Power lines: To bury or not to bury

The size and length of the East Coast power
outage has raised
the question we often hear during our annual
wind storms in Western Washington. Why don’t
we just bury our lines?

Bad weather and tree branches falling on power lines are
responsible for nearly half of all power outages in the
U.S. In some places, losing power is just part of life.
It happens every year. Sometimes more than once in the
same area.

It happens so often because 70 percent of the nation’s
power lines are above ground and are vulnerable.

The question of whether to bury or not has been asked
since the first power line went down in a storm.

Tom Schooley, with the Washington Utilities and
Transportation Commission, told MyNorthwest.com the
conversation usually ends when people find out how much it
would cost to bury the lines.

“They say ‘Why don’t we just bury it all’, and then they
look at the price tag and say ‘Well, I guess we can live
with a couple days outage every few years,'” Schooley
said.

Grant Ringel, with Puget Sound Energy, calls burying
the lines ‘cost prohibitive.’

“On the distribution side, it
starts at a million dollars a mile and goes up,” he said.
“It really depends on what you have to dig through and dig
around. On the transmission side, it’s between five and
fifteen million dollars a mile, again depending on what
conditions you run into.”

It costs about 10 times as much to bury existing lines as
it does to string the lines from poles and guess who
ends up paying the price? It would end-up on your bill.
Some projects to bury lines around the country penciled-
out to increases of more than 100-percent on customers’
monthly
bills. It’s just not worth it because repairing the damage
after storms ends up being a lot cheaper.

Ringel said underground lines aren’t without their own
problems.

“It would seem like undergrounding would solve
all of your reliability issues,” he said, “but it really
doesn’t.”

When a power line goes down, you can see it. Crews know
right where to go. When an underground line
fails, you can’t tell where the problem is. You have to
dig it up and look for the problem, so fixing underground
outages can take longer.

Most new developments bury their lines because they’re
already digging to put in sewer and gas lines, so the cost
is much cheaper.

About half of PSE’s lines are underground right now. Less
than a quarter of Seattle City Light’s lines are
underground. The number is about 40-percent for Snohomish
County PUD.