American Electric Power
Charles Patton is American Electric Power's Executive Vice President, External Affairs.
Here's a quick fact on AEP, one of the largest utilities in the country. We have five and a half million customers. That's in eleven regulated states, and two of them have retail competition. We're in thirty-five states because we have a robust, independent power company that is active in renewable space with a significant amount of wind and solar and is beginning to develop storage.
We have thirty thousand megawatts of diverse generation. We've declared that we are going to reach net zero by 2050, like many utilities have. It's a large company with 14.9 billion dollars in annual revenues.
In speaking to AEP's commitment to a clean future, in 2020, we were at a seventy-four percent reduction in carbon emissions when compared to 2000, and our own target is to be at eighty percent below that number by 2030.
Originally, AEP was reticent to make that commitment because being a strong engineering company we wanted clear line of sight to how we get to that zero emission by 2050. It wasn't something we just wanted to say; it was something we wanted to make sure that we had a clear path to.
As we moved forward, we dug into it, and we believe such a path is feasible. For us, with the Go to Net Zero, we recently completed a climate impact analysis and looked at various scenarios of, how does the company get to net zero?