US wind power leader pivots to gas in $78bn buildout

Major US utility American Electric Power (AEP) is ramping natural gas-fired generation following a banner year in wind to meet surging hyperscaler demand, the company said in its first quarter earnings call Tuesday.

AEP raised its five-year capital investment plan to $78bn to meet some 63GW of incremental demand by 2030. This marks a major increase over last year, with 10GW of new power supply agreements signed in the first three months of 2026 alone.

“The pace of change is accelerating, and the opportunities ahead of us are expanding within this environment,” chief executive Bill Fehrman said during yesterday’s earnings call.

“Unprecedented demand” is driven not only “by data centres but also broader economic development,” he added.

AEP operates in multiple markets, including regional transmission operator PJM in the MidAtlantic and Ercot across most of Texas, both major hubs of data centre expansion.

AEP added over 1GW of onshore wind capacity last year, second only to national pacesetter NextEra Energy. Wind comprised around half of its total 2.2GW of capacity brought online last year.

The utility operates around 5.8GW of renewables, primarily wind, within a 32GW generation portfolio. It is targeting over 5GW of new wind, 6.3GW of solar, and 500MW of storage by 2035.

However, this trails its natural gas-fired generation plans of over 15GW as the industry’s priority shifts to an all-of-the-above strategy focused on speed to market.

It’s “all about getting our customers connected as absolutely fast as possible,” Fehrman said.

AEP large load customers include hyperscalers Amazon Web Services, Google and Meta, as well as steelmaker Nucor and Cheniere Energy’s LNG terminal expansion in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Bridging strategies

AEP has developed “a variety of bridging strategies to serve their loads,” Fehrman said, including a 10GW gas turbine supply pipeline.

Gas turbines have become a critical bottleneck for the data centre ramp, with OEMs reporting 5-7 year backlogs for combined cycle units.

“We’ve done fuel cells. We have access to aeroderivatives. We can we can do smaller interconnections into our system,” he said.

“We have a variety of tools that we take to our customers to try to accelerate their ability to get their business online at the speed of which they want to move forward,” he added.

Aeroderivatives are natural gas-fired turbines based on jet engine technology that are more readily available than conventional gas units and can be installed in a fraction of the time.

Some 40GW of AEP’s incoming load is located in Texas, which hosts the nation’s largest wind fleet.

AEP’s 265MW Lazbuddie wind farm in the Texas Panhandle is slated to come online this summer, when it will feed the grid operated by the Southwest Power Pool.

The utility’s 140MW Grover Hill wind project in Ohio has reportedly already completed construction and is undergoing commissioning activities to begin feeding PJM’s network.

While the utility is open to behind-the-metre generation for data centres – including a potential 1GW fuel cell project in Wyoming – most of its future generation will be grid connected.

AEP has the nation’s largest transmission network spanning 40,000 miles (64,000 km), and expanding this network comprises the bulk of its capacity allocation.