Plans to bury the grid must not forget the poor

Across the U.S., wildfires are increasing both in frequency and intensity, a trend expected to accelerate with climate change. Core fire seasons are on average 78 days longer than they were in the 1970s, according to the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control’s 2022 Wildfire Preparedness Plan. This can push the wildfire season into historically windy times, often to catastrophic effect, Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher recently told the state Public Utilities Commission. And destructive blazes aren’t isolated to rural wildlands, but are also burning in suburban grasslands, as with the 2021 Marshall Fire. As development sprawls into flammable landscapes, humans become their primary fire starters, including from the widening web of power lines.

Although some of the factors driving wildfires seem near unsolvable, the transmission line solution is relatively simple, albeit expensive: bury the darn things. Indeed, over the past five years, an underground transmission system has become a generally accepted consensus in the scorched American West. 

Nowhere is burying the grid as important as in California. After about half a decade of historic wildfires linked to their negligence, In 2022, The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) revealed details about their push to bury the California grid. According to Bloomberg, the power company wants to put 3,600 miles of transmission lines underground over the next five years. Moreover, the utility is aiming to cut the cost per mile from $3.75 million to $2.5 million in 2026. The 3,600 miles of proposed line are part of a larger effort to bury 10,000 miles of lines by a later date. 

If coming up with the money wasn’t hard enough, now criticism is emerging that says the current payment plan is inequitable. 

The critics, it must be said, make a good argument. As it’s explained in a recent Nature Energy study, the current undergrounding plan leads to poor communities paying more than affluent ones to bury power lines. Here is how the findings are summarized in a recent The Hill article: 

“Because decisions about such burial are often based on whether the local population can afford the project costs — up to $5 million per mile — most “undergrounding” has occurred in wealthy areas, according to the study, published Monday in Nature Energy

...California’s Public Utilities Commission allows communities, developers and property owners to identify areas for undergrounding, as well as receive funding for a small portion of the cost from their utility.

Nonetheless, wildfire threat and income level have not factored into the regulator’s criteria for which projects should advance and who should pay for them, the researchers explained.

If California continues with this approach, the per-household cost of burying existing fire-prone overhead lines will soon become significantly higher in lower-income census blocks, according to the study.

For blocks in areas where wildfires are most likely to impact power lines, the authors estimated that the cost would be $37,000 per household at the $200,000 income level, and more than three times that at the $50,000 income level."

The researchers suggest addressing this problem by allocating funds for undergrounding based on an area's median income. 

Aiming to offer a sustainable policy solution to this imbalance, the researchers worked on a scheme that would allocate the costs of undergrounding based on a neighborhood’s median income. Going deeper, they recommend the California Public Utilities Commision afford poorer communities the opportunity to share the cost of transmission undergrounding among all utility customers. 

I can’t speak to the specifics of the proposed amendments, but it does seem new undergrounding plans must take equity into serious consideration. There was a time when an underground grid was mostly a mostly aesthetic privilege. Rich people could afford to remove the eye sore of transmission lines. Poorer people were stuck looking at the things. It wasn’t ideal, but it also wasn’t that big of a deal. The stakes are different now. In places like California, an above ground grid isn’t just ugly, it’s dangerous. The industry owes it to lower-income communities to do what they can to keep them safe. If that means subsidizing transmission undergrounding costs, so be it.