Posts about Power Lines

Pepco gives very high cost estimates

Residents listed burying the lines as a top priority during early public meetings for the project. The lines are unsightly, and Pepco would often truncate the street's trees to keep them from disrupting lines. Plus, putting the lines underground would reduce the change of trees falling on the lines and knocking out power.

Pepco told DDOT that it would cost $60 million to bury the lines along 12th. Plus, DDOT then-spokesperson Karyn LeBlanc said in an August 2008 email, Pepco rents space on its poles to telecommunication utilities as well, and burying the lines would require moving those wires.

LeBlanc added,

Each property that currently receives service from an overhead connection would need to be "rewired" to accept service from the newly undergrounded connection. This is a cost that would not be burdened to the utility but rather to the property owner. The current cost estimate is $15,000 per property and again that is just for the electrical service. The other communication lines would also need to be "rewired." All these estimated costs would, of course, increase as costs for materials continue to increase.

At DDOT oversight hearings at the time, residents and council staff found comparable cost estimates from other jurisdictions that were putting lines underground. Scenic America said that burying the wires costs $500,000 to $3 million per mile. Since the project covered one mile of street, that means the estimate differ by a factor of 20 to 120.

Information from an undergrounding project in San Francisco put the cost to move a property's connection at $1,500 to $2,000 per property, not $15,000.

These costs are still not small, but they might have been achievable. DDOT had $5.5 million in the project budget left over for miscellaneous streetscape tasks, which could have gone toward wires, but it was too late to make it happen at that point.

More importantly, this reveals a credibility gap for Pepco. The utility wasn't really interested in putting lines underground, so it seems it threw out a very high estimate.

One streetscape won't solve storm reliability

Underground wires on 12th Street could have saved businesses there from losing power, but wouldn't have done much for a broader area. To really combat outages, Pepco would need to bury its main trunk lines.

According to DeBonis, Pepco does want to bury two lines, on Oregon Avenue NW along Rock Creek and on Michigan Avenue NE, near Brookland. It's offered to do this as part of a rate increase currently before the Public Service Commission (PSC); Mayor Gray and other officials today said that maybe the utility doesn't deserve to get its rate hike given what's happened this week.

One thing is clear; unless the PSC starts pushing Pepco hard, wires won't go underground. To the utility, there's no incentive to invest in the cost of expensive infrastructure that's more reliable, or just having more crews on hand to make repairs. As a for-profit company with fixed rates, their only incentive is to keep costs low, and that means skimping on reliability.

The PSC will have to push Pepco harder—if the District can get members confirmed who want to do so. It would help get the discussion going if there were independent, more realiable estimates for costs. We just can't trust Pepco or industry groups whose incentives don't line up with the general public.

Outages are everywhere

From a discussion among our contributors, it seems that neighborhoods with underground power lines, like in the L'Enfant city, fared the best; Dan Malouff wrote that in Dupont, there was "Not even so much as a flicker" of a power outage, and I experienced the same.

Ben Ross said, "Pretty much everyone in Bethesda lost power except the small portion of downtown that has underground wires." Not all places with underground wires were spared; Geoff Hatchard said, "Places like Bloomingdale and Eckington, which have underground lines, still lost power (as they seem to do somewhat regularly). We have underground lines in Trinidad but didn't lose power."

David Klion said, "My family in Chevy Chase lost power. I drove along Colesville Road [last night] and everything outside of downtown Silver Spring was dark, including the traffic lights." Neil Flanagan wrote that in Ward 3, houses seem to be out of power more individually based on where trees came down. John Muller says, "No power in most of Anacostia—street lights out—although the library was wide open for folks until 9."

People have been using public facilities to keep cool and also to charge their phones. Julie Lawson stopped by the Wheaton Mall, and said, "The gym was closed but everything else seemed to be open. Crowds of people huddled around every wall outlet charging their phones, etc. Target was also sold out of car chargers." Matt Johnson agreed: "Downtown Silver Spring had power, and I've never seen it so crowded. Each electrical outlet had people clustered about charging cell phones."

Not every business district had power; Ballston and Clarendon did not. Eric Hallstrom wrote, "We were able to eat, but it was cash only because the phone lines power many of the credit card machines. ... We retained our power [in South Arlington] while many other streets in our neighborhood were without. That led to the interesting phenomena of seeing extension cords running across the streets at regular intervals as neighbors shared their power to keep refrigerators on."

What about transportation?

The outage primarily knocked out power to a lot of traffic lights, and brought trees down on a number of trails. Contributor reports say that by and large the bicycle and pedestrian facilities are working well. AWalkerInTheCity wrote, "The cyclists I've seen out and about seem to be enjoying it, and buses seem to be doing fine."

Ben Ross noted, "Yesterday I rode my bike to Alexandria via the Capital Crescent & Mount Vernon trails. The only real problem in MoCo was one section where a couple of trees had fallen on the electric wires, and the trees and 4 or 5 electric poles were hanging over the road at 45% angles. In DC, there were 4 or 5 places where you had to climb over trees and quite a few more where you had to leave the trail to go around them."

"A portion of the Red line was shut down for at least some of the weekend, and some of the stations lost power. Metro has announced that because of the electrical problems, there may be speed restrictions or slower service tomorrow morning," writes Michael Perkins. Ben Ross took the Red Line from Farragut North to Friendship Heights yesterday with no trouble.

Places with a street grid also benefited from having alternate routes around problems. "Although some residential streets were blocked with downed trees or power lines, Arlington's grid or semi-grid pattern of streets meant that there were always other ways to get there," said Michael Perkins.

