As people in some parts of Eastern Fairfax County continue to recover from May 16th’s devastating storms that left approximately 200,000 customers without power for over two days and tragically claimed two lives, we are once again confronted with a stark reality: our electrical infrastructure remains vulnerable to nature's wrath and we are extremely dependent on electricity for our quality of life.
I have received dozens of requests for underground utilities in the wake of this storm. I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the Virginia General Assembly has already authorized some limited undergrounding of outdoor electrical [only? other?] wiring and even authorized a special program for Fairfax County. The bad news is that our action will never be enough and there continue to be many obstacles to robust, widespread undergrounding. For example, Fairfax County has chosen not to take advantage of the program the General Assembly has made available.
In Virginia, electric power is mostly provided by utilities like Dominion Energy that have a monopoly, but provide services subject to oversight by the Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) and the state legislature to ensure that they do not abuse this monopoly power. One study of universal undergrounding of all electric utilities across the Commonwealth found the cost would exceed $150 billion.
In 2011-2012, Dominion Energy studied the feasibility of undergrounding residential electrical tap or feeder lines and the cost and the reliability improvements that could be generated. After the study, the General Assembly authorized Dominion Energy to spend a limited percentage of their annual revenues on undergrounding residential feeder lines, but not distribution or transmission lines which are larger and exponentially more expensive to bury.
This program requires Dominion to analyze a decade of power outage data and to prioritize burying lines that are the most vulnerable to outages. By prioritizing funds, this approach reduces some future outages, allows workers to focus on other problems and to restore the system to full operation more quickly.
We prohibited utilities from spending more than $20,000 per customer served directly by or downline of the converted lines and no more than $750,000 per mile for conversion to underground, exclusive of financing costs. The total anticipated expenditure is approximately $2 billion and each project is reviewed by the SCC to ensure compliance with state law and Virginia’s longstanding policy of minimizing electrical utility rates.
Conversions Have Reduced Outage Times by 50 Percent
Since adoption, the program has converted 7,300 neighborhood feeder or "tap lines” totaling approximately 2,480 miles of underground power infrastructure of what will eventually likely be up to 4,000 miles of overhead tap lines. Much of this has been in Fairfax County. These conversions are estimated to reduce outage times by 50 percent.
According to Dominion's most recent figures, the Strategic Underground Program has prevented an estimated 3,610 outage events every year. Even more impressive is the dramatic reduction in the system average interruption duration index (SAIDI) for customers in converted zones, from a pre-conversion SAIDI of 556 minutes to just 2.25 minutes after undergrounding. This represents a 99.6 percent improvement in outage duration.
For communities that have experienced major storms, the benefits are particularly evident, with Dominion reporting a 20-30 percent reduction in total restoration time following severe weather events where restoration would typically exceed 72 hours. This means faster recovery for all customers across the grid, even those whose lines remain above ground, as crews can focus on other affected areas rather than dealing with the most chronically-vulnerable sections.
Virginians should understand that Dominion will only move forward with eligible programs if all homeowners on the undergrounding project agree to modify their existing easements and transformer placements to alleviate the need for time-consuming and expensive condemnation proceedings. In addition, the projects cannot include cable or telephone lines because those companies have no means to recover costs from ratepayers since they are unregulated, non-mandatory utilities.
In 2019, I carried legislation which allowed Fairfax County to adopt a tax of up to $1 per month per household to fund burying distribution lines as long as the planned U.S. 1 Bus Rapid Transit Project would be the first recipient of funds. Commendably, Prince William County has buried distribution lines on their entire 14-mile stretch of U.S. 1. It was my hope this program would be used to improve reliability in our community, reduce project damage and enhance the beauty of the U.S. 1 Corridor, but the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has not utilized this authority.
Going forward, if underground electricity lines are important for your community, people need to cooperate with Dominion if the company determines that your neighborhood is eligible. In the meantime, I will continue to explore ways to make our electrical infrastructure more resilient as climate changes continues to make the weather more volatile and bring on more frequent and more severe storms.
If you have any comments or questions, please reach out to me at scott@scottsurovell.org.
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