by Ty Tagami | Oct 6, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Data centers gulp massive amounts of power, and that insatiable thirst is driving new production and distribution of natural gas supply, experts said at a legislative hearing Monday.
A special House subcommittee heard from industry insiders involved in the sourcing and supply of the finite fossil fuel.
“The need for electricity is growing tremendously, and natural gas is a large component of that,” said Josh Browning, a vice president with Williams Companies, Inc., which has 33,000 miles of gas pipeline in two dozen states, with a transcontinental line bisecting Georgia.
Data centers are a huge driver, but the electrification of transportation and heating are also pushing demand for natural gas, Browning said.
Power plants burn the gas to create electricity, but that is far less efficient than consuming it directly, for instance with a gas stove or a water heater, said Scott Tolleson of the Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia. Electrical conversion wastes two-thirds of the energy in natural gas, he said.
Meanwhile, the United States has at least a century’s worth of natural gas supply in the ground, accessible by techniques such as fracking, Tolleson said.
That worried Rep. Don Parson’s, R-Marietta, chairman of the House committee on Energy, Utilities & Telecommunications.
“Well, 100 years that wouldn’t get it,” he said. “All this investment and relying on natural gas, I mean, if it’s only a hundred … .”
Tolleson reiterated that the estimate is a minimum, noting potential reserves in Georgia. (He showed a slide that indicated natural gas could be locked in rock under the northwest and southwest corners of the state.)
“I wouldn’t say only a hundred years,” he said. “I’d say at least a hundred years.”
Scott Hunnewell offered a potentially limitless energy supply. He is vice president of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s new nuclear power program. He showed a slide indicating that renewable energy consumes far more land for each megawatt of power produced. A nuclear plant is hundreds of times more efficient in that sense than solar power, his slide indicated.
To replace the energy that the United States consumes in the form of fossil fuels, one would have to cover all of Tennessee with solar panels, Hunnewell said. “No roads, no rivers, no trees, nothing. Just solar panels.”
A fundamental weakness for solar is the intermittent nature of its source: the sun. To maintain consistent supply from a state’s worth of solar panels, one would need way more land, Hunnewell added.
“You’d have to cover about eight times the size of the state of Tennessee with batteries and solar panels,” he said. “And even then, that would get you about five days. If the sun didn’t shine on that sixth day, you’d have no power.”
The TVA is not building more coal plants or hydroelectric facilities, Hunnewell said. Solar and wind power will have a role, he said, but nuclear and natural gas will be the “backbone” of the authority’s future power supply. (His slide indicated that nuclear power production is 58 times more land efficient than natural gas production.)
These industry insiders said data centers will be driving a lot of future demand.
A mission of the quasi-governmental TVA is to produce the power needed for economic prosperity. Data centers may produce an initial flurry of jobs during construction, Hunnewell said, but each facility might produce around 20 sustained jobs thereafter — far fewer than a traditional manufacturing or industrial site that consumes a lot of power.
The TVA has not had to turn away customers, but the “signals” for energy consumption by “AI data centers” suggest that could happen, he said. “We’ll say ‘no’ to a data center before we will some industrial or manufacturing facility. We would much rather have an industry in there that is hiring 600 people” on a continuous basis, he said.
Tolleson, of the Municipal Gas Authority, said a data center can consume as much power each day as 350,000 hot water heaters, and new centers are difficult to anticipate and accommodate.
“When a data center comes in and says, ‘I want as much gas as you’ve ever seen in one setting,’ we aren’t planning for that,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 3, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will finally testify to a special committee of the Georgia Senate after rebuffing their demands for more than a year, the committee’s leader said Friday.
After refusing to appear last year and fighting a committee subpoena in court, Willis will comply with a new subpoena to be issued by the Senate Special Committee on Investigations to appear on Nov. 13, said its chairman, Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens.
It will be an opportunity for Republican lawmakers to ask her about the election interference case she brought against President Donald Trump and his allies.
Cowsert said she agreed to testify to a limited scope of questioning that he could not disclose.
Willis’ office did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Republicans have been vilifying Willis ever since she pursued the case, but Cowsert said his committee members want neither to persecute nor humiliate her.
They just want her advice on legislation to regulate prosecutorial misconduct, he said.
Willis was dislodged from her Trump prosecution after the state Supreme Court declined in September to consider her appeal of a Georgia Court of Appeals order disqualifying her from prosecuting conspiracy charges against Trump and eight others.
The appeals court had found an appearance of impropriety in her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she had assigned to the case.
Republicans have raised questions about her use of taxpayer dollars in hiring him.
“She can’t continue to create this impression that the laws don’t apply to her — that she’s being an obstructionist,” Cowsert said.
Sen. Harold Jones, II, D-Augusta, one of two Democrats on the eight-member committee, welcomed Willis’ testimony. It will be an opportunity to give her side of the story, said Jones, who is the Senate minority leader.
Despite her agreement to testify, the state Supreme Court will still hear oral arguments Nov. 4 in the dispute over the original subpoena, Cowsert said.
Cowsert’s committee also got an update from a new commission established by the General Assembly to investigate allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Investigators with the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission have considered 36 complaints filed in 2024 and 86 so far this year. None merited promotion to a hearing panel, said Ian Heap, the commission executive director.
The details of cases are not public unless they merit formal charges, so Heap could not answer Cowsert’s question about whether the commission had considered allegations against Willis.
Cowsert said after the hearing that he merely wanted to know if her Nov. 13 testimony to his committee might be constrained by concerns about self-incrimination connected with any commission investigation.
Cowsert said Heap’s report on the escalation in the number of complaints — there were only seven in 2023 — was new information to him. He wondered whether it indicated many prosecutors were misbehaving and the public now has a vehicle to complain — or whether the complaints were merely frivolous.
