Our responsibility to our customers extends to helping them use electricity efficiently. Under our gridSMART^® program, we have deployed new technologies and developed new programs and pricing options to help customers make choices that will save energy and money. The gridSMART^® initiative includes smart grid technologies such as smart meters, voltage optimization equipment and smart appliances. It allows us to test and deploy these new technologies that can reduce our own energy use, and teach us how new technolgoies interact with the grid. The gridSMART^® initiative includes more than 100 energy efficiency programs across our system. We work closely with many different stakeholders, from regulators and environmental groups to customers and policy makers, to better understand what motivates people to become more energy efficient.

For example, some of our programs give customers signals via two-way communications systems about the cost of electricity at any given time so they can adjust their use of electricity during peak demand periods, reducing their consumption and electric bill.

New electric transportation technologies also are being tested. As the auto industry continues to ramp up its development and production of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), we are taking steps to understand how they interact with our grid and how we will respond to the changing needs of our customers. Across our system, employees are driving 18 PEVs to collect data about performance and usage from a number of charging locations. As part of the gridSMART^® demonstration project in 2011, AEP installed more than 30 electric vehicle charging spots at four of its central Ohio work locations as well as some residential and public locations. In 2011, AEP and Wal-Mart installed the first public charging station at one of their retail locations in Columbus, Ohio.

The Community Energy Storage (CES) system is another technology AEP is testing. This next generation of energy storage system is designed to provide uninterrupted power for up to five customers for two to three hours when an outage occurs. Maintaining power is seamless – customers connected to the systems may not even be aware that there has been an outage. Last fall we deployed the world’s first CES system using lithium-ion technology. AEP had 15 of 80 CES units installed and functioning by the end of 2011. Since then, as can be expected with a demonstration or pilot project, there have been some technical issues. This required us to remove the units from service and return them to the vendor to troubleshoot. We look forward to resolving these technical challenges and resuming the test pilot when possible.

AEP has teamed up with Wal-Mart to provide the first public charging station in Columbus for plug-in electric vehicles.