American Electric Power 2008 Corporate Sustainability Report

2008 Corporate Sustainability Report 15 In February 2008, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals sent the rule back to the EPA for reconsideration. The ultimate impact of this ruling is unclear. Even with the uncertainty created by the recent legal challenge, we will still make significant mercury emission reductions at our power plants that have been equipped with scrubbers and SCR systems. We will move ahead with installing the mercury monitoring equipment required by the Clean Air Mercury Rule. We expect this equipment to provide detailed information on actual emissions – which may assist in the development of the new regulatory requirements. Once again, there are trade-offs. One challenge is that removing mercury from air emissions results in higher levels of mercury elsewhere, such as in approved solid waste landfills and in wastewater treatment ponds. AEP’s power plants with scrubber systems must manage an increased amount of mercury in wastewater within the limits of their water quality permits. In some states we expect regulators to begin including very low effluent limitations for mercury in renewed or modified wastewater permits. We have accelerated our evaluation of they are still in very early stages. PCBs: STILL AN ISSUE and as part of required maintenance during the next decade. We have approximately 427 pieces of equipment to replace. We also have approximately 700 PCB capacitors in service at 11 electrical substations. We are developing plans to remove them. During all property transactions involving facilities or sites where PCBs were known or could be assumed to have been in use, we conduct a thorough site assessment to determine if there is any PCB contamination. In 2007, AEP conducted 27 site assessments that resulted in eight PCB remediation projects which were completed without incident. In 2007, we had approximately 1,625 documented spills from oil-filled electrical equipment. A small portion of these (6.2 percent) were significant enough to be reportable to regulatory agencies and an even smaller number (2.3 percent) involved PCBs. Most were small spills caused by downed electrical equipment from car accidents, bad weather, vandalism or equipment failure. We clean these in a timely manner and report them, as appropriate. COAL ASH Environmental Performance AEP conducts thousands of tests each year to ensure compliance with water quality permits. new technologies that might meet these requirements, but AEP burns an estimated 76 million tons of coal per year, generating significant quantities of byproducts that need to be recycled or disposed of. As a member of the Coal Combustion Products Partnership, we promote the beneficial use of coal combustion products. Some of these can, for example, be used to treat acid mine drainage and return surrounding land closer to pre-mined condition. We are working with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to use coal combustion products (CCPs) to reclaim a 1950s surface mine that was abandoned, leaving behind acid mine drainage and a dangerous 100-foot-high wall. Acid mine drainage is a liability for AEP. While there are costs associated with this reclamation project, it will re- PCBs have been used since the 1930s. However, they are a suspected human carcinogen and are heavily regulated by federal and state agencies. AEP still has equipment in use, such as transformers and capacitors, that contain PCBs. We are eliminating them through planned phase-outs. Since 2000 we have disposed of more than 12,000 PCB and PCB-contaminated transformers and more than 4,500 PCB capacitors. We will continue to replace known PCB transformers at our power plants during planned outages

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Electric Power 2008 Corporate Sustainability Report

American Electric Power 2008 Corporate Sustainability Report Contents Leadership, Management & Strategy A Message from Michael G. Morris A Message from Dennis E. Welch About This Report Environmental Performance Work Force Issues Public Policy Climate Change Energy Security, Reliability & Growth Stakeholder Engagement Glossary GRI Table of Contents

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