Southern Company (SOCO)
Southern Company (SOCO) is a balancing authority on the North American grid. On the map it has 345 power plants with 67.1 GW of capacity, natural gas the largest share at 35.8 GW. Its peak load is 45,965 MW.
At a glance
- Peak load: 45,965 MW
Capacity by fuel
345 power plants with 67.1 GW of capacity, planned generators left out.
- Natural gas: 35.8 GW from 60 plants (53%)
- Coal: 8.6 GW from 3 plants (13%)
- Nuclear: 8.1 GW from 3 plants (12%)
- Solar: 6.4 GW from 170 plants (10%)
- Hydro: 2.9 GW from 42 plants (4%)
- Pumped storage: 1.9 GW from 3 plants (3%)
- Biomass: 1.7 GW from 36 plants (2%)
- Oil: 1.2 GW from 23 plants (2%)
- Battery storage: 607 MW from 4 plants (1%)
- Other: 8 MW from 1 plant (under 1%)
Largest plants
- Vogtle: Nuclear, 4.5 GW, Georgia
- Bowen: Coal, 3.2 GW, Georgia
- Barry: Natural gas, 3.1 GW, Alabama
- James H Miller Jr: Coal, 2.8 GW, Alabama
- Scherer: Coal, 2.6 GW, Georgia
- Jack McDonough: Natural gas, 2.5 GW, Georgia
- Victor J Daniel Jr: Natural gas, 2.1 GW, Mississippi
- H Allen Franklin Combined Cycle: Natural gas, 1.9 GW, Alabama
- E C Gaston: Natural gas, 1.9 GW, Alabama
- Joseph M Farley: Nuclear, 1.8 GW, Alabama
Planned and under construction
27 generators planned, under construction or testing, 7.6 GW in all, not counted above.
- Solar: 4.9 GW
- Natural gas: 2.6 GW
- Battery storage: 134 MW
States and provinces
- Georgia: 258 plants
- Alabama: 65 plants
- Mississippi: 15 plants
- Florida: 6 plants
- Massachusetts: 1 plant
Sources
Power plants: EIA-860M (US); NRCan NACEI (Canada, Mexico); WRI GPPD (Mexico); OpenStreetMap via Geofabrik (Canada, Mexico gap fill); USGS USWTDB/USPVDB; EPA eGRID; Natural Earth admin-1; HIFLD control areas; location attributes from WorldPop (R2025A), Global Solar Atlas PVOUT, Global Wind Atlas 4, USFS Wildfire Hazard Potential, the USGS National Seismic Hazard Model and the previous publish's lines and substations; water distances from OpenStreetMap via Geofabrik; gas distances and county queue from the previous publish's EIA gas pipelines and LBNL Queued Up requests; nearest city from Natural Earth populated places; cooling degree days from NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals; elevation and slope from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (ESA, via AWS Open Data); water stress from WRI Aqueduct 4.0; ozone nonattainment from the EPA Green Book; drought from the U.S. Drought Monitor; tribal land from US Census TIGER/Line. License: ODbL (derivative database; EIA content is public domain, NRCan OGL-Canada, WRI GPPD CC BY 4.0; location attributes from WorldPop, Global Solar Atlas, Global Wind Atlas, LBNL Queued Up and WRI Aqueduct CC BY 4.0, USFS, USGS, EIA, NOAA, EPA, US Census and Natural Earth public domain, Copernicus DEM GLO-30 © DLR e.V. and Airbus Defence and Space GmbH, the U.S. Drought Monitor courtesy of NDMC)
Balancing authorities: HIFLD Control Areas (position, peak load); EIA-930 reference tables (which BAs are active); EIA-861 (a feature's BA); Wattlas outlines for Canadian and Mexican BAs. License: Public domain