Vogtle, data centers, donations. Three financial layers stacked on one ratepayer. The bill arrives in a different envelope every time, and the balance sheet beneath the politics rarely makes a headline. This is the substrate the runoff is being decided on top of.
Pull each layer apart. Each is published, each is auditable, each is rendered here from sourced numbers, not vibes. The political question is what they look like stacked together. The Capital Stack is not a conspiracy; it is a balance sheet. The argument is the assembly, not the line items.
Units 3 & 4 ballooned from a $14B estimate to $36.8B over fifteen years. Unit 3 came online July 2023; Unit 4 in April 2024. Residential rates rose 23.7% across the recovery period. The PSC moved the bulk to ratepayers in December 2023. None of this is in dispute; it is the documented floor.
Georgia Power's 2024 IRP projects roughly 8,200 MW of new load by winter 2030/31, layered on top of the Vogtle base. The largest single driver is hyperscale data-center growth. The same plan kept coal units running and added gas capacity to serve it. Whether the forecast holds is contested; the regulatory commitments built on it are not.
Per Energy & Policy Institute filings, Johnson took 87% and Echols 61% of their reported campaign funds from sources tied to the utilities they regulate. Across the broader commission, four of five regulators have accepted at least 70% from regulated parties. The pattern is filed, public, and ongoing. The dispute is what it means, not whether it exists.
Most political coverage gives every assertion the same typographic weight. We don't. Each claim below carries an explicit tier from Proven (5 dots, glowing) to Speculative (1 dot, dim). The site's intellectual posture: "we identified mechanisms," not "we proved corruption." Read accordingly.
Three of the seven races on the June 16 runoff ballot (the GOP Senate race, the GOP Governor race, the Lt Gov race in both parties) touch the same regulatory geometry as the Capital Stack. The runoff cohort that returns to vote will be whiter, older, wealthier, and more reliably partisan than the primary cohort that put these races into runoff in the first place. That selection compounds with the financial stack: the voters most insulated from rate-burden are structurally over-represented in the cohort that will decide who supervises the rate-base. The Runoff lens and the Capital Stack lens are not separate stories; they are the same balance sheet, read at two different vertical scales.
Read · S1·10 · The Runoff TellsThe financial instruments described above — rate-base recovery, data-center underwriting, donor-class influence — are the same architectural pattern that gets re-deployed at the data layer in Season II. The composite of you assembled in EP 02 Personhood Inc. is securitized through the scoring architecture in EP 03 The Trust Market, with the same logic — pool exposure, abstract it into a tradable claim, distribute returns upward. The Capital Stack here is the financial mirror of the data stack there. When EP 08 The Class Engine ships, the bowtie that makes the two stacks one story becomes legible. The architecture is reproducible across asset classes; the names are local.
Same fact, different argument, different chart. Tabs are asymmetric: stronger-evidence lenses carry a visible stripe. Press A/B/C/D.
The stack is real in shape and the floor is heavily documented. Several joins between layers (exactly how much data-center build is socialized to residential ratepayers, exactly which donor relationships shaped which votes, exactly how Vogtle bills convert to runoff turnout) are inferred from pattern, not measured to the decimal. Where they are measured, they are sourced. Where they are not, they are marked and tier-tagged above.
$36.8B build, ~$11B rate-base addition, PSC recovery orders. Multi-source, official-filing-backed, not in dispute.
87% / 61% figures come from disclosure filings analyzed by Energy & Policy Institute. Methodology and source documents are public.
8,200 MW figure is from Georgia Power's filed 2024 IRP. Whether the magnitude materializes is actively contested by multiple intervenors at PSC hearings.
The share of data-center grid build absorbed by residential vs commercial rate classes is still being argued at the PSC. Our framing leans into the residential-burden read; an industry-side analyst would frame it differently.
A defensible household-level burden index requires PSC tariff data joined with ACS income at sub-county level. The data exists; the join is not yet published here.
Individual-voter ballot behavior cannot be tied to individual utility bills in any panel data we have access to. We assert mechanism shape, not voter-level causation.
Vogtle provides long-duration baseload generation. Nuclear required massive upfront capital. Long-horizon infrastructure cannot be evaluated solely through near-term rate impacts. This counter-frame is real and we hold it next to the burden frame, not under it.
We chose this stack after watching this primary. Mechanism narratives constructed in hindsight can produce false coherence. The site's defense against this is the confidence spectrum above and explicit predictions registered with future revisits.