Easy fix eludes power outage problems in US

WASHINGTON — In the aftermath of storms that knocked out power to millions, sweltering residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it's taking so long to restring power lines and why they're not more resilient in the first place.

The answer, it turns out, is complicated: Above-ground lines are vulnerable to lashing winds and falling trees, but relocating them underground incurs huge costs - as much as $15 million per mile of buried line - and that gets passed onto consumers.

With memories of other extended outages fresh in the minds of many of the 1.26 million customers who still lack electricity, some question whether the delivery of power is more precarious than it used to be. The storms that began Friday killed 24 people in seven states and the District of Columbia.

"It's a system that from an infrastructure point of view is beginning to age, has been aging," said Gregory Reed, a professor of electric power engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. "We haven't expanded and modernized the bulk of the transmission and distribution network."

The powerful winds that swept from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic late Friday, toppling trees onto power lines and knocking out transmission towers and electrical substations, have renewed debate about whether to bury lines. District of Columbia Mayor Vincent Gray was among officials calling for the change this week and was seeking to meet with the chief executive of Pepco, the city's dominant utility, to discuss what he called a slow and frustrating response.

"They obviously need to invest more in preparing for getting the power back on," said Maryland state Sen. James Rosapepe, who is among those advocating for moving lines underground. "Every time this happens, they say they're shocked - shocked that it rained or snowed or it was hot - which isn't an acceptable excuse given that we all know about climate change."

Though the newest communities do bury their power lines, many older ones have found that it's too expensive to replace existing networks. To bury power lines, utilities need to take over city streets so they can cut trenches into the asphalt, lay down plastic conduits and then the power lines. Manholes must be created to connect the lines together. The overall cost is between $5 million and $15 million per mile, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, Inc., a nonprofit research and development group funded by electric utilities. Those costs get passed on to residents in the form of higher electric bills, making the idea unpalatable for many communities.

Pepco's initial estimates are that it would be a $5.8 billion project to bury power lines in D.C. and would cost customers an extra $107 per month, said Michael Maxwell, vice president of asset management.

North Carolina considered burying its lines in 2003, after a winter storm knocked out power to 2 million utility customers. The North Carolina Public Staff Utilities Commission eventually concluded it was "prohibitively expensive" and time-consuming. The project would have cost $41 billion and taken 25 years to complete - and it would have raised residential electric bills by 125 percent.

An onslaught of recent extreme weather around the country, including heat waves, wildfires and flooding, has increased strain on infrastructure already struggling to meet growing consumer demand. And some scientists predict the severe weather will only increase, though it will take time to study this year's weather before any conclusions can be drawn.

Pepco has contingency plans for dealing with severe weather like tornadoes and hurricanes and runs periodic drills in which staff go through the process of responding to mass outages. In this case, though, the hurricane-force winds lashed the region with no advance notice, creating a type of quick-hit storm that caught the utility flat-footed and for which it had not practiced, Maxwell said.

"That's going to be a very big lesson for us," he said. "We need to understand how we recover from this."

A stress index created by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which monitors the country's power supply to annually assess its performance, shows that day-to-day performance seems to have improved, but there was an increase in high-stress days. The company counted six high-stress days in 2011, slightly more than the three preceding years. Weather was a contributing factor in nine of the 10 failures severe enough to generate a federally required report in 2011.

But utility insiders acknowledge that the math is little comfort when a customer's air conditioner fails during a triple-digit heat wave and the food spoils.

"The industry is getting better and better," said Aaron Strickland, who oversees distribution and emergency operations for Georgia Power, a subsidiary of the Atlanta-based Southern Co. "In my opinion, I think the expectations of customers are higher and higher because we depend so much on electricity. ... We expect to push that button and it works."

Still, he noted Friday's storms pummeled the region with no advance warning, and "you can't prepare for that."

Seth Blumsack, an assistant professor of energy policy and economics at Penn State, said utilities are making investments in transmission upgrades but "it doesn't look like blackouts are getting any less common."

"Some studies have suggested that they are getting more common," he said. "Some studies have suggested that they're happening at basically the same rate as they used to."

Though the country's power infrastructure is reliable, it was mostly built between the 1930s and 1970s and is starting to age, said Reed of the University of Pittsburgh.

Bruce Wollenberg, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota who specializes in power systems, said it's hard to tell if extended outages are more common than in years past. But the capacity for high-voltage transmission systems has not increased with demand, he said, in part because of the cost of moving power lines underground and the general distaste for having above-ground lines right outside homes.

"People don't want power lines - period ...They don't like the way they look, they don't like a lot of things," Wollenberg said. "It's universal across the country, and I think across the world. People don't want power lines. They don't want more power lines."

Residents' complaints about the latest outages have increased with their duration.

Kevin Fogg, a barber from the rural community of Jefferson, about 45 miles northwest of Washington, scoffed when asked if he'd be willing to pay Potomac Edison higher rates to prevent more outages like the one he's been suffering through.

He said the utility company should do a better job of trimming trees and branches that threaten power lines.

"There's a huge, dead tree hanging over our line and they said, 'Well, we're not going to cut it down,'" Fogg said. "It's got to break first and knock the power line down before they'll do anything about it. So I guess they won't do any preventive maintenance - or at least not as much as they should."

Jean Cuseo, a middle-school art teacher from Jefferson, said she's not sure if she'd be willing to pay more to prevent outages, even if that were an option.

