AEP says 'very, very unusual occurrence' causing outages— this is not the new normal

AEP and other crews were working Wednesday to repair problems that forced the utility to cut off power to an unprecedented number of Columbus-area customers this week.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 135,000 AEP Ohio customers remained without power, about 85,000 of them in central Ohio, down from a peak of 230,000 on Tuesday.

Company officials said the outages were the result of an extraordinary set of circumstances.

"I've been with AEP 41 years and I don't remember anything like this," said Jon Williams, AEP Ohio's managing director of customer experience. "This is a very, very unusual occurrence."

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Why did only some Columbus neighborhoods lose power?

The problems began Monday night and Tuesday morning when storms knocked out multiple transmission lines on the north and southwest parts of Greater Columbus.

Ordinarily, customers in those cases would simply have been served by other transmission lines, but the extreme heat pushed electricity demand to such high levels in some parts of central Ohio that they were in danger of overloading, forcing AEP to cut power to more than 100,000 customers.

"A significant storm created large number of outages, followed by the hot weather," said David Ball, AEP's vice president of energy delivery operations. "We had to address it by dropping service to some areas. ... We had to reduce the load."

According to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, AEP was ordered to cut power to customers by PJM, the electricity grid operator for 13 states including Ohio.

"This week, due to the storms leaving less transmission lines in service combined with the high temperatures, there was increased stress on the transmission lines that were still in service," said PUCO Chair Jenifer French in a statement released Wednesday afternoon.

"Because of this, yesterday afternoon PJM had to order AEP Ohio to decrease the electricity demand on some parts of the stressed system in central Ohio."

In a statement, PJM said the power grid itself can handle demand "even with the hot weather but in some local areas the energy is not able to be delivered to customers due to transmission line outages."

Ball and Williams said that while AEP manually shut off power to those areas, the locations were dictated by where lines were overloaded, not by any preference for neighborhood, as many have said on social media.

"There's no tie whatsoever to customers, or what type of customers," Williams said. "We're not picking and choosing locations."

As of Wednesday afternoon, customers were without power in about a dozen areas throughout central Ohio, most of them in the northern part of the metro area including areas around Easton, Upper Arlington, Clintonville, Linden, the University District, the Short North and the Hilltop.

AEP restored power overnight to some customers in those areas but turned it off again today, as demand from air conditioners and other uses rose. Williams encouraged customers to reduce their electricity use as much as possible between noon and 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, to allow more customers to receive power.

Williams said he did not expect additional customers to be turned off.

"This is the limit of where we are," he said Wednesday.

Are brownouts the new normal in Ohio?

AEP spokesman Scott Blake said the company is looking at how to prevent such an occurrence from happening again.

"This is a very unique set of circumstances," he said. "We will review the situation and see how we might prevent something similar in the future."

Williams said the problems arose so fast that AEP did not have time to warn customers or law enforcement.

"There wasn't an ability to have a heads up," he said. "This was an emergency, it's not a planned event."

Williams said in these situations, AEP's policy is to not cut power to hospitals, nursing homes or critical care units. In this case, Riverside Methodist Hospital and Grant Medical Center both lost power Tuesday, though Williams said power to those facilities was restored.

Williams said cutting power off to customers is AEP's last option.

"We're sorry, this is the very last thing we want to do," he said.

"We understand the anger, the frustration," he added. "The high heat makes this so much worse."

jweiker@dispatch.com

@JimWeiker

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Power outages are exceptions, AEP says, not the new rule