Pepco is investigating the feasibility of burying its Maryland power lines, the electric company told the Maryland Public Service Commission.
Within six months, Pepco will file with the utility regulator an analysis of undergrounding options, Pepco Assistant General Counsel Douglas Michael told the regulators in a letter. The analysis will look at the costs and benefits of burying select power lines and of burying all power lines, a spokesman told The Washington Examiner.
Pepco is already supposed to be considering the feasibility of burying select power lines as part of its “Reliability Enhancement Plan,” a long-term plan for improving its infrastructure, a large portion of which has consisted of trimming trees.
But after a June 29 storm knocked out power for more than half of Pepco’s 792,000 customers in the District and suburban Maryland — some for a week as temperatures reached record highs — customers and community leaders began clamoring for Pepco to bury its power lines. A petition on Change.org has gotten more than 3,100 signatures from people who want Pepco to pay the entire cost of burying power lines.
It is because of these concerns that Pepco will begin looking into the “more expensive option,” Michael wrote.
In the District, burying power lines could cost between $400,000 and $1.6 million per mile, depending on the area and type of construction, according to a 2010 study submitted to the D.C. Public Service Commission by Shaw Consultants International.
Though the costs of burying lines might be high, the costs to residents and businesses of a weeklong power outage is higher, Montgomery County Council President Roger Berliner has said. Last week, he told the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments that the storm and the resulting outages could have cost as much as $1 billion.
This is not the first time Pepco customers have asked about the costs of burying power lines. After severe summer and winter storms knocked out power for days at a time in 2009 and 2010, regulators looked at the costs of burying lines. But burying lines across Pepco’s service area was deemed too expensive.
Montgomery County Councilman Hans Riemer, D-at large, advised people to be skeptical of Pepco’s study results.
“We’ll need to apply real scrutiny to their study because they always tell us it’s going to cost a lot more money than it really will, and I’m actually a little skeptical of what their motives [are],” he said. “They probably will come forward with some result that says it costs $6 billion to do anything, and then the end result will be to help them push back against doing anything.”
