This year’s anomalous barrage of winter storms has left Whidbey Island residents praying to the underground power line gods. Unfortunately the utility deities would not be in a position to subsidize the often cost prohibitive undertaking.

Representatives from Puget Sound Energy addressed the Island County Council of Governments Wednesday to discuss the recent storms, upcoming PSE projects and other issues like underground lines.

Jerry Henry, PSE’s senior advisor to the chief executive officer, chairman and president, said the utility company had 6,000 miles of underground power lines in 1993, the year of the Inaugural Day Storm. Now there are close to 10,000 miles. The entire system also has 10,000 miles of overhead lines.

“We are very aggressive at adding underground,” Henry said. “What that tells you is about 50 percent of our system is underground already; distribution is underground already.”

Whidbey Island, like the rest of PSE’s coverage area, has approximately 50 percent overhead and 50 percent underground lines, 330 and 320 miles, respectively.

Converting Whidbey Island’s system to all underground would be a substantial and very expensive project. Depending on the location and terrain, PSE would pay $1 million to $10 million per mile.

“Figure the 330 miles of overheads you have,” the senior advisor said. “Take an average of $5 million a mile. That’s over a billion and a half dollars just to underground everything on the island. And that’s not the transmission line, that’s just the distribution line. That doesn’t include the 120 miles of transmission line.”

Underground options

PSE will underground wires in areas plagued with a history of power line problems, but for a neighborhood wanting to switch from overhead lines to subterranean lines, the final bill would be exorbitant. Customers pay 100 percent of the cost and must also bring their meters up to code, a project that could be as much as $1,000 to $5,000 per household.

“It’s not inexpensive,” Henry said. “Puget Sound Energy does not subsidize that.”

Cities or counties with road projects can catch a financial break if they choose to underground wires during the construction.

“Any time the city or the county are doing any road widening or any kind of work, that’s the time to do the undergrounding. That’s the time the price is the least,” said Henry, adding that the city would only have to pick up 40 percent of the tab.

For PSE, the cost of installing new underground wires is comparable to the cost of overhead wires, which is why the utility company opts to use the former whenever possible.

Underground wires are not infallible, however, Henry said. In fact, the wires often fail at a higher rate than overhead wires because of the wet and corrosive environment.

“It probably fails sooner than overhead lines,” he said. “It’s also harder to find.”

Winter storms can wreak havoc on overhead power lines for a few days, but underground wires are responsible for outages year-round.

Storm of the century?

Ray Trzynka, PSE’s local government and community relations manager, was complimented at the meeting for effectively facilitating communication with Whidbey Island leaders during the winter storms. He said the weather from mid-November to mid-January was unprecedented.

“We had just about everything you could imagine,” he said. “We haven’t had locusts yet, but we’re hoping we don’t get that.”

Henry said crews worked 16-hour shifts during the storms. The 40-year veteran of PSE, formerly Puget Sound Power and Light, had never witnessed an occurrence like the December maelstrom.

“This was a major storm without a doubt,” he said. “Somebody mentioned it was a 100-year storm. I don’t know if it’s a 100-year storm or a 50-year storm, but in my 40 years with the company I’d never experienced anything close to that before.”

To put the event in perspective, 700,000 of PSE’s one million customers were without power. North Bend was in the dark for seven days.

“Pretty close to three quarters of our customers were out of power,” he said.

The situation on Whidbey could have been even more dire had PSE not anticipated the storm and brought crews onto the island before the weather system hit. When Deception Pass Bridge was closed and the ferries were unable to run, the decision to mobilize crews beforehand became even more applaudable.

“We actually started people moving from across the U.S. to the Seattle area before the storm started,” Henry said. “We had people on Whidbey Island, about a dozen crews, sitting in the service center waiting for the storm to hit, something that we’d never done before. It turned out to be a fortunate decision because it was a major storm.”

More than 600 crews were dispatched to help PSE, five or six times more than normal.

