PSE and city are working together to improve South end service. Is undergrounding the answer?

J. Jacob Edel
Mercer Island Reporter

Just for a moment, imagine the sound of a thousand generators humming away 24 hours a day on the South end of the Island after the next big wind storm. Now imagine what the southern stretch of East Mercer Way would look like without any power lines.

For about $3 million Island taxpayer dollars, the city could have one or the other scenario. But neither is as quick or easy of a fix as it may seem.

Residents and public officials across western Washington — and here on Mercer Island — have suggested many ideas in response to the severe windstorm of December 2006, when the entire Island lost power for a long weekend and some South end homes were dark until Christmas — 10 days after the storm. About a million homes across the region, including Seattle, lost power that night and some communities have considered burying power lines in heavily wooded and residential areas, such as the South end of the Island. But as the number of talks about doing so have increased, so have the cost estimates.

Many Islanders, including Island resident of 28 years and utility expert, Michael Sheehan, wants Puget Sound Energy (PSE) to invest the money needed to underground parts of the Island to help restore power to its South end customers sooner.

Underground lines

To bury the power supply lines that serve about 1,000 South end homes off East Mercer Way and Avalon Drive, city officials estimate it would cost $3 million from city taxpayers and $4.5 million from PSE. There would also be a one-time cost of approximately $2,000 to $5,000 per home to connect to the buried line. Citing the high cost and minor improvements in reliability, officials from PSE have suggested that the city consider other options.

The tariffs regarding cost sharing for placing utility lines underground were instituted in 2002 by the Washington State Utilities and Transportation (WUTC), the state agency that regulates PSE. Under the rule called Schedule 74, local jurisdictions which decided to bury power lines are responsible for 40 percent of the cost and the utility, picks up the rest. Another rule, Schedule 73, for private homeowners who seek underground power lines from the street to their homes, requires the homeowner to pay all the cost to underground.

One group of South end homes has taken such action and buried its power lines.

While an analysis by PSE determined South end homes experienced outages more frequently and often on Mercer Island’s 9,000 electrical meters, burying the power lines on East Mercer would only help prevent one-third of those outages. In the past five years, 62 power outages documented by PSE on the East Mercer circuit, 44 took place on the laterals that connect homes to the supply line.

In response to that, the City Council decided to continue working with PSE to improve reliability on Mercer Island with minimum digging, which Sheehan despises. He wants the city to have “some teeth” and require undergrounding utilities while others are installed, such as when Qwest installed new cables down Island Crest Way a few years ago, he said.

City officials, PSE and Councilmembers also decided to hold further discussions about undergrounding power lines along East Mercer Way. According to city maintenance director Glenn Boettcher, the magnitude of the project and its difficulties make it unrealistic to bury those power lines.

“In this project there are 8,600 feet of power line,” Boettcher said. “And it’s complex even by PSE and Potelco standards. There’s a high degree of risk, potential conflicts with what is already underground, the topography is difficult, and there are unstable soils. Plus, the fact that it is an arterial adds to impacts and length of construction.”

Though the suggestion was hypothetical, Boettcher also said the city could outfit 1,000 homes with generators and automatic transfers for about the same price of burying East Mercer power lines.

Minimum service standards

Sheehan, now an independent engineering consultant who worked with PSE and several other utilities as a reliability engineer in the past, said the city should adopt minimum service standards and require PSE to meet those. He would also like to see the city require that local utilities work together when undergrounding.

“They need to have some teeth,” Sheehan, an energy reliability engineer, said of the city. “Making utilities work together seems to me something the city should be doing. If one is putting a conduit in the ground, we should be forcing others to go underground.”

Sheehan said he was disappointed that Qwest Communications was allowed to dig a ditch along Island Crest Way two years ago for its new cables with PSE undergrounding power lines at the same time.

Doug Kilpatrick, a regulatory analyst with the Washington Utility and Transportation Commission (UTC), said such mandatory service standards and required partnerships may not work, being superseded by state laws.

“From the viewpoint of PSE, for a local jurisdiction to impose a different standard makes it almost impossible for the utility to meet that,” Kilpatrick said. “The approach taken by the city to ask, ‘What are the options?’, and working together with the utility are certainly within the local government’s ability to work with a company toward a solution.

“But to take that leap to establish a separate standard, I think that becomes problematic for a company that serves multiple jurisdictions.”

Marilyn Meehan, a spokesperson for the UTC, said PSE’s report after the December 2006 windstorm stated that the utility had 10,000 miles of overhead power lines and 9,000 miles underground in its entire system. It also reported that it spent $12 million annually on its vegetation management, or trimming trees and bushes around infrastructure.

“The conclusion that the advantage of having overhead was that they could reroute them more easily if a big storm happens,” Meehan said. “And overhead poles last about 70 years, while underground placeholders last only 20 to 30.”

