American Electric Power Brand Guidelines: A 1906 Holding Company, a 1958 Name & Columbus

Twenty-three small utilities and a holding company.

American Electric Power began as American Gas & Electric Company, incorporated in 1906. The International Directory of Company Histories says three men met that year to form a holding company: Richard E. Breed, a glass manufacturer from Marion, Indiana; his brother-in-law Harrison Williams, a financier; and Sidney Z. Mitchell, president of Electric Bond & Share, a General Electric subsidiary. Their target was the Electric Company of America, a holding company founded in 1899 that had run into financial difficulty, and its 23 small utilities. The purchase was completed in January 1907, with Mitchell as chairman and Henry L. Doherty, who later built his own chain of utilities, as president until Breed took over in 1910.

The companies it took over were scattered: nine in Pennsylvania, four in New Jersey and two each in New York, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, supplying electricity, gas, water, steam and even ice, the same history says. Mitchell sold the gas properties by 1910 and set about joining up what remained, beginning with a 32-mile tie-line between Muncie and Marion in Indiana. By 1926 the company had three power centres: one near Atlantic City, one around Scranton, and a Central System that ran from Virginia to Michigan.

Federal law then reshaped it. The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 forced AG&E to give up Atlantic City Electric and Scranton Electric, but left the Central System intact. In both world wars, the directory notes, demand for power rose with wartime industry. After 1945 the company resumed building under Philip Sporn, an engineer who became president in 1947 and worked with General Electric on large new generating units. In 1958 American Gas & Electric changed its name to American Electric Power Company. Three years later, in 1961, Donald C. Cook succeeded Sporn as president; in 1967 he told a national power conference in Washington that most American electrical systems were outmoded, the directory says.

From New York to Columbus.

The new name came with a new centre of gravity. In 1980 AEP bought Columbus and Southern Ohio Electric, which sat in the middle of its system, and moved its headquarters from New York to Columbus, Ohio, then the largest city it served, according to the International Directory of Company Histories. In 1986 it finished a network of 765,000-volt transmission lines, some 2,022 miles long, between Virginia and Michigan, a project that had run for 19 years. The Zimmer plant in Ohio, begun in 1971 as a nuclear project with two other utilities and halted in 1982, was converted to burn coal after a decision in 1984, the directory says.

The biggest change to the map came with Central and South West Corporation. English Wikipedia says the acquisition was agreed in 1997 and completed in 2000, bringing four operating companies into AEP: Central Power and Light and West Texas Utilities, which now form AEP Texas; Public Service Company of Oklahoma, known as PSO; and Southwestern Electric Power Company, or SWEPCO, which serves parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and east Texas.

Today the company works through regional operating companies whose names customers see on their bills. Appalachian Power, based in Charleston, West Virginia, serves parts of West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee; Indiana Michigan Power runs the Donald C. Cook nuclear plant in Michigan; and AEP Ohio and Kentucky Power serve their own states. English Wikipedia describes AEP as one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, with more than five million customers in 11 states, citing the company.

Not every plan went ahead. In October 2021 AEP agreed to sell Kentucky Power to Liberty Utilities, part of Algonquin Power & Utilities; after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declined to approve the deal in December 2022, the sale was called off in April 2023, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. The Wind Catcher project in the Oklahoma Panhandle, which PSO and SWEPCO had asked regulators to let them buy, was cancelled in July 2018 after opposition, the Tulsa World reported.

How utilities present themselves.

Investor-owned electric utilities in the United States sell something nobody sees. Their customers meet them through a bill, a meter, a truck in the street and, when the lights go out, a crew working overnight. So the pictures these companies choose carry much of the weight that a product shot would carry for a maker of goods.

The most familiar picture is the lineworker. Annual reports and storm-season posts return again and again to crews in bucket trucks against heavy skies, to rows of trucks staged before a hurricane, and to poles and wires being rebuilt. Next to them sit transmission towers at sunset, substations, and long views of solar farms and wind turbines, often shown beside older gas, coal, hydro and nuclear plants.

The second register is the customer relationship. Utilities explain smart meters, outage maps and mobile apps for reporting a fault or paying a bill; they print bill inserts on saving energy and send branded customer-service vans to local events. Community-giving photography, from school grants to volunteer days, is a staple of their websites. Trade gatherings such as the Edison Electric Institute’s meetings and the DistribuTECH conference are where they speak to one another and to suppliers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when and where it began, which utilities it owns, how its name changed and what its public record shows — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and type here are our own interpretation, not the companies’ marks.

Three initials on many companies.

The record includes regulation and litigation. The United States Justice Department sued AEP and six other companies under the Clean Air Act in November 1999; in October 2007 AEP agreed a settlement that required it to install pollution-control equipment at its plants and pay a civil penalty, English Wikipedia says, citing CNN and the company’s filings. In August 2008 AEP formed a joint venture with Duke Energy to build and own new transmission lines.

The brand itself is mostly a set of initials. “AEP” leads the names of AEP Ohio and AEP Texas, while older names such as Appalachian Power and SWEPCO stay in use beside it. English Wikipedia’s infobox lists the company on Nasdaq and names Bill Fehrman as chairman, president and chief executive; English Wikipedia says Atlantic City Electric, which AG&E gave up after 1935, now belongs to Exelon.

For a design guide, American Electric Power shows how an identity can be built from initials laid over a century of regional names. Compare Duke Energy, its partner in transmission, and Exelon, another multi-state holding company. For this guide we use a line red, a dark slate and a pole grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep American Electric Power’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.