When Hurricane Helene swept across Appalachia last year, it left millions of homes without power.
“80 percent of power outages occur because of weather and other extreme events, like high winds, ice, snow or hurricanes,” said Joe Vantassel, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
One way to reduce the majority of power outages is to bury lines underground. Utility companies do this either by digging trenches, but that often means a huge construction job, taking down trees, cutting into landscaping, and holding up traffic along roads. Drilling is another method that can be less invasive to communities, but that has risks too, and both are expensive.
Workers can occasionally cut into water or gas pipes by mistake. “The plans that we have for utilities are by and large not great,” Vantassel said. “Often utilities are not where they’re supposed to be, or maybe there was something that was put in that wasn’t documented, or maybe it’s just something from, you know, in some of our older cities 100 years ago, where they weren’t keeping plans.”
Vantassel’s team is working on a three-year study with the Department of Energy to develop sensors on drills that can detect when there’s an object ahead. The drill operator can then check the utility maps and determine if it’s safe to continue.
Dominion Energy is advising Vantassel on the research. That company calculated in the early 2000s, that it would cost $83 billion to bury all their lines in Virginia, according to Craig Carper, a spokesperson with Dominion Energy. “That figure would be at least double now,” Carper said. Instead of transitioning all their lines, the company has been more selective, aiming to bury the worst performing lines.
Carter said the properties where the lines have transitioned to underground have experience significantly fewer outages, though there are some occasional outages.
Appalachian Power maintains several thousand miles of underground lines, though the company doesn’t have a proactive program to target areas for transitioning to underground lines.
“If a customer requests their power lines be buried beneath ground, Appalachian Power can consider that, but the customer has to cover the cost,” said George Porter, a company spokesman.
There are significant costs for utilities and customers to bury lines, said Vantassel, but with an increased frequency of natural disasters, it’s becoming a more important option to consider.
“But there also needs to be a conversation with the public of, ‘do you want more reliable power? And how much is that worth to you?’” Vantassel said.
“So if we can minimize the risk [and] the cost of putting power lines underground, I think in the end the public is in favor of having more reliable power,” Vantassel said.