Kilpatrick also said when comparing overhead versus underground lines, PSE can fix overhead outages faster.

“You have to weigh the duration of an outage with the frequency,” he said. “While you may lose power more often with overhead, it comes back on sooner. Underground lines may take longer to fix.”

But Sheehan said, from both a reliability and safety point of view, it makes sense to bury power lines.

Reliability in Medina and the San Juans

Voters in Medina recently narrowly rejected paying the high cost to underground power lines. In response to the big wind storm two winters ago, Medina voters were asked to approve a $26-million, 20-year bond measure to bury power lines last November. Though 52 percent of the voters said yes, it needed a super majority to pass and the measure failed.

However, there are utilities in Washington that have underground power lines. Orca Power and Light, an electrical cooperative that serves 13,000 customers on the San Juan Islands, has 80 percent of its distribution lines underground, according to its operations manager Todd Shaner.

“Our system is 1,100 miles total with 872 miles underground,” Shaner said.

The work by Orca’s Power is what Sheehan and others would like to see done by PSE on the South end of the Island, focusing on customer satisfaction rather than costs.

“The utility world is myopic in its focus on cost,” Sheehan said. “They don’t measure the inconvenience to the customer for how long they didn’t have power. They don’t look at it holistically. Why can [progressive utilities] have that gold standard and we can’t?”

Given the few similarities between the two communities, city officials on Mercer Island paid attention to the Medina vote, said city manager Rich Conrad. As proposed, the failed bond Medina measure would have added approximately 85 cents per $1,000 of assessed value per Medina home, roughly $850 a year for the average $1-million home. Mercer Island homes average about the same value. According to Conrad, his staff “watched the Medina vote carefully,” and he was not surprised that the vote was so controversial, given the high cost and small improvement in reliability during major storms. Sheehan said the Medina vote is exactly what Puget wants residents to see; voters deciding whether or not to bury lines.

He reiterated that the city should decide by setting minimum level of service requirements. If customers experienced continuous failure to meet those standards, the city should require the utility to underground the lines and pay for it, he said.

But even Shaner said San Juan residents have had to foot the high cost over a period of decades.

“It’s expensive. That’s the thing about it,” Shaner said. “Once cable is underground, it takes longer to fix outages, and people don’t realize it falls underground too. It takes longer to fix and to find. Our board added a surcharge of quarter-cent per kilowatt hour [in the early 1990s] and with that money over the next five, six and seven years, we used it to underground.”

Distribution down S.E. 68th

The city and PSE have been developing two projects to improve reliability on the South end since the December 2006 windstorm. Using funds from the $400 million that PSE’s board allotted for capital improvement projects this year, Susan Hempstead, a community relations manager with PSE, told the City Council the utility plans to spend $500,000 to add another line source to the Island’s South end substation. Plus, the city and PSE are going to devise a project to bury the distribution line from the substation down S.E. 68th Street to East Mercer Way.

“Our customer confidence in the system remains high and these projects hope to keep that,” Hempstead told Councilmembers.

The plan to add the extra input line is to improve South end reliability by connecting it to a supply line from the North end of the Island. Currently, one line powers the substation. It comes under the East Channel of Lake Washington near S.E. 53rd and extends up 68th to the substation. During windstorms, trees along 68th often knock down the poles holding that supply line. Those poles also hold distribution lines that run back down to East Mercer.

However, adding the new supply line from the North end has raised some red flags for members of the Open Space Conservancy Board, which is a group of Island citizens appointed by the mayor to protect Pioneer Park. The initial plans to add the extra input would require the removal of several trees on the south edge of the park along 68th near the substation.

Another potential project still in consideration by the city and PSE would underground the distribution lines down 68th to East Mercer Way so that a storm that downed the poles along 68th could be powered up from the new North end feed down Island Crest Way.

PSE estimates that the city’s cost of designing this underground project would be $83,000. The final cost estimate of the project has not been determined by PSE, but officials told the Council it should be less than burying the lines along East Mercer.

Speaking to the Councilmembers, PSE manager Cody Olson said the utility looks forward to exploring this project with the city because it ties well into PSE’s plans to add the additional transmission line.

“East Mercer would be a challenging way to improve reliability because we don’t know if there will be any benefit,” Olson said. “So we suggest that we exclude East Mercer and continue exploring the work along 68th, mainly because it complements our transmission project already in the works.”

PSE officials reminded Councilmembers that regardless of these improvements, it can sometimes take a few days to clear the way for utility crews to make it down the Island. Which is why Sheehan said PSE needs to do more than just look at reliability reports for the communities it serves. He wants the utility to focus more on customer service standards similar to the utility cooperative that serves the San Juan Islands.

“The gold standard out there is Orca’s Power and Light,” Sheehan said. “Their power lines are exclusively underground. They made the decision to put everything underground because it takes crews so long to get over there.”