AEP Shares Dip 0.52% as $290M Volume Plunges 27.9% to 415th in Market Amid PUCO Upholds Data Center Rate Hike

On September 8, 2025, , , .

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) rejected a request from Amazon, Google, and other data center developers to overturn AEP's newly implemented rate structure for the sector. The regulation, approved in July, . This decision supports AEP's strategy to prevent costs from being passed to residential ratepayers amid rapid data center expansion in the state.

AEP Ohio highlighted that the 12-year framework includes financial viability checks and exit fees for canceled projects, aiming to mitigate risks for both the utility and consumers. The praised the ruling for protecting ratepayers from subsidizing large-scale energy demands. Similar state-level measures, such as Oregon’s legislation on data center costs, underscore a broader trend of regulatory efforts to balance infrastructure investment with consumer affordability.

At the moment, the built-in back-testing engine available in this workspace is designed for single-ticker or single-event studies. Running a daily, rules-based portfolio of 500 different stocks (ranked each day by trading volume) would require pulling daily volume data for the entire U.S. equity universe, re-ranking it every day, re-weighting a 500-position portfolio, and aggregating portfolio-level P&L and risk statistics. Those steps go beyond the current tool’s single-ticker scope, so I cannot execute that strategy directly here. Two possible work-arounds: approximate with a liquid index or ETF (e.g., SPY or equal-weighted S&P 500) if that satisfies your objective, or narrow the experiment to one security using the event-backtest tools available.