AEP Confirms Strategy for Retail Supplier, Reports Impact from Ohio Switching

The negative impact on AEP first quarter 2012 earnings due to gross customer switching at AEP Ohio was up $42 million versus the impact in the year-ago quarter, AEP said this morning in announcing earnings.

Total retail generation margin lost in the first quarter of 2012 was $57 million.

As of the end of March 2012, 28% of total AEP Ohio load had migrated to competitive supply.

AEP said that it is serving over 100,000 competitive retail customers under BlueStar Energy Solutions and AEP Retail Energy. At the time the BlueStar acquisition was announced, AEP said that BlueStar was serving 22,000 customers, and AEP Retail Energy was serving 40,000.

AEP reiterated that its competitive activities will be focused on markets that it understands -- PJM, the Midwest ISO, and Texas.

With respect to AEP's competitive retail activity in Texas, Nicholas Akins, AEP president and chief executive officer, offered the following:

"We continue to pursue ... getting a name for the company in Texas, you can't name it AEP, apparently, so we have to name it something else, but we're starting that business back up."