SQLAlchemy is a ORM, psycopg2 is a database driver. These are completely different things: SQLAlchemy generates SQL statements and psycopg2 sends SQL statements to the database. SQLAlchemy depends on psycopg2 or other database drivers to communicate with the database!
As a rather complex software layer SQLAlchemy does add some overhead but it also is a huge boost to development speed, at least once you learned the library. SQLAlchemy is an excellent library and will teach you the whole ORM concept, but if you don’t want to generate SQL statements to begin with then you don’t want SQLAlchemy.