Every day, AEP Ohio crews are out in the field improving the electric grid, strengthening it to ensure greater reliability for our customers. With a customer-first mindset and a commitment to operational excellence, we do our best to avoid interruptions and keep the power flowing, an essential part of everyone’s daily lives. But that isn’t always easy.
One recent project in Pomeroy in southern Ohio required employees from several departments to collaborate and think creatively to provide reliable service, and the result exceeded expectations.
“In order to complete upgrades on the transmission system, the work was going to take about a week,” said AEP Ohio Engineer Principal Keith Davison. “But we didn’t want the customers in the area to be without power for that long. We couldn’t simply transfer these customers to another power source because the infrastructure didn’t exist — that’s when we contacted United Rentals.”
Davison assembled a cross-functional team of project designers, operations personnel, transmission engineers and others to determine how to power more than 2,300 customers — equal to eight MW — from an alternative source. The solution: Bring in four generators to keep electricity flowing reliably and safely.
It may sound simple, but the plan required months of preparation.
“United Rentals was able to help us sync in at the start of the station outage, which allowed us to have no interruption to the customer,” Davison said.
Before work began, however, the project was delayed for a week because parts needed to complete the job were recalled. The nature of the recall required operations personnel to maintain a large distance from the breakers in case one failed, which meant they couldn’t bring the generators into the station as originally planned.
“Safety is always top of mind at AEP Ohio and that’s one of our proudest moments on this job,” Davison said. “We used the STAR process — Stop, Think, Act, Review — due to a change in the conditions.”
The team ultimately identified a safe way to transfer the entire load to another breaker in the station, allowing them to bring the generators in as planned and keep the project moving.
Once the transmission upgrades were completed, the team faced another challenge in returning customers to their original power source without interrupting their service.
“We needed to perform a drop-and-pick when transferring back to power from the station,” Davison said.
In other words, some customers briefly lost power in order for crews to safely transfer them back to the original power source.
“Some customers may have seen a slight flicker or experienced a brief outage of a minute or two,” Davison said. “But thanks to our teamwork and creative problem-solving, we were able to complete this project without customers losing power for an entire week.”
This effort shows how collaboration and innovative thinking make a real difference for our customers. Together, the team delivered a reliable solution when it mattered most.
