AEP continues drafting and implementing its avian protection plan (APP). As this area of compliance is relatively new to the industry, determining its breadth and depth is an evolving process, and incorporating the APP into the work processes of the groups affected by the issue has been daunting. We continue to upgrade our reporting process, train personnel, identify preventive devices that are compatible with the varieties of equipment used in our 11-state system and learn more about the magnitude of the issues throughout our approximately 200,000 square-mile service area.

Through the Edison Electric Institute’s Avian Power Line Interaction Committee, we are working with other electric utilities and with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to develop rules that reflect the amendments to the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, following the bald eagle’s removal from the Threatened and Endangered Species List. It appears that the USFWS intends to require utilities to obtain “programmatic permits” that will mandate practices, monitoring, and mitigation for preventing the unintended injury, mortality, or disturbance of eagles on or near power lines or other utility infrastructure.

At the same time, we are working with the USFWS and other electric utilities that have parts of their service area in the whooping crane migration corridor. Whooping cranes nest in northern Alberta, Canada and winter in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast. They migrate between these two locations through a corridor that is approximately 2,400 miles long and 200 miles wide. In the United States, this corridor includes the edge of eastern Montana and parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Whooping crane collisions with power lines are thought to be responsible for more deaths of this endangered species than any other human-associated source. As a result, USFWS is encouraging electric utilities in the migration corridor to develop a corridorwide habitat conservation plan (HCP) to minimize the new and existing lines’ impacts on the whooping crane, and other endangered and threatened species. We are just beginning to understand the resources such a plan will require. Companies covered by this HCP would also be issued an “incidental take permit” which will protect them from litigation over certain incidents that might otherwise be actionable. The costs of these programs have not yet been calculated, but they will have a noticeable impact on the cost of providing electricity.

We adopted an avian protection plan based on guidelines created by the electric utility industry in partnership with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service