AEP lifts five-year capital plan 30% to $100 billion
Victoria Shinder1 min readAmerican Electric Power now plans to spend $100 billion over five years, up from $78 billion, company officials said on the utility's third-quarter earnings call on 28 October, according to Utility Dive.
Through 2031, AEP plans $37 billion for transmission, up from $33 billion in the previous plan, and $20 billion for gas-fired generation, up from $13 billion. It also expects its utilities to spend $8 billion on renewable projects. Chief financial officer Trevor Mihalik said contracted customer demand is growing faster than the output of AEP's existing fleet.
That demand is now 84 GW of contracted load through 2031, 22% more than the 69 GW reported a quarter earlier. The biggest single addition is a 10.4 GW data centre campus planned by SB Energy in Ohio, for which AEP expects to start building the Piketon transmission project, a roughly $5 billion 765 kV line, early next year. Chief executive William Fehrman also pointed to a $4 billion fuel cell project in Wyoming: 702 MW of Bloom Energy fuel cells, backed by a 20-year power purchase agreement with Google and expected online in 2028, with construction already well under way. Both projects are included in the new plan.
What it means
The headline number is driven by a handful of very large customers. A single campus accounts for most of the quarter's increase in contracted load, so the plan is exposed to the timing of a few projects. For customers outside those contracts, the question regulators will ask is how the transmission and generation costs are allocated; the earnings call figures do not answer it.