Tech
Georgia Power Is Buying 20 Homes to Serve a Data Center
QTS's Project Excalibur drew 29 million gallons from Fayette County's water system without a billing account and paid no fine. The 35-mile transmission corridor built to power it at scale will force 20 to 30 Coweta County families from their homes.
Georgia Power is building a 35-mile, 500kV transmission line to serve a data center campus outside Atlanta, acquiring easements across more than 300 parcels along the route.
The campus is Project Excalibur, 615 acres in Fayetteville operated by Quality Technology Services, a Blackstone subsidiary. At full buildout, the development spans 16 buildings and 6.6 million square feet, drawing 500 megawatts from the Georgia Power grid.
The Power Route
Power enters the site through Charles and Creola substations inside the property, connecting north to Georgia Power's new Ashley Park 500/230kV substation. That first link is expected to be energized in summer 2026.
The longer path goes 35 miles southwest to Plant Wansley in Heard County, where Georgia Power retired 2,000 megawatts of coal generation in August 2022. On April 30, 2026, the company broke ground on 1,453 megawatts of combined-cycle natural gas generation and a 500-megawatt battery storage system at the same location. The gas plant opens November 2029; the batteries in 2028.
The Ashley Park-Wansley 500kV line, scheduled to complete in Q2 2028, crosses Coweta, Fayette, Fulton, and Heard counties. More than 300 parcels will carry new easements. Georgia Power has confirmed that 20 to 30 homes, all in Coweta County, will be removed.
The Water Account
Before a single kilowatt runs through the Wansley line, QTS's construction phase had already drawn from the county's municipal supply without authorization. Fayette County Water System Director Vanessa Tigert's May 15, 2025, letter documented that QTS consumed approximately 29 million gallons through two connections not linked to a QTS billing account.
QTS puts the period at 15 months, implying roughly 64,000 gallons a day. Tigert's account places the unauthorized draw at approximately four months, implying closer to 242,000 gallons a day. Either figure landed during a drought that had prompted the county to restrict lawn watering.
Residents in a neighboring subdivision reported low water pressure before the draw was detected. The county billed QTS $147,474 retroactively and imposed no further penalty. Asked by E&E News why, Tigert answered plainly: "They're our largest customer, and we have to be partners. It's called customer service."
QTS attributed the usage to temporary construction activities. The company says the completed facility will use a closed-loop cooling system consuming roughly the equivalent of four American households annually.
The Federal Math
The DOE added $26.5 billion in loan guarantees in February 2026 for a Southern Company buildout spanning Georgia and Alabama, the largest non-emergency energy guarantee in U.S. history. No public filing breaks the total down by site.
Georgia Power CEO Kim Greene said at the April 30 groundbreaking that the company has signed 9,500 megawatts in data center contracts and is not building speculatively. Georgia Power structured the underlying Protection Pledge against the PJM failure mode, where data center load pushed capacity costs up 262% in 2025 with no equivalent cost-shifting. The pledge commits Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI to build or fund their own generation.
The PSC formalized enforcement in a December 2025 stipulated agreement requiring Georgia Power's next rate case to push residential bills down at least $8.50 per month through large-load cost allocation. The current rate freeze runs through 2028.
PSC Chairman Jason Shaw confirmed that existing residential customers will not pay for the new infrastructure. QTS does not disclose which companies occupy Project Excalibur; whether any of the seven Protection Pledge counterparties are among them is not public record.
The transmission corridor means that roughly 300 landowners are absorbing a physical cost that appears nowhere in QTS's project disclosures or Blackstone's investor materials. Twenty to 30 of those households, all in Coweta County, face demolition.
The Ashley Park-Wansley line completes in Q2 2028. Watch the first PSC rate case after that date: that is when the December 2025 protection floor and the Wansley generation costs face actual load numbers for the first time.