(Bloomberg) -- American Electric Power Co. selected utility veteran Bill Fehrman as its new chief executive after abruptly firing its head earlier this year. 

Fehrman, 63, will join AEP on Aug. 1 after just seven months leading Centuri Holdings, an infrastructure services business. He formerly served as president and chief executive officer of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy Co. 

Even though Fehrman is a longtime energy executive,“he wasn’t CEO of Centuri for very long, so it’s a little unusual to see this kind of move,” said Paul Patterson, a utility analyst for Glenrock Associates LLC. AEP shares were unchanged in late trading following the news.

AEP fired Julie Sloat in February after 14 months in the utility owner’s top job. Earlier that month, billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn reached an agreement to add two directors to the company’s board after he acquired about 1% of the Columbus, Ohio-based business. Icahn representatives did not immediately reply to a request for comment Wednesday.

Centuri was spun off from Southwest Gas Holdings Inc. as part of an agreement with Icahn and went public in April, raising about $315 million. Phoenix-based Centuri said Paul Caudill, former CEO of NV Energy Inc., will succeed Fehrman as interim president and chief executive officer. 

AEP is one of the biggest investor-owned utilities in the US, with almost 5.6 million customers in 11 states, including Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia. The company operates about 23 gigawatts of electric generation, including 7 gigawatts of clean energy, according to its website. 

--With assistance from Mark Chediak and Crystal Tse.

(Story updates with analyst commentary in third paragraph and additional background throughout.)

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