Jones focused on Heap’s disclosure that all the complaints so far were deemed meritless and on the relevance of the law that created the commission.
“I think that kind of shows that the law was not needed,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia lawmakers who say they want to address doubts about election security wrapped up a fifth marathon meeting Thursday, hearing about themes repeated from prior such events during their travels across the state.
Some Republicans on the GOP-led study committee expressed skepticism about the security of a multi-state compact created to detect illegal voting. And the lone Democrat questioned the credibility of speakers the Republicans had invited to give evidence.
The hearing, which spanned nearly five hours, featured a half dozen election officials, experts and advocates.
Nearly all of them got at least half an hour to present, before more than two dozen members of the public, some of them local election officials who had driven from far-flung counties, got 90 seconds apiece.
An exchange between Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, and Erik Christensen, an accountant called to testify about how Georgia’s election audit procedures are “a rubber stamp recount,” might have summed up the core of the years-long fight over voting that flared after Donald Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden.
Christensen acknowledged that he had never managed an election or even worked a poll, leading Draper to ask why someone with his qualifications was “sitting here today talking to us about your opinions.”
She threw in a “with all due respect,” but her line of attack was clearly aimed at his credibility — and by extension the motivations of the Republicans who invited him to speak.
Christensen responded that he knows “how to account for things.”
“But,” said Draper, “you’ve never had a client in election administration.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Christensen shot back. “Numbers are numbers are numbers. In fact, I can’t think of anything on the surface easier than counting votes.”
Then, he added, “Have we turned it into a can of worms? Oh yes.”
That about sums up the situation facing the committee, which will likely promote more election-related legislation next year. That would come after a series of new voting laws in recent years that have not quelled doubts.
The testimony, some of it repeated from prior hearings, went deep into the details of data security, voter roll maintenance, election audits, voter confidence surveys, conflicts of interest, and the history of partisan pivots on election security based on who won and lost.
Republicans pointed to doubting Democrats when Stacey Abrams was defeated by Gov. Brian Kemp in their first gubernatorial matchup, when Kemp, as Secretary of State, oversaw their contest.
Republicans had sharp questions for Shane Hamlin, executive director of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate consortium.
The organization has been collecting and comparing voter data for over a decade, with the goal of detecting people who vote in more than one state.
Hamlin described his nonprofit as bipartisan, and he confronted suspicions that it is, as he put it, a “shadowy” operation.
Georgia lawmakers have been talking about abandoning ERIC since nine states, nearly all of them Republican-dominated, left in 2023. Draper called it a “rash reaction” to Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss to Joe Biden, but two Republicans on the committee criticized the organization’s data security and the fact that most of its meetings are held in private.
Georgia and other states send ERIC the personal information of voters, including their dates of birth and their Social Security Numbers.
Hamlin said the data is secured by irreversible encryption and by strict protocols for accessing it. He only has two staffers with the credentials and equipment to pull data from a hosting site somewhere in the Midwest, a location he wouldn’t disclose for security reasons.
Rep. Martin Momtahan, R-Dallas, said the login procedure sounded no more secure than the way he accesses his Gmail.
“It’s not exactly the same,” Hamlin responded.
Rep. Trey Kelley, R-Cedartown, criticized ERIC for holding only one public meeting per year, convening privately the rest of the time. Hamlin responded that ERIC is not subject to open meeting law but does disclose meeting information on its website.
One election watchdog who testified about “systemic irregularities” in voting felt compelled to address the heated politics head on. Mark Davis, president of Data Productions, Inc, introduced himself as someone who is “not an election denier” and is “just trying to solve a problem.”
The people who got 90 seconds apiece at the end mostly expressed confidence in election outcomes, but some shared suspicions that may prove difficult to dislodge absent a full reversion back to hand-marked and hand-counted voting on paper.
No one can lay eyes on a voter’s intent when it is translated into an “unverifiable” electronic ballot through a proprietary system like the one used in Georgia, said one woman. “And there is no way to squeeze trust out of that.”
by Ty Tagami | Oct 1, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — One in eight Georgia jobs are tied to the state’s two ocean ports, and the number of those jobs is growing, according to new research and state data.
The Port of Savannah handled 9% more container units year-over-year and has implemented a new routing process that should increase turnaround time for ships, the Georgia Ports Authority said this week.
And an economic impact study by the University of Georgia’s business school says port activity now supports about 650,000 full- or part-time jobs in Georgia.
That is an increase of 7% from fiscal year 2023.
The ports provide $43 billion in personal income, about 7% of the state total, the UGA report added.
Some areas lagged. The Port of Brunswick saw a 14% year-to-year decline in autos and machinery traffic.
But the Georgia Port Authority’s Board is betting on growth, recently approving $614 million for infrastructure work, with plans to invest $4.5 billion during the next decade.
Gov. Brian Kemp continues to throw his support behind the ports, saying in a statement Tuesday that they are driving the economy and are key to job creation.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 1, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The federal government shut down as of 12:01 a.m., and it could affect the income of about 111,000 Georgia employees.
Many will not get paid, causing an economic loss that could reverberate through communities.
But the Georgia Department of Labor said Friday that the estimated 110,900 federal workers who could be furloughed may be eligible to collect state unemployment benefits.
“Furloughed employees are considered job-attached and are not required to search for work for six weeks,” the agency said.
There is a catch: under a 2019 federal law, the agency notes, furloughed employees will receive back pay when funding is restored. So, any money they collected from the state must be repaid.
The federal government can deduct unemployment benefits from their back pay or reimburse the state directly, so applicants must report gross earnings when requesting payments.
Affected employees can apply online but must show a W2 form or pay stub in person if the federal government fails to report the information to the state, which is common during shutdowns. Applicants can take their documents to any Georgia Dept of Labor Career Center.
