The path to permanent electric grid resiliency
A survey in 2014 revealed that 80 percent of the population supports the idea of undergrounding utilities, and also conveyed willingness to pay a small surcharge on their monthly bills.
Every time we have a severe weather event that causes lots of power outages, we hear only a murmur of talk about undergrounding the utility lines. But after a few weeks pass, you don’t hear any of that talk going on.
The August 2020 storm Isaias caused nearly a million customers to lose power in Connecticut. Even after that event, there wasn’t much public talk about undergrounding. The storms of 10 years ago and subsequent weather events heightened the public awareness of the vulnerability of the electric, telephone and utility systems hanging overhead on wooden poles. The response by the utilities and state Legislature was to create vegetation management legislation that enabled the utilities to increase our monthly electric bills to pay for tree trimming and tree removal on our public streets. This cost is not itemized on our electric bills.
A tornado a few weeks after Isaias again left thousands of customers without power. Although millions of dollars had been spent for vegetation management since the program began, it had not created the necessary resilience in the electric grid, and it never will. Trimmed branches grow back in five or 10 years, and there will always be bigger trees nearby that the utility companies cannot touch, but can fall on the power lines. Removing trees and branches in the utility protection zone exposes adjacent trees to the wind force more directly. The vegetation management activity has had the negative effect that removing trees can cause. Not only do trees contribute to air quality, storm water management and public space beauty, but they also help to reduce electrical consumption for cooling in adjacent buildings, and make our streets more walkable in the heat of summer.
Immediately after these intense storm events, the utility companies push back on undergrounding talk. They, along with legislators, come up with other costly ideas that won’t ever solve this problem in the best and most permanent way. Ideas like more tree trimming, removal, tougher wires and poles, fines for outages and payments to customers for food losses. These ideas will not provide the resiliency that we, the public, should be requiring. Although the cost of undergrounding everything that’s on poles is high, the long-term costs of maintaining underground lines is much less. Depending on the specifics of the location (the complexity of what is overhead, and what is already under the street), it can cost anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars per mile to $5 million per mile to put the mess under the street. Then we would be able to have beautiful tree-lined streets, and design the street lighting as part of a comprehensive streetscape design.
When we talk to our elected officials to advocate for some kind of initiative to actively start a long-term program of undergrounding, we usually get lip service and nothing happens. To change this 100year paradigm would require unrelenting pressure from us, the citizens, since we are the owners of the streets, to evoke leadership on this issue from the governor. Most town professional staffs already have more to do than they can handle. State legislators have so many pressing concerns that once the lights are on again after an outage, they don’t have time to develop a statewide plan for this.
Changing this would have to start with a governor’s task force for undergrounding, which would assemble a team of players from utilities, legislators, PURA, ConnDOT, DEEP, regional councils of government members, consulting engineers and contractors. The task force would study how this has been done in other states, and develop a structure to fund undergrounding efforts statewide that would have no unreasonable financial impact on ratepayers, municipal or state budgets. It would provide technical, political, legal and planning expertise to enable this effort to start, and continue for 50 to 100 years or more.
A survey in 2014 revealed that 80 percent of the population supports the idea of undergrounding utilities, and also conveyed willingness to pay a small surcharge on their monthly bills. Many places around the country have developed manageable ways to do this. In 1967 California passed legislation (Rule 20) that enables any locality to plan and engage in undergrounding. San Diego and many other places in California have been doing this for the last 50 years, including San Francisco, Anaheim, San Jose, Los Angeles and many others. Gov. Lamont, please enable this to happen in Connecticut.