It's been tougher with the inactive traffic lights. Drivers are supposed to treat them as a 4-way stop, not a yield sign, but not everyone is doing that. Michael Perkins wrote: "There were a lot of traffic signals which were not working, notably on Arlington Boulevard (US 50) from Clarendon to Seven Corners.

"At many of these intersections, Arlington Police Department had blocked the median of the major thoroughfare, blocking left turns across the highway. This helped traffic flow tremendously. Most of the time, drivers treated these uncontrolled intersections as a hybrid of a stop sign and a yield sign, depending on the amount of cross traffic."

Steven Yates said, "I found a number of traffic lights out with lots of people having no idea how to treat them. I even had to cross one on foot once and that felt like taking my life into my own hands. I was surprised that I didn't see any police officers directing traffic at any of the traffic lights." Julie Lawson added, "Some people obeyed the 4-way stop rule but almost nobody else was, which made the risk of being rear-ended very high."

Matt Johnson had a similar report: "The [Greenbelt] police had closed off all median crossings of Route 193 (Greenbelt Road). I've discovered that in Maryland most drivers treat dark intersections with the equivalency of a green light ("it isn't red, so I don't have to stop, right?") I saw 2 teenagers trying to cross Greenbelt Road almost get nailed. No one was yielding, and I suppose they got tired of waiting.

"At [Colesville Road and] Spring Street, the light was out, and it was a complete free-for-all. Cross-traffic, left turns, through movements, everybody was essentially just pulling into the intersection and hoping the other cars would stop. As we approached, several drivers from several directions had effectively blocked each other from moving, but they worked it out."

Eric Hallstrom noted from Ballston and Clarendon, "It felt a little chaotic, but most drivers were being conscientious about lights. Interesting, many people seemed to still be paying for their parking (because the digital meters were still working), even though it is hard to believe that parking enforcement was out checking."

Sadly, at least one interaction at a darkened signal turned into a tragedy. A driver hit and killed a pedestrian at Columbia Pike and Four Mile Run Drive. There's no information yet about whether the driver disregarded the rule to treat the signal like a stop sign, though that's the most likely way someone would have been killed.

On a lighter note, nothing seems to have changed with the insanity of the cable company. Ben Ross says, "Sunday afternoon, a Comcast truck showed up at our building which had been without cable & Internet since Friday night. The technician had come to connect new subscribers—even though the new subscribers wouldn't get any service. Fix the outage? It wasn't his department. This morning we have our cable back."

What were your experiences with the derecho's wake?

After Tropical Storm Isabel came through in 2003, my nearby Baskin-Robbins had to throw out their entire inventory of ice cream, thousands of dollars worth. They were just one of thousands of businesses that suffered major financial losses due to the power outages from that storm.

According to the article, some customers are spending $9,400 to install natural gas-powered generators in their homes because they can no longer rely on Pepco to provide them with reliable power. If 10,000 customers do that, it's a total expense of $94,000,000 incurred by them to reduce the risks associated with outages. Unlike, say, cell phone service, customers cannot choose to switch to a different utility for their electric distribution service, so there is no competition to raise the bar for reliability.

Pepco is regulated by the public utility commissions in DC and Maryland. The simplest way to get Pepco to make improvements is for these commissions to internalize the costs of outages with a simple mechanism.

Pepco has announced that they have a 5-year plan to improve reliability. So give them the five years they claim they need. Then, starting in 2015, the PUCs should require them to reimburse customers for outages. For example, any residential customer would receive $2 per hour or portion of an hour that their power is out after the first 15 minutes.

If Pepco experiences an equipment failure that knocks out 2000 customers for 3 hours, they pay $12,000: $6 to each customer. If, after a big storm, they lose 100,000 customers for 10 hours, that's $2 million: $20 to each customer. Reimbursements to commercial customers would be on a different scale. (I'm just making up the amount of these reimbursements for illustrative purposes; the appropriate dollar amounts could be higher or lower.)

The utility commissions would build into Pepco's rate case the expected costs to the utility for achieving "average" reliability based on regional or national statistics, or to return to their own reliability rate from 2004. If Pepco exceeds that, then their investors would reap extra profit; if they fall short, their investors pay. This is fair, since the customers who are directly affected are the ones who get the reimbursements if Pepco falls short, while the customer base as a whole would pay a slight premium for increased reliability if they exceed the goals.

The commission could set the bar anywhere they like. One idea would be to expect them to achieve "average" by 2015 and then increase the reliability expectation by some percentage each year, incentivizing Pepco to continuously improve.

What about "Acts of God?" I would propose that there are no "Acts of God." It's up to the utility to prepare for big storms and other large-scale disruptions. This is, in fact, the business they are in. Hopefully the risk of enormous payments would get them to start looking more seriously at undergrounding, redundancy, smart grid and other risk abatement strategies.

Also, they could purchase re-insurance for major losses. That would be good, because the re-insurer would likely be tougher on Pepco than the PUCs, since they would be scrutinizing Pepco's actions to make sure they reduce their own risks.

This customer rebate mechanism is very simple and easy to understand. The financial incentives are exactly aligned with the desired outcomes. The utility is rewarded for exceeding its goals and penalized for falling short. It even incentivizes them to go beyond the minimum and look for creative and cost-effective solutions.

For the last five years, Pepco has gotten fat and happy while allowing its reliability to go to pot. Sure, they've had a couple of uncomfortable press conferences, but no real penalties. A mechanism like this would keep them from letting it happen again.