Coweta County, Georgia, resident Ansley Brown made international news this year when she posted on X that she was saying goodbye to her childhood home, describing it as being demolished to make way for data center power lines. Brown’s situation is part of a larger dispute over Georgia Power’s Ashley Park–Wansley project, a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line cutting through Coweta, Fayette, Fulton, and Heard counties south of Atlanta. More than 330 properties sit in the corridor’s path, with roughly 29 homes expected to be cleared entirely, according to Propmodo, which has tracked the project closely. Construction is scheduled to begin in early 2027.
For Clay Rikard, senior vice president of system planning at Southern — Georgia Power’s parent company — the question of who benefits from the line misses a larger point. “Data centers do represent a lot of the growth, but I think they’re also bringing tremendous benefits to our communities,” Rikard said, noting that new transmission also allows older power plants to retire and enables power to be imported from other regions. The company has reported reaching voluntary agreements with the great majority of affected landowners, citing a voluntary settlement rate above 99 percent. What it has not managed to do is stop the opposition from spreading.
Investor-owned utilities and transmission companies are on track to spend $43.7 billion on the US transmission system this year, according to the Edison Electric Institute — roughly 10 percent more than the prior year’s estimate. That spending reflects two pressures arriving simultaneously. Much of the country’s high-voltage grid dates to the postwar decades and needs replacement regardless of demand trends. Add the surge driven by AI data centers, domestic manufacturing growth, and broader electrification, and what might have been a gradual replacement cycle has become a compressed, decade-scale expansion. The challenge is that the rights-of-way for those lines run through places that were never built with 500-kilovolt corridors in mind…