Dive Brief:
- Dominion Resources intends to bury 350 miles of power lines each year in a strategic initiative aimed at taking underground the lines that are most susceptible to outages.
- The plan is to bury about 4,000 miles of distribution lines over the next 10-12 years. The company said moving its entire system underground would cost a prohibitive $83.3 billion.
- The Virginia State Corporation Commission will have to approve a special rate adjustment to pay for the program.
Dive Insight:
Dominion will analyze outage data over a 10-year period to determine which power lines should be buried. Almost a million customers lost power during the derecho storms of June 2012, causing Dominion to take a new look at undergrounding power lines. The project will concentrate on tap lines, all of which will be less than 69,000 volts.
A Virginia law passed in April authorizes utilities in the state to spend 5% of the value of their rate base to bury some lines. The Daily Progress reported that, for Dominion, that could mean spending $175 million every year on the project.
“To ensure the cost remains low for our customers, we will request a small, gradual increase over time to cover the costs of this program,” Alan Bradshaw, who heads up of Dominion’s underground program, told the newspaper.