That was the question many Californians were asking this week as hundreds of thousands of customers lost power in the Sacramento and San Francisco

Why not bury California's fire-prone power lines underground? The reason is sky high

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2025-01-09 21:00:05

That was the question many Californians were asking this week as hundreds of thousands of customers lost power in the Sacramento and San Francisco areas in preemptive shutoffs by Pacific Gas & Electric. Further south, another 200,000 customers of other utilities faced warnings that they too could lose power due to high winds.

"It's very, very expensive," said Severin Borenstein, a UC Berkeley professor of business administration and public policy who specializes in energy. Borenstein was speaking through the crackly static of a cell phone outside his darkened home in the San Francisco suburb of Orinda on Thursday evening. The Berkeley campus was shut down and his home had lost power too after PG&E instituted a mandatory "de-energization" across nearly 40 counties due to high fire threats.

It costs about $3 million per mile to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead, while the cost to build a mile of new overhead line is less than a third of that, at approximately $800,000 per mile, according to a section on PG&E's website called Facts About Undergrounding Power Lines.