"I'm pretty environmentally friendly. If I could live off the grid I would," she said.

I got my neighbors together a decade ago to complain to the PSC and get our block's ~50 year old high voltage wires, pole cross ties and insulators replaced and the whole thing given a prune job.

The extension to another block where folks didn't want the tree trimming got a circuit breaker so they don't bring us down anymore.

It's been a definite improvement in reliability.

Buying a sine wave inverter to run off a bank of 12volt batteries and hooking up to the cars for recharging takes care providing minimal 120v backup (has to be manually rigged).

which is why NONE EXIST, even for short distances.

Where do they hide all of the electrical poles in Manhattan, and every other downtown city area?

“Where do they hide all of the electrical poles in Manhattan, and every other downtown city area? “

Those are medium voltage lines. The substations are outside of the cities, for obvious reasons.

“Electric power can also be transmitted by underground power cables instead of overhead power lines. Underground cables take up less right-of-way than overhead lines, have lower visibility, and are less affected by bad weather. However, costs of insulated cable and excavation are much higher than overhead construction. Faults in buried transmission lines take longer to locate and repair. Underground lines are strictly limited by their thermal capacity, which permits less overload or re-rating than overhead lines. Long underground cables have significant capacitance, which may reduce their ability to provide useful power to loads.”

This is from Wikipedia.

“Could people have paid for a swap that wasn’t?”

Did your rates double in the past few years? If not, don’t worry, you haven’t paid for it (yet).

I saw your comment and had a hard time understanding your point.

I've traveled over 2 million miles domestically and helped to "deregulate" the 8th largest utility company in the US.

Rural areas, weather new or old, are above ground. Densely populated metro centers have been buried for many decades using large, multipurpose utility conduits. This is the best way and allows for hardening and future upgrades. It can work for areas with low water tables (we’ve had intercontinental communication cables since 1851), but less so for mountainous regions.

$15 million per mile of buried line

Ah! Time for another $2 trillion obama campaign stimulus to get the economy rolling for the unions.

They’re putting new poles in here now.

When I put my split rail fence in I had to put a rock on top of each one to keep them from bobbing up in the hole while I put concrete in.

$15 million per mile of buried line - and that gets passed onto consumers

$3000 per foot - ah the joy of monopolies that can just pass their costs on to their customers, unquestioned.

Of course here in DC $3000 per foot does not go far. First there is the pickup truck and couple of guys to operate the rented pavement cutter, and then the guy to operate the backhoe. But then there are all the supervisors and the guys who stand in the road with the stop / go signs and thier deputies, and reliefs and supervisors.

A cynic might also factor in bribes to the city council not to ask too many hard questions, but I think that is a totally over the top and unfair slander against citizens working for the good of the taxpayer like DC Councilmember Marion Barry.

$15 million per mile of buried line - and that gets passed onto consumers

$3000 per foot - ah the joy of monopolies that can just pass their costs on to their customers, unquestioned.

I’m an electrical engineer and to me, our above ground power grid is really a bad thing, almost stupid. And did I mention really UGLY.

The big push for underground distribution lines in Calif began in the 60s. Older communities are still above ground. I live in Anaheim Hills, a planned community, we are 100% underground. Malibu on the otherhand is 100% above ground. PCH Malibu has all overhead lines and it's ugly as hell.

There are no problems with earthquake damage to underground. Flooding can cause problems at transformer vaults however. Had to go out in big stormy nights to pump water out of vaults. The overhead crew had a much tougher time.

malibu

Really? I find it hard to believe that all of Manhattan is run off of medium voltage lines. If true they would have to run a lot of them into the city.

That said, the high voltage lines on the giant towers aren’t generally where the power outages occur, as the trees are below those lines and can’t fall on them.

Those overhead transmission lines will be cheaper. The ambient cooling of the air is verses building tunnels with cooling systems to string transmission lines.

Underground lines crap out too.

More reliable than overhead.

Cables run thru PVC. Conductors are sealed in lead casing and are water tight. Biggest problems are at the underground connection vaults where they are connected and routed. Underground Vault flooding is a headache.

“That said, the high voltage lines on the giant towers aren’t generally where the power outages occur, as the trees are below those lines and can’t fall on them.”

You’re right. So the question there becomes whether people are willing to pay TWICE what they pay now (for at least 5 years, if not 10 years) to get their existing lines buried, as well as the lower voltage feeders to their neighborhood.

I suspect that if you had that referendum, you’d realize why so many overhead lines remain. They may be ugly (to some of us), but burying them is neither free, nor cheap.

Those overhead transmission lines will be cheaper. The ambient cooling of the air is verses building tunnels with cooling systems to string transmission lines.

Most all high voltage transmission lines are overhead. It's the low voltage distribution lines, 12kv or less, that go underground.

Thanx for using the proper vocabulary. Transmission is high-voltage, and distribution is low voltage. DC area has a load imbalance, generation relatively far from load which makes the power grid less reliable than it could be. See map

Buying a sine wave inverter to run off a bank of 12volt batteries and hooking up to the cars for recharging takes care providing minimal 120v backup (has to be manually rigged). www.generac.com Got a 15,000kw unit after the Isabel outage, runs on propane wih an automatic transfer switch.

Downside is that at the current price of propane power outages cost me $5.00/hour.

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