Southern Company

Southern Company operates as a U.S. energy delivery company, providing electric and gas services in the Southeastern United States. Its generation operations are water-intensive and especially reliant on water for thermal and nuclear generation, making water withdrawal, consumption, water quality, and aquatic ecosystem protection factors of note in its environmental footprint.

Southern Company mostly manages its water stewardship work through community and ecosystem-related programs. Georgia Power’s Waters for Georgia program helps fund projects to remediate water-quality impairments, protect aquatic systems, and support community water supplies. Mississippi Power works with The Nature Conservancy to support oyster restoration along the Gulf Coast as part of the Gulf Coast Oyster initiative and to facilitate transportation, land, and logistical support for hauling old shells for recycling into new reef habitat.

The company further scaled up this program in 2024 through its Conserve water-stewardship strategy to track biological, chemical, and other water-quality impairments in addition to broader ecological restoration goals. While these efforts show a single utility’s engagement in the local watershed, materials on the company’s operations exhibit relatively fewer operational water-conservation programs than some of the other utilities examined by H2Oversight.