This commentary is by Stephen C. Terry of Middlebury, who spent 29 years at Green Mountain Power before retiring in 2014 and returning to writing about Vermont history and politics.
The electric power industry has not been known for rapid changes in technology, thinking, or standards of practice. One of the mainstays for a hundred years has been that, for the most part, power lines were constructed above ground with the argument that it was cheaper than undergrounding.
But concerns over a rapidly changing climate — hotter and wetter weather driven by powerful storms and wind — are finally overshadowing generations of utility thinking. There is no better example of this transition than what is now happening in Vermont.
On May 19, Green Mountain Power and the O’Brien Brothers, a construction company in South Burlington building residential and commercial properties, announced the state’s first “fully storm-resilient all-electric neighborhood.” The plan to build 155 all-electric homes is itself a game-changer.
Vermonters will recall that in the 1970s many new homes were built with electric heat. Then regulators established higher winter electric rates to conserve the use of electricity. That led many homeowners to replace their all-electric-heated homes with fossil fuel heating systems, as oil and propane were cheaper.
Now the opposite strategy is being implemented in Vermont to protect the climate — by cutting down or eliminating the use of fossil fuels.
The plan to create an all-electric environment for neighborhoods has essentially one basic requirement: The power must stay on during storms, especially during heavy winds and icy buildup that cause trees to down overhead power lines, as well as disrupting all-important internet and digital communication systems.
The all-electric neighborhood will include its own batteries and rooftop solar units to keep them recharged, as well as a community microgrid, with utility-scale batteries, to keep the whole area powered up during damaging storms that usually keeps others in the dark.
One important feature of the new neighborhood is that all electric lines will be underground, thus eliminating much of the storm damage caused by fallen trees.
While undergrounding in Vermont is not new, it has not been the first choice for years because it was argued that it was 10 times more expensive, thereby putting more pressure on electric rates. Another argument against undergrounding was that restoration of power would be delayed as utilities had to find and dig up the underground lines.
Utility managers, which used to include me during my many years at Green Mountain Power, argued that the cost to underground would not be economical for customers, nor would they tolerate delayed restoration of electric service.
Now, nearly 10 years after retiring from GMP, and watching the devastating impacts of climate change on utility customers here in Vermont, I have changed my mind.
Undergrounding of retail electric lines, and now high-voltage transmission lines, is becoming standard utility practice, a welcome change of utility management philosophy — all driven by the devastating impact of climate change, which has been largely driven by reliance on fossil fuels.
Innovative technologies — such as electric transportation, storage batteries, renewable power generation, and home-based solar power — are rapidly changing the thinking of both investor and publicly owned companies. In fact, there has been more innovation in the generation of electric power in the last 10 years than most people realize.
Yet, this quiet innovation revolution needs to be sped up if Vermont utilities and their customers are not to suffer the longer-than-usual outages like we experienced during the past Christmas holidays.
We need a cost-effective, long-term plan to rip down the overhead lines and replace them with underground lines.
If Vermont is to move off fossil fuels to renewable power driving new, innovative technologies, we will need to assure customers their power will remain on during adverse weather-caused outages. This should be a focus of the joint effort by the Public Service Department and the utilities to improve customer communications due to outages, mostly caused by tree damage.
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), one of the important founders of the modern utility industry, would be impressed 92 years after his death at the new utility thinking now in Vermont.