THERE'S AN INEVITABLE question many folks ask after a big storm, when power poles break, lines are down and you are without electricity for a lot longer than anyone would like—Why doesn't Blue Ridge Electric just bury its lines underground?

It's a fair question. The short answer is that we do bury power lines when it makes sense. Currently, 31% of our system is underground.

Underground lines are generally more reliable because they aren't as susceptible to routine outages caused by falling trees and branches. We also recognize underground lines are more aesthetically pleasing. Even I would admit the most beautiful power line is one you don't see.

However, burying lines doesn't make sense in every case. While they are more reliable, underground lines still offer no guarantee against outages. A system of buried distribution lines still depends on aboveground transmission lines that can be damaged by storms. Plus, buried lines can be knocked out of commission by flooding, mudslides, digging accidents or tree roots, and repairing underground systems typically takes longer because they aren't as easy to access.

Another challenge is cost. Burying one of the distribution lines that serves your home is about five times more expensive than building an overhead line. Burying larger transmission lines is even more expensive. The cost of burying all 7,300 miles of our system would be astronomical. We could not do it without significantly raising our electric rates. The marginal improvements to reliability don't always justify the significant cost.

So, when do we bury lines? In almost every case, it's when we're building new lines, and when somebody else will pay for it.

That could be a residential developer, a neighborhood, or a municipality that prefers underground lines and is willing to pay. That way, the members who benefit from underground lines pay those added costs, not the members who don't.

Building underground infrastructure isn't the only way we invest in reliability. We regularly replace aging poles, add technologies that improve restoration timelines, and build redundancies onto our system so a single point of failure doesn't mean an outage for an entire community. We also trim trees, inspect equipment regularly and strengthen critical connections before storm season. That's because preventing outages is better and less expensive than repairing the damage afterward.

Reliability and affordability aren't opposing goals for us. They are part of the same promise we made when this co-op was founded. Our job is to deliver both, using your dollars carefully and making investments strategically to do the most good for the most people.

Sometimes that means burying a line. Sometimes it means finding other ways to improve reliability without asking you to pay more than you should. Either way, you have my word that we're never done improving.

Cooperatively Yours, 

Jim Lovinggood 

CEO and President, Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative