In 2022, AEP Ohio asked state regulators to allow their electric service to become less reliable.
The company wanted to be allowed to have more power outages for longer periods of time, even as costs to customers increased.
After more than a year of negotiations with consumer advocates, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio this week approved an agreement that increases reliability instead of lowering it like AEP requested.
The new standard takes effect at the beginning of 2025.
The reliability standard is still not as demanding as PUCO staff originally requested, and allows for more frequent and longer outages than national averages.
The state measures reliability performance for companies like AEP in two ways: how many power outages customers experience and how long those power outages last.
The standard now requires AEP to keep power outages to 148 minutes per customer a year. AEP wanted to raise the outage time to 158 minutes.
The settlement agreement between the state, AEP and advocates for consumers calls for AEP to keep outages under 146 minutes. That's 26 minutes longer than 2022's national average. AEP Ohio has mostly met the 148-minuite standard over the last 10 years, but did miss it by about three minutes in 2023.
If AEP misses the standards, they have to file detailed reports explaining why.
The state also measures the frequency of outages. Now, AEP can have 1.18 outages per customer each year. AEP wanted to raise it to 1.3 per customer each year. The agreement brings it down to 1.13. AEP Ohio met the 1.18 standard most years in the last 10 years, except for in 2018 and 2019.
When AEP asked the state to lower the standards to allow for more outages, the company claimed the standards set in older cases “seemed achievable at the time," but “they have proven to be too optimistic considering the company’s current system and challenges.”
The company claimed advancements in technology have come, but the advancements improved “efficiency and effectiveness,” not reliability.
And the company claimed their customer surveys “indicate that customers are generally happy with the reliability of their recent service," so lower standards would likely be accepted.
Staff that work at the PUCO called AEP’s proposals “unreasonable.” The staff report found AEP wasn’t accounting for promises they made when they requested new programs that customers pay for, which are meant to advance reliability. They recommended the PUCO commissioners approve standards that improved upon past metrics, reducing the average time of outages per customer to under 140 minutes and bringing the frequencies of the outages to 1.16 outage per year.
The settlement also requires AEP to provide consumer advocates with disconnection data by ZIP code.
Negotiations for the new agreement were made between PUCO Staff, the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, the Ohio Poverty Law Center, Pro Seniors and AEP.
“Today’s PUCO decision honoring the settlement reached between consumers and AEP will assure more reliable service for AEP consumers. Reliable electric service is essential to all Ohioans’ well-being," said Maureen Willis, director of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel.
AEP Ohio spokesman Scott Blake said the company is "making a concerted effort to improve the reliability of our system, and to achieve that goal, we have made substantial investments in tree trimming, equipment inspections and replacements, and new technology that lessens the extent of outages."
"The new reliability standards reflect AEP Ohio’s commitment to reducing the number of customer outages on its system and how long outages last if they do occur," Blake said.
Blake said the reduction of .05 outages in the frequency of outages will equal a reduction of "tens of thousands of actual customer-outages," and the reduction of two minutes in the average time of outages "means a reduction of over three million customer-minutes of outages."
