Appalachian Power on Tuesday submitted its annual fuel factor filing with the Virginia State Corporate Commission (SCC) requesting that the current fuel factor remain in place through the summer of 2015. Appalachian expects that its current fuel factor will allow the company to recover both its projected costs during the next twelve months as well as actual accumulated fuel costs that have not yet been recovered.

“We are pleased that the company will be able to keep rates stable during the next year,” said Charles Patton, Appalachian’s president and chief operating officer. “While the extreme cold and resulting high fuel and purchased power costs in the winter significantly increased actual fuel costs, the current fuel factor is expected to recover those actual costs over the next year.”

The SCC approved the current fuel factor in 2012. This will be the third consecutive year without a change in the fuel factor. The fuel factor is approximately 25 percent of a Virginia residential customer’s bill. It is 2.9 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), or $29.53 for a customer using 1,000 kWh in a month.

Appalachian Power has 1 million customers in Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee (as AEP Appalachian Power). It is a unit of American Electric Power, one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, which delivers electricity to more than 5 million customers in 11 states. AEP ranks among the nation’s largest generators of electricity, owning nearly 38,000 megawatts of generating capacity in the U.S. AEP also owns the nation’s largest electricity transmission system, a nearly 39,000-mile network that includes more 765 kilovolt extra-high voltage transmission lines than all other U.S. transmission systems combined.