Thursday, April 7, 2011

Why not bury the lines?

Here are a few interesting tidbits of info:

Every time we get a large outage, people suggest that we put all of our lines underground. At today's board meeting, our President & CEO, Jerry Collins, shared these figures with the board:

Over the past 30 years, storm outage restoration has cost us $100 million. To put all lines underground would cost about $3 billion.

Other underground facts:

--Underground lines are fed by above-ground substations, so they aren't failsafe.
--Switching from overhead to underground in places like Midtown would likely result in costly and inconvenient relocation of water, sewer or gas lines.

This storm ranks 5th in recent history in terms of the damage to MLGW's system.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could MLGW at least replace meters over 25 years old or so? Would that cost billions as well? Gosh. MLGW, at a bare butt minimum, could do an audit of its meters and replace the really, really old ones.

MLGW said...

It is the Electric Meter areas practice to replace meters anytime a meter technician is on site and the meter is over 25 years old. We replace meters because of age on a daily basis along with damaged and non-working meters.

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