“We built as much line in eight days as we would build in a whole year,” Henry said. “We built enough line to be able to build a line from Seattle to Portland, which is pretty unbelievable.”

Communication breakdown

Communication with customers has been a concern for PSE. Although officers and even the CEO put in countless hours at the call centers to field questions during the storm, frustration with customers still mounted.

“Our customers were extremely frustrated because they would call and they would get no information,” Henry said. “It’s an area where we really need to do better.”

Island County Commissioner Mike Shelton said the frustration felt by customers has been due partly to the inability to speak with local PSE representatives. Calling a toll free number in Bellevue and listening to an answering machine does not suffice.

“You’ve moved away from a community presence,” he said. “On South Whidbey we used to have our own little office there and everybody on South Whidbey knew the people who worked in the office.”

The company’s presence on Whidbey has diminished in the last decade, but the two servicemen stationed in Oak Harbor are considered adequate for a majority of the year.

“We had three crews historically about 10 years ago,” said Kit Maret, PSE senior engineer and Whidbey Island resident. “The workforce is there for the workload. Storms are extraordinary. During the storm season, we have crews on the island.”

In addition to the two servicemen, Oak Harbor also has one full-time crew from Potelco, PSE’s contracted service provider, Maret said.

Looking into

the future

A PSE department head is analyzing exactly what took place during the storm and personnel will brainstorm recommendations for future improvement.

“We’ll figure out if more undergrounding is needed,” Henry said. “If policies and procedures need to be changed. We have tariffs in place for undergrounding. Do those need to be changed?”

PSE is also in the process of contracting an outside firm to further analyze the system objectively.

“Did we handle the storm the right way? Are there things that we should do different in our system? All of those things will be public record,” Henry said.

For Whidbey Island specifically, he said the service provided during the big storm was well below the company’s standards.

“The number of outages and the amount of hours you were out far exceeded anything that any of us would have expected,” Henry continued. In the coming months, PSE will be looking at ways to improve service on Whidbey in extreme weather conditions. Tree trimming is one component of a solution attractive in its immediacy. PSE will become more aggressive with trimming in the coming months.

“We have one of the more aggressive tree trimming programs of any utility in the U.S.,” Henry said of the decidedly divisive issue. “We live in this area because we love the trees. What we have to do is figure out how we compatibly come up with a system that coexists with the trees.”

A shock to

the system

Gary Shumate, PSE consulting engineer for total energy system planning, described Whidbey’s power system to the local government officials. With 35,000 customers and 11 substations, the island represents a significant area for the company. The primary power source is at the March Point substation, which has four high voltage feeds, two of which are parallel feeds that run down Whidbey Island. When one line goes down, power continues. When two are down, however unlikely, blackness ensues. In general, the level of service worsens as one travels south.

To help with reliability determinations, a project manager has helped identify the trouble spots on the island, many of which are on South Whidbey.

“We’re going after those sections that really have an impact on the system, so when they fail, people are out. Or they fail often,” Shumate said.

The consulting engineer said one expensive but viable option for improving service on South Whidbey would be an undersea line running from Snohomish County PUD to the island.

“It would be putting a line into the area that has the lowest reliability,” Shumate said. “And it would also be able to provide capacity as the load growth continues, where we could lose one of the lines and we’d still have two lines feeding the island.”

During the big December storm, Maret said all 11 Whidbey substations were down. For safety purposes, power was not turned back on until all lines were checked.

“It’s just a long process,” she said.

Another problem came in the form of system overloads when the power did return and appliances and heating systems in households came on simultaneously. Fuses melted in the face of a system load four or five times greater than normal.

“That was a problem in a number of storms,” Maret said, encouraging people to turn off their appliances during a power outage.

PSE personnel will use the experience gained from this winter’s weather systems to help improve service company-wide .

“When we look at Whidbey Island and we see that it’s substandard compared to other parts of our company, the focus is how do you bring it up to the standards that we set as a company as a whole,” Henry said.