Southern’s Fanning, Force Behind Last US Reactors, Bows Out

(Bloomberg) -- Tom Fanning — the longtime leader of Southern Co. who pushed to build the first new US nuclear reactors in decades despite billions of dollars in cost overruns and years of delays — will retire as chief executive officer shortly after that project is finally scheduled to start operations.

“There was challenge after challenge, and we overcame all of that to produce something that we’ll be proud of for 100 years,” he said in an interview Thursday.

Fanning, an outspoken utility leader and CEO since 2010, will leave that post after Southern’s shareholder meeting in May, a company spokesperson said. He will, however, remain with the company as executive chairman. Chris Womack, the chief executive of Southern utility Georgia Power, will become the new CEO.

While Fanning became an evangelist for nuclear power — a sector that’s struggled with high costs and political backlash — he had to grapple with an energy transition that saw cheap natural gas and collapsing solar prices over his decade-plus as CEO.

He once railed against “the war on coal” and argued that limiting its use would hurt the US economy. But the growing appeal of gas and solar ultimately contributed to Southern slashing its dependence on coal-fired electricity during his tenure.

Fanning has overseen a big drop in Southern’s use of coal. As fears of climate change rose and natural gas and solar prices fell, Southern went from producing more than half its power from coal in 2011 to about 20% today.

“One of the riskiest things a company can do in this kind of environment is not to change,“ Fanning said in a 2020 profile. 

Read: Clean power so cheap a staunch defender of US coal went green

Back in 2010, Fanning’s first decision as CEO was to move Womack’s office next to his. “He can keep 12 balls in the air at once,” Fanning said Thursday. Womack will be the seventh sitting Black CEO among S&P 500 companies, and the second Black CEO appointed to a major utility company in less than a month.

Fanning made it clear last year that he didn’t plan to leave the CEO post before the Vogtle nuclear expansion was completed. The project is at least seven years behind schedule and its cost ballooned to about $30 billion — more than double from the original budget. Vogtle is now expected to start producing electricity early this year.

While Fanning has led a determined campaign to see Vogtle through, Southern pulled the plug on a so-called “clean coal” project in Mississippi. That led to a $2.8 billion pretax charge that contributed to its biggest quarterly loss in a quarter century.

“Tom has led a significant change in Southern’s generation mix and decarbonization, but also has faced operational and financial challenges — particularly with the Vogtle nuclear plant,” said Travis Miller, a utility analyst for Morningstar.

--With assistance from , and .

(Story updates with CEO quote in 2nd paragraph.)

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