Quantifying the resilience benefits of undergrounding a circuit with utility data

TL;DR

This study uses historical outage data to quantify how undergrounding power circuits significantly reduces outages, customer impact, and outage duration, demonstrating substantial resilience benefits.

Contribution

It introduces a method to evaluate undergrounding benefits using actual outage data, providing quantitative evidence of resilience improvements.

Findings

75% and 78% reductions in customer hours lost for two circuits

Significant decrease in outages and customers affected annually

Faster outage restoration further enhances resilience benefits

Abstract

We leverage historical outage data to quantify the resilience benefits of undergrounding a circuit. The historical performance of the overhead circuit is compared to the performance if the circuit had been undergrounded in the past. The number of outages, customers affected, outage duration, and customer hours lost are used as metrics to quantify the benefits of undergrounding. Results show 75% and 78% reductions in customer hours lost per year for two selected circuits, as well as a significant reduction in the average number of outages and customers affected per year, highlighting the advantages of undergrounding. The benefits of investments that result in 10% faster outage restoration are also calculated by rerunning history with the faster restoration included.