A utility giant with a $16 billion expansion plan is using eminent domain to seize hundreds of Georgia properties — and furious owners say they never had a fighting chance.

Ansley Brown was 5 years old when her mother moved into the Coweta County house where she spent her entire childhood.

“It is [what] made me who I am today,” Brown, now 27, told The Post. “So it wouldn’t make sense if I didn’t fight for it.”

Now, Georgia Power wants to take it.

The Atlanta-based utility, a subsidiary of Southern Company, is rolling out a grid expansion plan that would add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over five years, with company representatives acknowledging that approximately 80% of that new power will flow to data centers. 

To deliver it, the company needs hundreds of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines. In Coweta and Fayette counties, those lines are going straight through people’s backyards, pools and, like Brown, childhood homes.

At least 330 properties total are in the path of Project Wansley, a new 35-mile transmission corridor that Georgia Power says is critical to meeting surging electricity demand driven by the AI boom. 

Of that sum, between 20 and 30 homes are expected to be demolished outright, with hundreds of other landowners being asked to hand over permanent easements that would plant 500-kilovolt power towers feet from their bedroom windows. At least four data centers are directly tied to or supported by the line.

Brown’s 49-year-old mother Angela purchased the home in 2003 using a USDA loan program for single mothers, a federal program that required the property to be in a rural area. 

“This is literally the federal government gave us this home,” Brown said, “and you’re taking it.”

The negotiations, Brown said, were never really negotiations.

Georgia Power sent appraisers who used comparable sales from areas far outside the immediate market to establish a baseline value, leaving the family with an offer she estimates fell between $70,000 and $100,000 short of what the home was worth. 

By March, her mother had had enough. According to Brown, she told Georgia Power she was done negotiating and would not be selling willingly. Shortly after, a letter arrived — not from the utility, but from its lawyers. If the family did not settle soon, the email warned, the company would pursue condemnation through a third party. 

“When I saw that threat in that email,” Brown said, “it just truthfully made me angry. So I decided I was going to post a video about it. I never knew that it would take off to that degree ever. And had I known I would have done this from the beginning.”

The video now has more than 6 million views across platforms.

Brown is not the only one with that story. Cynthia Van Epps, 57, has lived in her five-bedroom Coweta County home for 17 years. She and her husband bought it as a foreclosure and spent nearly two decades upgrading it. 

Last October, a land agent sat down at their kitchen table and told them plainly that all of it had to go. 

“It was a shock,” Van Epps told The Post. The agent also came with paperwork — a temporary right-of-entry form — and a check for $5,000 so Georgia Power could conduct soil samples before it officially owned the property. Van Epps and her husband declined.

Georgia Power’s offer came in hundreds of thousands of dollars below what the family believed the property was worth, Van Epps said. After months of back-and-forth, the company shifted its position in late March, saying it would take only an easement rather than the full property — and offered $125,000 for it. 

The easement would consume more than half their land and put the transmission line just 87 feet from the house, with only 12 feet between the structure and the easement boundary. Some studies suggest safe residential distance from lines of this voltage begins at 300 feet. 

“And $125,000 isn’t going to come close to the value that they’re destroying,” Van Epps said. “We’ll never be able to sell our house.”

The financial toll extends beyond property value. Van Epps calculates that if forced to accept the easement, she will spend an estimated $300,000 in property taxes over the next 30 years on land she cannot use, build on or sell — land that Georgia Power will use simultaneously to carry electricity for decades of revenue. 

“Can you imagine that?” she said. “You imagine losing half your property being 12 feet from an easement. So you have absolutely no backyard when you bought it for this purpose. And there’s nothing you can do about it. And to make things worse, you’re paying property taxes for the very power lines that they’re making billions of dollars off of and will for the next 30 years.”

Van Epps also raised broader questions about who is really benefiting from this infrastructure push. 

“They’re using something that was created for the benefit of the good, not the benefit of private corporations who are making trillions of dollars off the backs of the taxpayer citizens,” she said. “Same taxpayers funded a ‘loan’ that the government just gave to Southern Company for $26 billion.”

Both women say the least destructive alternatives were never seriously pursued. 

“They’re doing it the way that’s the fastest and the cheapest for them, which destroys people’s lives,” Van Epps said. “They could bury it. They could put it someplace else.”  

Brown, meanwhile, has been working the phones with state legislators. Rep. Brian Jack’s office reached out to her, and State Sen. Greg Dolezal walked her mother’s property in person. She is also pressing the Public Service Commission on whether it granted Georgia Power blanket eminent domain authority over all 330 affected properties without reviewing them individually. 

“It makes me angry,” Brown said of learning the project serves not one, but four data centers. “This is not what our county wanted.”

Georgia Power, in a statement provided to The Post, said it has negotiated in good faith with Brown’s mother, Angie Hall, for over four months and ultimately agreed to meet her asking price — an offer the company says came to $205,000 above the appraisal Hall herself provided, and more than $275,000 above the home’s Zillow value. The company says Hall accepted those financial terms on May 8, but has since declined to move forward. 

“Georgia Power is authorized to exercise eminent domain in specific circumstances through state law, however, using eminent domain is a last resort for our company and, in fact, comprises less than 1% of all of the land transactions each year,” the statement read.

Georgia Power also disputed the characterization of the line as a data center project, saying the Ashley-Park Wansley corridor is designed to serve broad regional load growth including manufacturing, residential demand and overall grid reliability, and that it is not built to serve any single customer. On underground burial, the company said it evaluated the option and determined it was neither practical nor feasible for a 500-kilovolt line of this scale, citing greater construction complexity, longer outage repair times and significantly higher costs. The company added that the selected route was determined to have the least community and environmental impact of all options considered.

Brown’s mother, worn down by months of conflict, has largely stepped back from the public fight. 

“It’s a lot of crying. It’s a lot of sleepless nights,” Brown said. “We want to keep the property.”