Dec 01 - Scripps Howard

Remember that sense of doom and helplessness when the lights flickered and your life was hurtled back into Stone Age darkness?

For victims of this year's record-breaking hurricane season, it was a darkness that lasted for weeks as power-company teams sought to restore storm-ravaged grids. In the last decade, there have been similar blackouts caused by wildfires in the West, tornadoes in the Midwest and ice storms in the East, not to mention localized disruptions traced to problems like nesting vultures and curious squirrels.

So why is the world's largest economy so dependent on vulnerable wires strung on power poles and pylons overhead? Why doesn't the United States follow the path of tiny Holland, which in 1970 adopted a policy of putting power lines underground because Dutch politicians felt it was more aesthetic to preserve their country's flat vistas than to have power pylons marching across the tulip fields?

Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., says that after the last two years of digging out of storm damage left by hurricanes in South Florida, he's in favor of encouraging putting power lines underground in the United States.

"Just this year, millions of Americans have been faced with long-term power outages due to a devastating storm season," Shaw says. "By burying power lines, families will be less likely to be left in the dark and will be more likely to get their lives back on track sooner."

Shaw, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said he's drafting legislation that would allow power companies to immediately write off the costs of burying lines, rather than depreciating the costs over 15 years as currently permitted under federal policies. About 21 percent of the 150,000 miles of power lines in the United States are already underground.

Utilities have studied the problem for years and contend it's much too expensive to bury power lines.

But new superconducting technologies are emerging that will shake up the industry by offering utilities new economic incentives to bury lines. With new superconducting underground cables, utilities can save the 8 percent of electricity lost during transmission and on distribution systems using traditional copper or aluminum wires.

The superconducting cables are made with a ceramic core surrounded by a sleeve of extremely cold gasses. A thermal insulation level then surrounds the core and gasses. Because of their construction, they are designed for use underground, although they could be carried in ground-level cradles.

The Energy Department says the high-capacity superconducting cables are one of the "critical technologies" that will be needed in the power grids of the future to meet U.S. electricity needs.

John Howe, vice president for electricity-industry affairs at American Superconductor in Massachusetts, which manufactures the wires, said he expects them initially to be used around cities to add capacity where space is constrained.

The superconducting wires carry up to five times more electricity and are currently being used in a dozen demonstration projects around the country.

The ceramic wires are so efficient that electricity loss on the lines is extremely low. And the lines have another public-relations advantage for utilities because they don't produce an electromagnetic field. Utilities point to scientific studies that find no effects on humans from the electromagnetic field produced by power lines, but many people still refuse to live near them.

Production of the new cables is currently limited, but Howe said there's no technological hurdle to be overcome for using them for long-distance transmission of high-voltage electricity. The industry needs to be creative in finding ways to meet electricity demands, according to Howe, and saving electricity could be one way of offsetting increasing costs of natural gas and oil.

"I don't expect utilities to replace vast amounts of their system, but what we do see as a key strategy is adding to the existing system in a cost-effective way," he said.

The Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based organization representing utilities, says burying lines is just not cost-effective.

"It's tremendously expensive," said Institute spokesman Jason Cuevas. "It can be 10 times more per line mile, so that a system that costs $100,000 a line mile to install overhead lines could cost from $500,000 to $1 million a line mile," he said. "Costs tend to be first and foremost."

While they are generally more dependable, underground lines also can be damaged. Animals can burrow through the underground lines and water can corrode the metals.

In a paper prepared for the organization last year, independent energy adviser Brad Johnson said it typically takes longer to find breaks and problems in underground networks than it does with overhead systems, where crews just look for downed lines.

Johnson said North Carolina's utilities found that underground networks are generally more reliable and suffer only half the outages of overhead systems. But when there are problems, it took 1.6 times longer to repair the underground facilities. Other utilities had significant problems fixing storm damage to their underground networks.

(Contact Lance Gay at GayL(at)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)

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