Southern Company

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Southern Company sits behind the light switches and gas stoves of 9 million households across six states, making it the second largest utility company in the United States by customer base as of 2021. Its territory covers 120,000 square miles, served by 27,000 miles of distribution lines stretching across the Deep South. Yet behind those mundane facts of pipes and wires lies a company whose history involves nuclear gambles, a clean coal plant that became a cautionary tale, and decades of funding organizations that disputed the science of climate change. How did a regional utility rooted in early 20th century Alabama become one of the country's most consequential energy corporations? And what does its future look like as it bets on reactors, solar fields, and a $26.54 billion federal loan?

• 2. A Century of Consolidation

  ›

  Alabama Traction, Light and Power was founded in 1906, and it became the earliest thread in what would eventually be woven into Southern Company. Southeastern Power & Light formed in 1924 as a holding company for that predecessor, and within two years it had pulled in Mississippi Power, Gulf Power, and Georgia Power (itself founded in 1902) under a single umbrella. By 1930 the whole structure merged into the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, a sprawling national entity that included five Northern companies alongside six Southern ones.

  The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 eventually unraveled that arrangement. In the late 1940s, Commonwealth & Southern was dissolved to satisfy the law's requirements. Four of its Deep South operating companies, Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, and Mississippi Power, were judged to form an integrated system and were allowed to stay joined together. A fresh holding company, Southern Company, was incorporated in Delaware on the 9th of November 1945. It began operating in 1949 and moved to Georgia in 1950.

  The Cold War era pulled the company into national politics almost immediately. In 1954-55, Southern Company became tangled in the Dixon-Yates contract with the Atomic Energy Commission, a politically charged arrangement that drew significant controversy before it was ultimately cancelled. That episode signaled that a utility company of Southern's scale could never remain purely a local affair.

• 3. Expansion and Diversification

  ›

  In 1981, Southern Company became the first electric utility holding company in 46 years to diversify its operations by forming an unregulated subsidiary. That move broke with decades of industry convention. When Southern Energy, Inc. began official operations in January 1982, it grew into a global energy company operating in 10 countries across four continents.

  On the 2nd of April 2001, Southern Company spun off Southern Energy as Mirant Corporation, separating the international operations from the regulated utility core. The same year, on the 9th of January 2001, the Securities and Exchange Commission gave final approval for Southern Power, a new subsidiary targeting wholesale customers with generating assets across the Southeast.

  The company's growth through the 2010s was more acquisitive than organic. In 2016, Southern Company acquired PowerSecure, a distributed energy infrastructure company based in Wake Forest, North Carolina. That same year it acquired AGL Resources, renaming it Southern Company Gas. That deal, valued at $12 billion including $8 billion of equity, doubled Southern Company's customer base to approximately 9 million people and significantly expanded its natural gas footprint. Two years later, in 2018, it sold Gulf Power along with shares in two gas plants to NextEra for $6.5 billion, retreating from Florida as it deepened its gas presence elsewhere.

  By 2025, Southern Company ranked 163rd on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations, with approximately 31,300 employees.

• 4. The Nuclear Wager at Vogtle

  ›

  In June 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to support the construction of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, near Augusta, Georgia. Energy Secretary Steven Chu described the project as "the first new nuclear power plant to break ground in decades." The plant's capacity was expected to double, with the two new 1,154 MW reactors projected to supply electricity for about 1 million customers and create up to 3,500 jobs during construction.

  Georgia Power owns 45.7% of the existing 2,430 MW facility. The co-owners are Oglethorpe Power at 30%, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia at 22.7%, and the City of Dalton at 1.6%.

  The construction was not a smooth story. In March 2017, Westinghouse Electric Company, the contractor building the plant, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after accumulating $9 billion in losses from its two U.S. nuclear projects. The $14 billion construction project had been scheduled for completion in 2022. The actual completion came years later. Unit 3 began commercial operations in July 2023, and Unit 4 followed in April 2024. Those two additions represent the first new nuclear units in the United States in roughly 30 years.

  In February 2026, the Department of Energy awarded Southern Company a $26.54 billion loan, described as the largest in the agency's history. Georgia Power is set to receive $22.4 billion and Alabama Power $4.1 billion from that loan, covering 16 gigawatts of power including nuclear upgrades and license renewals, new natural gas generation, hydropower modernization, battery storage, and 1,300 miles of new transmission infrastructure.

