AEP Scrutinized for Power Cuts to Low Income Neighborhoods
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AEP recently implemented a series of planned power cuts in response to severe weather, which is an increasingly normal business practice within the electric utility industry. All told, 170,000 Columbus-area customers were impacted, but it was necessary from an emergency preparedness perspective, to avoid impacting an even larger group of customers.
However, in this case the company is being challenged by the NAACP Columbus chapter, as well as by local lawmakers, with accusations that low-income and minority neighborhoods were disproportionally targeted.
Why the Concern Over AEP’s Power Cuts?
Democratic Ohio state representatives, on the heels of the NAACP accusation, submitted a letter to AEP demanding answers.
?We find it troubling that AEP has no issue with customer notifications when bills are due, but when customers are faced with historic heat, limited resources and great needs, there seems to be limited or no communication about planned outages that impact the health, safety and welfare of customers,? the lawmakers wrote.
For AEP’s part, the company said the power cuts were a last resort, and that the load shedding was based on circuit locations, not neighborhoods. Simply put, the company is adamant that the only decision point was the desire to maintain the system – specifically, targeting areas where the lines were most overloaded and in danger of failure – and I believe them. There was no subjective decision-making around this, rather, grid conditions 100% dictated the response. In fact, a Dispatch analysis showed that both affluent and poor neighborhoods were affected.
Another complaint was that the impacted customers were not notified. AEP’s response is that it was an emergency situation, and therefore there was no time to provide widespread notifications. Here again, perhaps I am biased but that sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation.
In the final analysis, AEP had little choice other than to execute the planned power cuts, the company did not have time to deploy widespread notifications due to it being an emergency, and a post-partum analysis shows that both poor and affluent neighborhoods were impacted. Additionally, planned outages are common in the utility industry. In other words, this seems like something akin to a witch hunt.
