28 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY december 14-20, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com It was power outages that spurred district leaders in 1996 to survey residents about whether they wanted to tax themselves to undertake undergrounding. At the time, the cost was estimated at approximately $1 million a mile. Pebble Beach contains 60 miles of power lines. “People did a quick calculation and said a generator would be much cheaper than that,” Niccum says. “Undergrounding is a great idea when someone else is paying for it.” After a large outage during a storm in early 2008, residents were more amenable to the idea, and in 2011, the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) approved PBCSD’s authority to underground the power and communication lines within Pebble Beach, paid for through property taxes. The question, Niccum remembers, was: “If everyone is paying for it, which neighborhood do you underground first?” They decided to tackle the main feeder lines first. The district has completed three projects for a total of six miles, at a cost of around $18 million. Each project takes three to four years to complete. The last project cost approximately $3.5 million a mile. In Carmel, where the City Council recently considered creating an undergrounding district using a program called Electric Rule 20A—for undergrounding in urban areas for aesthetic reasons—the cost estimate was around $600,000 for 1,500 feet. “With 27 lane miles, the total comes out to $120 million,” Carmel City Administrator Chip Rerig says. Councilmembers said they wanted to focus on one area near Mission Trails Park but a vote was postponed to do outreach to homeowners. PG&E provides some money through the program but property owners would have to bear some of the cost. Part of what drives the high cost of undergrounding is that it’s not just PG&E involved—AT&T and Comcast communication lines have to be included as well, Niccum says. Each utility is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission and each comes with their own unique set of rules. Plus, there’s existing underground infrastructure like sewer lines to contend with. Pebble Beach didn’t qualify for Rule 20A, since its mission was to improve reliability of power delivery, not aesthetics. There is a less frequently utilized Rule 20B, and Niccum says some wealthier homeowners have opted to use it to underground utilities near their own properties. There are no subsidies available—the cost is borne 100 percent by the homeowner. Undergrounding isn’t the panacea that will solve all connectivity issues, as Pasquinelli and Cullem well know. The Skyline Forest neighborhood was undergrounded years ago—you can see where the line, which emanates from a power station visible from Highway 1 between Munras Avenue and Holman Highway, heads down into the ground at Skyline Forest and Skyline drives— but if that line is struck down at any point before it goes underground, the neighborhood is left in the dark. There are hundreds more Monterey pines under the line that runs from the Monterey power station and Skyline Forest and it runs directly through the Monterey Vista neighborhood where Jean Rasch lives. Yet it wasn’t trees interfering with power lines that got her interested in undergrounding. For her it was a proposal by Verizon to add 13 cell antennas to power poles several years ago. With no poles, there’s no way to hang cell antennas, she reasoned. Rasch got involved in a subcommittee of the neighborhood association that was addressing the issue and served as the first chair of what became its own organization called Monterey Undergrounding. Current chair Ray Meyers says the initial focus was power outages, but fires like the one in Paradise also became a motivating factor. Rasch and Meyers both emphasize the negative economic impact of power outages, seriously affecting local businesses and costing residents who have to toss the contents of their fridges. Rasch believes the cost of undergrounding on a large scale is worth preventing future losses. How will it get paid for? “It’s the question,” she says. It could be a combination of money from state grants, taxes or bonds to create undergrounding districts. Monterey’s Neighborhood Improvement Program, financed by transient-occupancy taxes paid by hotel visitors, could be utilized. Meyers says the group is advocating for other solutions that rely on technology, including “distributed energy,” where the solar systems and batteries within a neighborhood are used to distribute power within an area when electrical power fails. Electric cars sitting in driveways could be plugged into the distribution system. “They have a huge battery and could be used to augment the system,” Meyers says. Although a large portion of the Del Monte Forest lies within an area considered to be a high fire risk by PG&E, there are no plans to underground lines as is being done in more rural areas of the state, according to a spokesperson for the utility. There are 34 miles in a mountainous section of rural Monterey County that the company is considering, but it depends on future approval from the California Public Utilities Commission. It’s part of PG&E’s plan to underground 10,000 miles of rural areas over the next decade. On Nov. 16, PG&E and the CPUC came to a compromise on the company’s 2023 request to underground 2,000 miles of lines, along with other improvements, at a cost of $15.4 billion. Commissioners pushed back, arguing that covering conductors would be more cost effective. In the end, they agreed to the undergrounding of 1,230 miles and covering conductors over 778 miles. Someone has to pay for those safety improvements, and that someone is us. The typical ratepayer will see an increase of around $38 a month, or 12.8 percent, according to the CPUC. The increase goes into effect Jan. 1. PG&E crews work to restore power in a Carmel neighborhood after two storms swept through the region in March 2023. “Undergrounding is a great idea when someone else is paying for it.”
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