Southern Co.’s top executive is retiring at the end of the year and will be replaced by one of his top lieutenants, the Atlanta-based utility said Tuesday.
David Ratcliffe, 61, will leave his post as chief executive, president and chairman on Dec. 1, after six years leading one of the largest power companies in the nation -- and one of the biggest corporate forces in Georgia.
Southern said Chief Operating Officer Thomas Fanning will succeed Ratcliffe. Fanning, a 30-year Southern employee, becomes the company’s president next month, and its chairman and CEO after Ratcliffe’s retirement.
Southern is the parent of four utility operating companies -- Georgia Power, Alabama Power, Mississippi Power and Gulf Power -- and of Southern Power, a wholesale energy company
Ratcliffe’s tenure -- which recently included launching the nation’s first new nuclear reactor project in decades -- drew praise from the industry and state civic leaders.
“David Ratcliffe has served the Southern Company and our entire industry with great distinction for many years,” said Tom Kuhn, head of the Edison Electric Institute. “He is universally respected and admired by his peers and widely appreciated for his sense of civic duty.”
Georgia economic development Commissioner Heidi Green said Ratcliffe’s work at the Georgia Research Alliance helped attract new industries like biotechnology. “He’s been a real champion,” Green said.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, meanwhile, has praised Ratcliffe’s role in promoting nuclear development, calling him a “trailblazer in revitalizing the U.S. nuclear industry.”
Ratcliffe took over at Southern in 2004, after five years as CEO of Georgia Power. He joined the company in 1971 as a biologist.
Under Ratcliffe, the company began a period of unprecedented capital expansion. It invested in environmental controls on its plants, in its transmission system and -- most notably -- in expanding the company’s nuclear capacity.
Southern began its nuclear push in 2004, after a 30-year national slump following the Three Mile Island disaster. It was the first U.S. utility to receive federal loan guarantees for new reactors and is on schedule to bring new reactors on line in 2016 and 2017 at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle.
Southern Co. expanded into less traditional energy, too. The company joined with Ted Turner this year in a huge solar venture in New Mexico, is building a Mississippi coal plant that can capture carbon, and took steps to encourage energy efficiency.
Critics call those baby steps.
“From the standpoint of what he inherited, it looks like progress,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “But if you look at it compared to other southeastern utilities, it doesn’t look like much.”
Ratcliffe’s tenure coincided with a period of rising electric costs for consumers and a deep economic slump. Fuel prices, environmental controls and transmission investment helped push up rates. The economic fallout from the 2008 housing meltdown, meanwhile, rippled through Southern’s business last year, depressing power sales.
Despite that, Southern’s performance under Ratcliffe has been strong, said Dan Eggers, an analyst at Credit Suisse.
He called Tuesday’s succession announcement typical: “That’s how Southern operates. They build a strong management team, they promote them and move them around. It gives them very strong management.”
Ratcliffe’s successor joined Southern as a financial analyst in 1980. Fanning, 53, was the company’s chief financial officer before becoming its chief operating officer in 2008. Fanning also was president and CEO of Gulf Power, and CFO of Georgia Power and Mississippi Power.
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