A TikTok video from a young woman in Coweta County, Georgia, racked up more than 3.7 million views this spring. Her video focused on a very real claim: Utility company Georgia Power was “forcibly taking” her childhood home to make way for new transmission lines. It blew up: A country music star tweeted about it, a state senator running for lieutenant governor showed up at her house and called her heroic on Facebook, and within days, a local land dispute had become a national flashpoint.
A few miles away, in Fayette County, Rachael Maszk and her husband got a letter last fall informing them that Georgia Power wanted to run new high-voltage lines through roughly a third of the two-acre property they’d bought specifically for its privacy and space to garden. Negotiations have dragged on for months. She now spends hours most days on calls and emails trying to protect a home she no longer feels safe raising her children in.
I’ve spent a career working inside and around utilities and infrastructure companies: Entergy, Duke Energy, AT&T, Spectrum Communications, and Central States Water Resources and more. I’ve lived this contradiction at every turn. I remember my brother, a staunch environmentalist, taking me to task once for working at a utility — then boarding a plane for vacation days later. It’s the contradiction we all live and contribute to.
These are real, sympathetic people losing something that matters to them. They are also, whether they realize it or not, at the leading edge of a demand curve that most of us — all of us — created.
@ansleysgarden Say no to data centers! This is a longer cut of the video I posted earlier about how GA power is taking my family home and dimolishing it to supply power to the current data center in Fayetteville. #coweta #datacenters #cowetacounty #stopai #fayetteville ♬ original sound – Ansley’s garden 🌻
Georgia Power says it’s building as much as 1,000 miles of new transmission lines over the next decade, driven overwhelmingly by a surge in data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom. Metro Atlanta has become one of the largest data center markets in the world. But don’t forget that every query we type into a chatbot, every photo backed up to the cloud, every electric vehicle we plug in overnight draws on infrastructure that has to physically exist somewhere — on somebody’s land, near somebody’s bedroom window.
This is the uncomfortable truth utilities rarely get to say out loud: The public wants abundant, reliable, increasingly clean power, and it wants the infrastructure that delivers it to be invisible. We want the AI tools. We want the EVs. We want the convenience. We just don’t want to see the poles, and we certainly don’t want them in our backyard. That contradiction isn’t going away. If anything, it’s accelerating as data center demand reshapes the grid faster than most utilities’ public engagement models were built to handle.
In Georgia, none of the homeowners are in any way wrong.
Georgia Power says it uses eminent domain as a last resort in under one percent of its land transactions, and that it typically pays above market value. That may well be true, and it still doesn’t make the process feel fair to a family staring down a transmission tower forty feet from their porch, with limited leverage to negotiate and a deadline that isn’t really theirs to set. Eminent domain law was written to balance public need against private rights, but when the “public use” increasingly means powering a private data center campus rather than a hospital or school, that balance gets harder to defend in the court of public opinion, whatever the legal merits.
That’s the real failure on display here, and it’s a communications and reputation failure as much as a policy one. By the time a homeowner is filming a TikTok video, the utility has already lost control of the narrative. Here’s what utilities in this position should be doing differently, starting well before the first easement letter goes out.
1. Lead with the honest tradeoff instead of hiding behind reliability jargon: Utilities should be telling the public plainly that the AI and data center boom they’re benefiting from indirectly — through jobs, tax revenue, and grid investment — comes with a physical cost somebody has to bear. Naming that tradeoff builds more credibility than pretending it doesn’t exist.
2. Get ahead of the map, not behind it: Community meetings and compensation offers that arrive after a route is functionally locked in read as theater, not consultation. Real input early, even if it’s imperfect, costs less in reputational damage than a viral video six months later.
3. Treat the compensation conversation as a relationship, not a transaction: A single lowball opening offer, even if it’s later corrected, sets the emotional tone for the entire negotiation. Utilities should assume every offer will be screenshotted and shared.
4. Make the tech beneficiaries visible partners, not silent ones: If a transmission line exists primarily to serve a specific data center campus, the utility and that company should be sharing the burden of community engagement and, where appropriate, the cost of easing the transition for affected homeowners — not leaving the utility to absorb all the reputational risk for infrastructure another company’s growth demanded.
5. Prepare for virality as a certainty, not a risk: Any project touching individual homeowners now operates in a media environment where one sympathetic video can outrun months of careful process. Utilities need response protocols, empowered local spokespeople, and genuine willingness to revisit a bad-looking offer quickly, not after weeks of legal review.
The data center era is not slowing down, and neither is the transmission buildout it requires. Utilities that treat these conflicts as one-off PR problems will keep losing them one viral video at a time. The ones that get ahead of the tradeoff — honestly, early, and in partnership with the companies actually driving the demand — have a real chance to keep the public’s trust while keeping the lights, and the servers, on.
