The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Experts: Hardening the grid throughout CT would be costly
Over the past three years, Eversource customers paid on average $450 each to replace old utility poles, lines and other apparatus across Connecticut.
That $570 million outlay helped keep the refrigerator on for some during Tropical Storm Isaias — but it was no help to many who were forced to replace spoiled food and endure long, hot days with no power.
Following the prolonged blackouts that Isaias left behind, many have called for utilities to better armor the rickety electrical grids operated by Eversource and United Illuminating.
But some warn that could translate into customers paying several thousand dollars more on utility bills in the coming years — and the lights still might go out the next time a hurricane or nor’easter throws a haymaker at Connecticut’s old-growth pine, maple, oak
and tulip trees.
Eversource removed more than 8,400 trees in the days after Isaias, according to the company’s initial count, with nearly 2,100 poles breaking in its Connecticut grid and Isaias downing more than 12,500 spans of electric distribution cable.
Lawmakers and regulators are left again with the question of whether to spend more, through utility bills and other means, to better protect and secure the overhead lines that deliver electricity from substations across Connecticut, or bury more of them underground to put them out of harm’s way.
The question is recurring nearly eight years after the devastation caused by Sandy in 2012, at a time when the state is strapped for cash and grappling with the long-term, economic implications of a killer pandemic.
“In a case like this — when you have trees actually fall over — the system’s not going to stop that tree from [knocking] the lights out,” said Craig Hallstrom, Eversource’s regional president, speaking last week to reporters during restoration efforts. “That’s the crux of it. ... No matter how much hardening of the system you do, a giant tree coming across a street is going to take that pole and wire down.”
‘That’s on you’
The state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority opens hearings into Eversource’s and United Illuminating’s performance before and after Isaias in less than two weeks.
Attorney General William Tong is expected to argue the power companies could have performed better.
“It is the responsibility of the utilities to take that risk and to manage that risk of being prepared,” Tong said Thursday. “You have a monopoly that’s been granted to you to manage that risk and to do it well, and in many ways to ‘insure’ ... that storm response. And sometimes you’ll get it right, and sometimes you’ll get it wrong — but that’s on you.”
But whether the PURA inquiry ends up focusing on response or infrastructure or both, a central, simple question remains: How much money is too much money to better brace Connecticut’s grid?
An Eversource spokesperson declined to provide details on the company’s investments to reinforce its Connecticut electricity distribution system against threats like falling tree limbs. But Eversource — and its ratepayers — have invested hundreds of millions of dollars since Sandy to remove trees and branches near lines, and protect electric substations from coastal flooding.
In its annual report released earlier this year, Eversource described its Connecticut grid as comprising 17,000 miles of overhead lines with an additional 6,700 miles below the streets — nearly enough to circle the planet if strung together. The utility runs electricity through about 180 substations and more than 291,000 transformers to reach outlets in homes and businesses.
Connecticut has more than 900,000 utility poles statewide owned by Eversource, United Illuminating and Frontier Communications.
Eversource spent $225 million last year replacing what it described as “aging infrastructure” in its Connecticut electric grid, about 2.5 percent of the total value of Eversource’s historic Connecticut Light & Power grid, which the company valued at $9.6 billion entering 2019.
Against revenue, the replacement work in 2019 equated to 7 percent of the $3.2 billion generated by CL&P operations; or more than half of the CL&P operating profits of $411 million in 2019.
“It doesn’t sound like enough to me,” Tong said. “There is an inherent conflict between the publicservice mission and their fiduciary responsibility to ratepayers ... and their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, to make money.”
A $1,600 pole — and $10,000 crew
Many utilities are investing in poles made of fiberglass composites by companies like BASF, Creative Pultrusions IntelliPole and Valmont. In addition to being resistant to weathering, deicing salt and other threats like burrowing insects, composite poles weigh two thirds less than those made from pine tree trunks, making for easier installation. They can be manufactured in colors to match surrounding trees and terrain. And the poles eliminate the possibility of wood preservatives leeching into soil. One called pentachlorophenol, used historically on roughly one of every two poles nationwide, was banned a few years ago as a possible carcinogen.
But the Electric Power Research Institute noted in a 2018 study that composite poles have yet to prove they can withstand the test of time, with the possibility of faster-than-expected deterioration due to sunlight, heat and ice.
Other opportunities include strengthening accompanying hardware like the fastenings that attach lines to poles, or installing more poles to reduce the distance between any two, reducing sag on lines and accompanying stress from falling trees and branches.
Whether wood or composite, however, pole installations are a pricey proposition. A California litigation consultancy called Garrett Forensics did the math five years ago, costing out a pole replacement at $3,800 for materials (including the pole itself at nearly $1,600) and heavy equipment like borers and aerial work platforms.
With Eversource using the industry standard of 40 poles for every mile of electric wire running along roadways, the Garrett Forensics estimate works out to about $152,000 per mile of new poles — and that’s before a single line crew gets paid for the installation work. Replacing Eversource’s entire pole system — pre labor — would cost more than $2.5 billion, or more
than $2,000 per customer.
And that is a bargain next to trenching lines underground. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company three years ago estimated it costs close to four times more to bury lines along roadways rather than run them above, reflecting both the cost of labor as well as cost of the line itself, which must be insulated with extra protection.
Underground cables offer long-term operational savings by eliminating the need to trim back tree branches, and they are far less susceptible to failures. But when they do fail — whether an underground circuit blowing or a backhoe operator not doing homework before digging — they are far more expensive to fix.
Eversource has added more than 5,500 miles of underground cable in its Connecticut grid since Sandy, but reduced its overhead distribution cables only by about 1,400 miles, suggesting the subterranean infrastructure has supported new developments largely,
rather than served as a storm-mitigation strategy in Connecticut’s leafier towns.
Replacing infrastructure is not the only storm protection that costs money. As the post-Isaias blackout dragged on, Eversource in particular came under heavy fire for underestimating the storm and not having enough crews at the ready to set the state right.
Some have suggested the company should have reserve brigades of line and tree crews at the ready when trouble is brewing in the Atlantic.
But as Eversource’s Hallstrom noted, those crews will cost the company big each time a storm veers wide of Connecticut.
“You can’t hire thousands and thousands of crews based on, ‘We just want to be prepared,’” Hallstrom. “Economically [and] financially, that doesn’t make any sense. We make the best predictions we can, and then we adjust accordingly.”