Bitter cold will test Georgia’s power grid. Utilities say they’re ready.

Georgia’s electric utilities are still focused on turning the power back on for customers affected by ice in the northern half of the state. With the wintry precipitation over, however, their attention will turn to another challenge: bitter cold and an expected surge in demand for electricity.

Georgia Power and the state’s electric membership cooperatives say they’re ready to meet customers’ power needs.

“I don’t have any concerns,” said Rick Anderson, a senior vice president at Georgia Power, who oversees most of the company’s power generation resources. “I’m very confident in what we’ve done.”

Still, other utilities in the South have struggled with winter demands, and the cold snap could be a test for Georgia’s power providers.

Georgia and neighboring Southeastern states were expected to see dangerously cold temperatures starting Monday, before lows dip into the teens and even single digits Tuesday morning. Keeping homes and businesses warm in those frigid temperatures is likely to send demand for electricity through the roof.

Ice coats power lines in the Inman Park neighborhood of Atlanta during a break in a winter storm Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (Abbey Cutrer/AJC)

Georgia Power said it has invested in significant resiliency upgrades over the past few years in response to past winter storms.

But these high-stress, high-demand winter weather situations have caused major problems in other states in the past — sometimes with tragic consequences.

In 2021, a record-shattering outbreak of cold in Texas crippled the state’s electric grid, a meltdown blamed in large part on failures in its gas infrastructure. The storm left millions in the dark and cold, resulting in an estimated 246 deaths. An estimated two-thirds of the deaths were caused by hypothermia.

Another deep freeze that gripped the Southeast around Christmas in 2022 forced utilities like the Tennessee Valley Authority to use rolling power outages to keep their grid from failing. In that case, it was critical instruments at coal and gas plants that froze once again, taking key power resources offline.

Georgia’s close call

Georgia and its largest electric utility, Georgia Power, have avoided blackouts or major failures, but not without some close calls.

Southern Co., Georgia Power’s parent, was one of many major electric utilities in the South, Northeast and Midwest that had to issue a so-called “energy emergency alert” during that 2022 Christmas freeze, according to a report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and regional agencies.

An energy emergency alert is when an electric company’s power grid is strained because of high demand, to the point that it either may have to get emergency power from a neighboring utility or start rolling blackouts to prevent the entire grid from failing.

Southern had to borrow emergency power from Florida Power & Light Co. early Christmas Eve morning that year, according to a separate report. That allowed the utility to meet what was then its all-time December record peak in the morning and later supply emergency power to neighboring electric companies.

FERC and the other agencies analyzed what went wrong during the storm, which left millions in the Eastern U.S. without electricity, especially after dozens of power plants either failed to operate when utilities turned them on or tripped offline during the storm.

The agencies also looked at the reliability of the nation’s natural gas infrastructure.

Electric utilities in the South had spent billions weatherizing the grid and power plants after the 2014 polar vortex, whose record cold weather exposed vulnerabilities.

Despite those investments, when the cold hit again in December 2022, equipment at natural gas and coal-powered plants throughout the Southeast still froze. In other parts of the country, 70% of the power plants that failed were powered by natural gas.

Georgia Power is among several electric companies in the South building new natural gas plants to meet the unprecedented electricity demand for data centers, warehouses packed with servers that power artificial intelligence and our digital lives.

‘Adequate generation capacity’

Anderson, the Georgia Power executive, said the utility has learned from past storms and has continued to improve the weather resilience at key power plants. He said the company has installed heating strips and more insulation on critical pipes, instruments and other infrastructure.

Georgia EMC, the trade association representing Georgia’s 41 electric membership cooperatives, said its members also feel they have “adequate generation capacity” to meet the demands of the arctic cold.

“System conditions can always change,” said Kim Broun, a spokesperson for Georgia EMC. “However, we believe that we are well prepared to meet members’ needs through the upcoming cold weather conditions.”