Ohio regulators cleared American Electric Power (NASDAQ:AEP) of any wrongdoing in its response to severe storms that left more than 240,000 Ohio customers without power for up to two days in June, but said the company should develop a more aggressive vegetation management program on its transmission lines.

About 606,000 AEP Ohio customers lost service between June 13 and 19, including 283,000 who were cut off because of load sheds ordered by PJM.

PJM ordered load sheds to prevent overloads and cascading outages between June 14 and 16 after a storm identified as a derecho downed transmission and distribution circuits and sent dangerous volumes of power onto remaining lines.

Six lines failed on June 14 and 15, causing AEP to shed loads. | Public Utilities Commission of Ohio

Some customers accused the company of racism for cutting power to poor areas of Columbus while continuing service to richer suburbs. But the staff of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission said there was no evidence that the company acted improperly. (See Vegetation Eyed in AEP Ohio Outages Following Storms.)

AEP Ohio was required to take action within 30 minutes after PJM ordered the first of five load shed directives totaling 396 MW at 1:57 p.m. on June 14, PUCO staff said in its report Tuesday.

“After review of AEP Ohio’s actions during the load shed event, it is clear to staff that the company had very little time to communicate to its customers and to react to PJM’s directives in the selection of the circuits that needed a reduction in load,” it said. “The number of customers, the type of customers (residential, commercial or industrial), and the specific location of the customers are not readily available to the operations team and are not considered. The only criterion for selecting those feeds is the amount of load they are carrying.”

Staff said they believed the heat wave alone would not have caused any outages “and that it was only because of the damage caused by the storm that shedding load was necessary.” They noted that temperatures in the Columbus area reached highs of more than 95 degrees Fahrenheit days after the storm, but it resulted in no load shed orders.

Four transmission lines failed on the morning of June 15, including three that failed during the first event. | Public Utilities Commission of Ohio

But while staff said AEP Ohio had complied with state regulations, it said it was concerned about the utility’s transmission vegetation management program, particularly those outages attributed to “grow-in” vegetation — when vegetation comes into contact with lines but is still part of a growing plant.

“AEP Ohio has asserted that although the lines came into contact with trees and limbs that were still intact, it happened only because the storm itself impacted the vegetation in and around the [right of way] enough that the landscape changed,” the report said. “Staff understands this point and can accept that this may be the case. However, it believes that if the trees were in a position that allowed the storm to alter them to the point that they caused a grow-in outage, then perhaps they had not been trimmed enough.”

Although staff concluded that AEP complied with its commission-approved vegetation control plan, they said it “should re-evaluate its approach on its transmission vegetation management plan and move to a more cyclical trimming schedule, similar to its distribution plan.”

Staff also called for the utility to strengthen its community outreach plan for working with emergency responders and community organizations to supplement its own communications. “In both rural and urban centers, emergency responders and community organizations play a vital role in spreading valuable information and services to the communities that they serve,” staff said. “Efforts should be made to capitalize on this important community asset.”

Transparency Criticism

Merrilee Embs, spokesperson for Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Bruce Weston, criticized the report, saying the commission failed to involve the public and the Consumers’ Counsel, as the group and others had requested.

“That public process we called for has not happened despite the motion for an investigation that we, the Poverty Law Center and Pro Seniors filed at the PUCO in July,” she said. “Energy justice for hundreds of thousands of AEP consumers who lost their electricity should be served with a process that is transparent and inclusive of the public and their representatives. While we appreciate today’s PUCO report, it begs questions including why there would be outages from electric wires damaged by trees considering the money that AEP charges consumers for tree-trimming.”

The outages began after a line of storms moved through Ohio on June 13, damaging multiple electric lines throughout the state. Wind speeds reached as high as 90 mph and at least three tornadoes were reported.

Because the majority of the outages were caused by wind, trees or a combination of both, staff said it focused its investigation on circuit inspections and vegetation control for transmission lines.

After the first load shed directives beginning at about 2 p.m. on June 14, PJM issued a second set of load shed orders totaling 170 MW at about 7:30 p.m.

Staff noted that AEP’s system faced unusual strains as power was restored during the hot weather.

“While on hot days [air conditioners] are running throughout the area, they are not all running at the same time; it is staggered throughout the day, which serves to naturally levelize the overall load. But during the restoration period following a large storm outage, on a hot day, large numbers of customers are getting their power turned back on at the same moment. … So, all of their AC units turn on shortly after the power comes on and they run continuously for longer-than-usual periods because it takes time to reduce the temperature down to the level set on the thermostat.”

All customers affected by the two rounds of load sheds were restored by 9:48 a.m. June 15.

But the failure of four transmission lines that morning — including three that failed the day before — caused PJM to order additional load sheds totaling 479 MW.

The last of the affected customers had service restored by 4:51 a.m. on June 16, PUCO said.