keep energy affordable for members.
From purely an economic standpoint, the cost of building new generation facilities is more affordable for the EMCs and their members than continuing to purchase power from third party for-profit suppliers.

As a first step in securing new base-load generation resources, the Power4Georgians consortium is going to build a modern, highly-efficient, coal-fired, 850 MW power generating facility near Sandersville, in Washington County, Georgia.
Unlike other proposed power plants that seek to use Georgia’s land and water resources to produce electricity for other states, the Washington County power station will produce energy only for use by members served by Georgia co-ops.
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There would be two likely outcomes of not building the power plant, and neither is very good.
- The first is that EMCs will have to pay substantially more for the power they buy from the wholesale market, assuming it is available, – meaning members would see their electricity become less and less affordable. Residential members may have to choose between electricity and other priorities in their life while commercial and small industrial members may choose to relocate if electric costs put them at a competitive disadvantage.
- The second result may be a shortage of electricity in the state. Building the plant is a pre-emptive step in ensuring that Georgia does not experience power shortages during peak demand periods.
The Plant Washington is the first pre-emptive step to avoid potential power shortages and exorbitantly higher energy costs for co-op members in Georgia.