A former employee is suing to force a Mississippi utility to repay $382 million that the federal government gave to build a failed coal-fueled power plant.
Kelli Williams, a former construction manager for Atlanta-based Southern Co., filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the company and its subsidiary Mississippi Power Co. in 2018. That lawsuit, unsealed Monday, alleges that the two firms defrauded the U.S. Department of Energy and state regulators in a failed quest to build a $7.5 billion power plant.
Schuyler Baehman, a spokesperson for Southern Co., declined to comment. The company has yet to file a reply in court. The cost of the plant ballooned and Mississippi Power could never make it run reliably. The company lost $6.4 billion when the three-member Mississippi Public Service Commission in 2017 ordered it to stop building the gasifier and chemical removal unit and instead operate the plant by burning conventional natural gas.
Whistleblower actions under the False Claims Act are filed under seal with the private plaintiff seeking to recover money on behalf of the federal government. “I believe at some point, they began to tell us things that were not true,” said Cecil Brown, a Democrat who served on the Mississippi Public Service Commission from 2016 to 2020.
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