I can think of 100 more meaningful projects than building electric power lines underground. Feeding the young, the old, the poor and the sick, for example. Halting global warming. Giving Internet access to all schoolchildren. A proposal for upgrading the condition of our nation’s electrical infrastructure is no match in a competition for public attention with political scandal, either.
But the large scale power outages in the Chicago area and in various parts of the U.S. and Canada this past winter reflect upon all electrical power engineers. We have to pick our battles judiciously as we reconcile the competing requirements of our employers with the public’s desire for safety, reliability, economy and beauty. The U.S. will be a nation of some 400 million people soon and it needs to be informed about the freebooters’ enterprise the “wires” industry has become.
The trade-off between overhead and underground electric power delivery is fairly intuitive. Underground power lines, while safer for the public, fail less frequently. When the underground power lines fail it is much harder to find the source of the failure and even harder to fix the lines are typically buried in concrete. Repairing outage failures clearly fall in favor of overhead power circuits. Underground power lines present a different set of hazards for electricians and they are a devil to engineer. Cost differentials are cumbersome to establish and are determined entirely by site-specific factors, ranging from the price of an easement to the difficulty of drilling through a specific mixture of rock and soil. Rules of thumb about comparative costs range from 2 to 10 times the cost of overhead power lines.
The battleground between power delivery technologies now lies between urban settings and the the rural extremes. This is where some kind of clever gimmickry, applied in the “gray areas” in small doses at the federal level, might result in an optimal mix of power delivery technologies.
The Europeans are far ahead of us on underground power delivery even though their weather isn’t half as nutty as ours. Their destiny has taught them that power security is not unrelated to national security. Concern about national security resulted in the U.S. interstate freeway system after World War II and has been applied recently to hasten the migration to the digital television format. Why not apply the same rationale to the wires industry?
Technical developments
Some recent technological developments would get us off to a good start. Among them:
– Electronically guided boring rigs (based upon electronics developed for the cruise missile) that can drill channels for conduit installation over longer distances in rougher terrains without the need for trenching.
– A soft trenching system that applies supersonic air and reduces the chances of damaging existing underground structures such as gas pipelines.
– Improved techniques for locating faults and leaks in cables by detecting a tracer gas at parts-per-quadrillion levels.
Applied together, these technologies can fundamentally change the economics of underground power delivery and make it more attractive.
Deregulation
The coming months and years will be filled with sound bites celebrating the arrival of “choice” for power consumers. Hundreds of companies will compete for a share of this new commodity. By the time power reaches your reading lamp, it could be bought and sold 10 times.
If you think that this is a bonanza for lawyers, bean counters and energy policy wonks, you would be right. Engineers warn that electricity is a fundamentally different commodity than natural gas or telecommunications; that the grid was designed for operation in a simpler business environment. Perhaps in some oddly capitalistic way the ultimate effect of deregulation will be to increase the reliability of the power delivery grid. I hope so. In other industries that have undergone deregulation, the average savings over 10 years amounted to 2 to 5 percent annually. This is a lot of money for some people. For others at the far end of a fallen power line that cost is negligible compared to shivering in the dark every year.
To measure the full value of such an undertaking, utility executives, engineers, planners, public commissioners and local leaders need to be involved in a multidimensional framework of assessment that sets the cost of underground power lines against a wide spectrum of benefits over time. Federal involvement in gray areas might mean the government doing as little as providing incentives for
– the adoption of standardized underground infrastructure construction materials;
– more coordinated and long-range planning among developers and local zoning authorities;
– property owners (such as natural gas companies and railroads) to release more right-of-way for use in public infrastructure corridors;
– cooperation among trade unions engaged in utility construction.
It could also mean ratcheting upward existing federal energy policies aimed at encouraging the construction of moderately-sized generation plants, thus reducing the need for large transmission towers. A local power supply is as much a touchstone of a neighborhood as its water supply. This scenario bears a strong resemblance to the infancy of the electric power industry.
Installing electric power lines underground is an issue over which many people will disagree. As a society, we make choices about how much loss we can tolerate. Engineers know how to make an automobile muffler last forever but, as consumers, we prefer to replace cheaper mufflers periodically. We could virtually eliminate auto fatalities by reducing the speed limit to 20 m.p.h., but we do not do so in the interest of economic expediency. History does not repeat itself, but if we want to avoid the same misery caused by power outages during the next “Storm of the Decade,” then the public needs to get smart about its electric power choices.
