Profile: the "other"electric company: american electric power is a study in contrasts - anachronistic, yet progressive, and a giant in spite of its relatively low profile

For engineers and nonengineer consumer alike, General Electric and Westinghouse Electric are household names. And as for utilities, most of us have heard of Public Service Electric and Gas, and Con Edison. But who, besides the power engineer, its customers, and its corporate stock-holders, knows American Electric Power? Yet the company today ranks as the largest investor-owned U.S. utility, with energy sales, during 1973, totaling nearly 75 billion kWh. Further, as the power engineer well knows, AEP is unique among the utilities in its reliance on coal, rather than oil, as its primary resource. Thus, the events of the last year - the Mideast petroleum embargo and the international energy crisis - have left AEP largely unscathed ... and so too its 1.76 million customers, across seven Midwest and midsouth states, who are currently paying fuel bills the bulk of us would envy. Through a combination of foresight and fortuitous circumstances, AEP, long regarded in power circles as a modern-day industrial anachronism, a dinosaur living off the remains of dinosaurs, has emerged as a glamor topic worthy of IEEE Spectrum's focus.