Another major US utility embraces renewables

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When Charles Patton joined American Electric Power in 2000, around 90 percent of the company’s electricity production came from coal. Since then, AEP’s executive vice president of external affairs says things have changed dramatically.

“I will confess, there was a time I wouldn’t have publicly stated — although in the last few years I have publicly stated that I was wrong — that you would be able to [interconnect] renewables to the extent that we’ve been able to,” said Patton, speaking Tuesday at Greentech Media’s inaugural Power & Renewables Summit in Austin, Texas. “If you were a utility guy…that wasn’t something you necessarily believed was possible to the degree it is today.”

AEP isn’t traditionally thought of as the most environmentally friendly utility, but that reputation is changing — marking arguably one of the most significant endorsements of clean energy technologies to date.

In 2005, coal made up 70 percent of AEP’s generation capacity — which is how the utility measures its electricity mix today. Since then, coal’s share of capacity has dropped to 47 percent. At the same time, AEP’s natural gas capacity increased from 19 percent in 2005 to 27 percent today, and renewables entered the scene in a meaningful way, growing from 4 percent in 2005 to 13 percent today.

Renewable energy is now slated to make up the vast majority of AEP’s planned generation additions over the next decade. In AEP’s third-quarter 2017 earnings report, the utility said it plans to add another 8,360 megawatts of wind and solar through 2030 across its regulated and deregulated businesses — and that doesn’t even include the 2,000-megawatt Wind Catcher project, which could become the largest wind project in North America.

“To think a utility that was at one time the largest coal-burning utility in the Western hemisphere, that that’s where our focus is,” Patton said, remarking on AEP’s strong embrace of clean energy.

“We don’t even have gas on the horizon; it’s all wind and solar.”

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Wind, solar and gas--that is going to be the typical generation mix for US utilities.  And in time, gas will be replaced with batteries.