In the summer of 2022, American Electric Power shut off power to roughly 600,000 customers in Columbus, leaving many without electricity for days during one of the hottest weeks of the year.

State lawmakers responded to those reliability concerns by including a provision in House Bill 15, a law that overhauled electric utility regulation to increase transparency and accountability. The provision requires utilities to provide additional reliability information and directs the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to produce a report summarizing statewide electric reliability trends and recommending grid improvements. Legislators left some details of the reporting requirements to be determined by the commission.

The commission later released a draft outlining what information would be included in the reports and sought public comment. Customers and other stakeholders submitted a range of recommendations, including calls to require circuit-level reliability metrics that account for outages lasting less than five minutes, outages caused by major events such as severe weather, and transmission-related outages. Manufacturers said short-duration outages and major-event disruptions are of particular concern.

The commission rejected those recommendations and incorporated only changes supported by utilities.

Short outages and outages tied to major events still disrupt operations, damage equipment, spoil products and pose health risks to customers. Those are the types of disruptions customers and lawmakers have said they want better information about and solutions for. Under the commission’s rules, however, utility reports would show that electric circuits in Columbus improved from 2021 to 2022, a result critics say is misleading. 2/5/2026