Business readiness for high impact/low probability events has always been important, but it came under increased scrutiny in the wake of the DeepWater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the Upper Big Branch mining disaster in West Virginia and the nuclear crisis in Japan.

AEP has business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place. Every business unit has a business continuity plan specific to its needs that addresses people, processes, property and other factors. For example, we have plans in place for response to a pandemic that could cause widespread employee absences and supply disruptions, affecting our ability to serve our customers.

In our Fossil/Hydro unit, we use predictive maintenance technologies such as vibration analysis and infrared thermography to help identify the potential for high-impact events in our power plants. In addition, we monitor industry experience to develop proactive approaches to minimizing our risks. For instance, following the Kleen Energy Plant natural gas explosion in Connecticut, we reviewed the startup procedure for the new J. Lamar Stall natural gas plant to ensure that safety zones were properly established. We developed a template for this review that we will use to conduct these types of inspections at all of our gas plants.

We benchmark our business continuity plans against our peers, recently using the Edison Electric Institute Business Continuity Benchmark survey.  This year, we plan to focus on improving our business leaders’ understanding of their roles in business continuity activities, refreshing existing plans, improving communication capabilities and setting a five-year road map for continuous improvement.

We are also taking a closer look at our disaster recovery systems, which emphasize recovery of technology systems if we were to experience a catastrophic failure. AEP maintains a 24/7 IT Disaster Recovery Center that makes it possible for us to continue operations in the event of a disaster. Although our disaster recovery infrastructure is continuously monitored and is in a state of readiness, we will analyze the recovery prioritization of business processes to ensure those priorities reflect today’s business environment and needs.