• 5. Kemper and the Clean Coal Gamble

  ›

  In June 2010, Southern Company broke ground on what it called a 21st-century clean coal facility in Kemper County, Mississippi, operated by its subsidiary Mississippi Power. The plant was designed to use lignite, a low-quality coal abundant in the region, and convert it through Transport Gasifier technology into a synthetic gas with significantly reduced emissions. TRIG technology, developed with the help of partner KBR, works by crushing and heating dry feed coal in a gasifier operating at lower temperatures than competing systems, producing syngas that generates electricity while stripping out a large share of carbon dioxide. The Kemper project was expected to capture at least 65% of carbon dioxide emissions, well above the EPA's proposed ceiling of 1,100 pounds per megawatt hour.

  As of April 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy had invested $270 million in the project. Southern Company anticipated the plant would serve more than 187,000 customers. Mississippi Power also partnered with China's Shenhua Group, which was projected to add more than 400,000 megawatts of coal capacity by 2035, to extend TRIG technology into Asian markets.

  The reality of construction proved far grimmer than the promise. The original cost estimate of $2.88 billion ballooned to $6.58 billion. In February 2015, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered Mississippi Power to restore $377 million to ratepayers who had been charged for a plant still under construction under Mississippi's Baseload Act. By May 2016, both Southern Company and Mississippi Power were under Securities and Exchange Commission investigation over the cost overruns. Recorded conversations captured at least six Kemper engineers alleging that delays, safety violations, and poor workmanship traced back to mismanagement or fraud. A whistleblower who criticized company management was found to have been unlawfully fired. Mississippi Power was also sued by Treetop Midstream Services, which had built a pipeline in anticipation of receiving carbon dioxide from the plant, alleging that Mississippi Power had fraudulently concealed the project's true start date.

• 6. The Climate Denial Record

  ›

  Between 1993 and 2004, Southern Company paid over $62 million to organizations that spread disinformation about climate change. That money funded advertising claiming climate change was not real, as well as payments to public relations firms, industry groups, law firms, and think tanks whose purpose was to dispute the scientific consensus and resist legislative action. Among those payments was $20 million to the trade group Edison Electric Institute, which ran media campaigns targeting proponents of global warming. In the 1990s, Southern Company and the Center for Energy and Economic Development used the company's satellite network to broadcast workshops to schoolteachers promoting pro-coal messages about climate and the environment.

  From 2010 to 2020, Southern Company spent more than $135 million on federal lobbying.

  In February 2015, documents obtained by Greenpeace revealed that climate scientist Willie Soon had received funding from Southern Company and several other fossil fuel interests. Over 14 years, Soon collected a total of $1.25 million from Southern Company, Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and a foundation associated with the Koch brothers. At $469,560, Southern Company was the largest single donor among that group. Soon described his research to fossil fuel executives as "deliverables" and allowed anonymous pre-publication review by funders. His work consistently advanced the discredited theory that solar activity rather than greenhouse gases drives climate change, without disclosing his financial backers.

  On the environmental enforcement side, Alabama Power agreed on the 25th of April 2006 to pay $200 million to settle allegations that its coal-fired James H. Miller, Jr. Plant near West Jefferson, Alabama had emitted harmful levels of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. As of 2019, Southern Company remained the third-largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, emitting 86,244,286 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent that year.

• 7. Shifting the Energy Mix

  ›

  In 2009, coal represented 57% of Southern Company's generation output, down from an average of 70% between 2005 and 2008. Nuclear provided 23%, natural gas 16%, and renewable hydroelectric power accounted for 4%. By 2017, coal's share had dropped further to 30%, reflecting both fuel economics and tightening environmental standards.

  The company's renewable expansion has run in parallel with its fossil fuel operations. In 2011, Southern Company and Turner Renewable Energy purchased a 30 MW solar project from First Solar in Cimarron, New Mexico, which began generating electricity that same year. In June 2012, the Nacogdoches Generating Facility commenced commercial operation as a 115 MW biomass-fueled power plant located near Sacul in Nacogdoches County, Texas. In September 2023, Southern Power acquired the 200 MW Millers Branch Solar Facility in Haskell County, Texas from EDF Renewables North America.

  On the grid infrastructure side, in 2009 the U.S. Department of Energy granted Southern Company a $165 million Smart Grid Investment Grant. Through matching funds and its own investments, the company spent $363 million total on the initiative and completed it in 2014. The upgraded grid allows real-time monitoring and control of the company's electric infrastructure. Southern Company also manages the Department of Energy's National Carbon Capture Center, a research facility focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal-based generation, with geologic sequestration projects underway at Plant Gorgas in Alabama and Plant Daniel in Mississippi. In May 2018, the company donated $1 million to America First Policies, a pro-Donald Trump advocacy group.