Photo by Bill Adler
The derecho storm that swept through the D.C. area last June left residents across the city without power for several days. Even Mayor Vince Gray wasn’t spared. Although he barely missed the storm itself, he returned from a trip to China to find that he was among tens of thousands of residents whose homes lingered in the dark for several days.
And the culprit for why that storm left so many thousands of people to suffer without power through a heat wave that chased the derecho was quickly identified: the District’s aging network of above-ground power lines. The derecho was hardly the first storm to expose that vulnerability, but it was an extreme example. And a few weeks after it hit, Gray announced a task force to look into the expense of putting as many of those wires underground, where they can’t be snagged by falling tree limbs.
That task force, which met seven times since last August, turned in a proposal this week. The report isn’t public yet, but Gray and members of the panel offered some of the details at a Wilson Building press conference today. Over the next several years, about $1 billion will be spent to bring 60 high-voltage, outage-prone lines down from the trees and into the ground.
And The Washington Post reports that most of that burden will be carried by Pepco’s customers, otherwise known as all of us:
Although both Pepco and the District government would play a role in financing the project, $875 million of the $1 billion in spending would be directly borne by Pepco ratepayers via surcharges on their electric bills. The rest — between $62 million and $125 million, officials said—would be incorporated into the city transportation department’s existing capital projects program.
After the District’s Public Service Commission approves the final plan later this year, Pepco’s residential customers will see their monthly rates increase by an average of $1.50; over the next seven years, the average monthly impact from this project will rise to as much as $3.25, or about 3.23 percent of current rates. Commercial customers will see rate increases of between 5 and 9.25 percent, city officials said today.
The task force behind the plan was led by City Administrator Allen Lew and Pepco CEO Joseph M. Rigby. The power lines affected by the proposal are located throughout wards 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8, where last summer’s outages were most severe. In the wake of the derecho, Gray, a Ward 7 resident, called for a “game-changer.”
Whether that pans out will be seen only if the lights stay on during future freak storms. But the terminology was echoed by D.C. People’s Counsel Sandra Mattavous-Frye, who argued before the task force to keep the financial burden on Pepco customers to a minimum. She said at today’s press conference that monthly rate adjustments stemming from the upcoming project could have reached $30.
