SHREVEPORT, La., January 13, 2014 – The extreme Arctic cold front last week brought a new all-time winter peak load for AEP Southwestern Electric Power Company (SWEPCO®) on Tuesday, January 7, as its customers used 4,892 megawatts of electricity at 8:00 a.m., when the average daily temperature across SWEPCO’s three-state service area was 26 degrees. The previous SWEPCO record winter peak load had been 4,823 megawatts on February 2, 2011. One megawatt is a million watts.

SWEPCO is one of 64 members of the Southwest Power Pool, a regional reliability council within the Eastern Grid, with over 60,000 megawatts of electric generation available to serve some 15 million customers across 49,000 miles of transmission lines in nine states.

The new record demand is 16.1 percent over the company’s projected customer load for this winter.  SWEPCO serves over 524,000 customers in western Arkansas, northwest and central Louisiana, and north and east Texas within a 33,000 square-mile service area.