Believe it or not, our local power companies have taken to boasting of their “smart grid” technology.

But the same dumb and antiquated grid was on display last week when Superstorm Sandy slammed onto shore, once again leaving hundreds of thousands of homeowners and businesses in the dark across Massachusetts.

Forget all the talk about smart grids. The solution to this rising trend of massive outages is decidedly low tech – putting power lines underground instead of stringing them from pole to pole.

But to look at solutions, you first have to acknowledge you have a problem. And executives at our local power companies, NStar and National Grid, clearly think they are doing just swimmingly, patting themselves on the back over the fact that this year’s big outage wasn’t a complete disaster.  

Better PR, Same Problem

To be fair, the power companies’ response to Sandy appeared to be improved over the chaos we saw last fall in the wake of the freak October snowstorm and Tropical Storm Irene.
National Grid and NStar were more aggressive in getting out the latest information on power restoration, while National Grid also posted company employees in each town in its territory to work with local officials.
Massachusetts also lucked out, with the brunt of the storm hitting the Mid-Atlantic states, while Sandy’s lumbering, slow approach gave ample time to prepare.

Yet while the storm just sideswiped the Bay State, it was still enough to cut the lights for nearly 300,000 homes and businesses.
Thankfully, homeowners were not left shivering for a week before the power came back on, as was too often the case last fall.  But it still took a good two or three days to get everyone back on the grid.

Troubling Trend

The power companies are acting like this is all business as usual, but it’s not.
What we are seeing is no anomaly, but part of a larger trend. If you don’t recall enduring such annual outages in years past, your memory is not faulty. Rather, it’s a trend that been escalating over the past five years.

Counting Sandy, there have been nine major power outages in Massachusetts since 2007, with winter storms being the major culprit, reports filed with the U.S. Department of Energy indicate. All involved the state’s big electric companies. By contrast, there were only two major outages – defined as more than 50,000 homes and businesses losing power – during the previous five-year period, 2001 to 2006.
Certainly, there is enough blame to go around. Deregulation of the power companies probably hasn’t helped. For their part, the utilities gripe of being stopped by local officials when they try to cut down trees perched precariously near power lines.

But the weather may also be changing, with climate change brewing and more volatile storms. And that, combined with a grid built around early 20th century technology of stringing wires from poles, is a recipe for trouble.

Given all that, it would seem to make sense then to look at putting wires underground. It’s expensive, but it can be done – in fact, Europe and other parts of the developed world long ago went that route.

It doesn’t mean there are never any outages – you still have to spend money to maintain the lines after you put them underground.
But it would also likely make the massive storm and wind-driven outages a thing of the past.

And it certainly makes more sense than clear cutting tree-lined streets in picturesque New England towns.

When asked about putting lines underground, power companies dismiss the idea out of hand, citing the cost.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped Concord, which has a municipally-owned power company and which is slowly but steadily putting its power lines beneath the streets. Like other town-owned utilities, it also has a much better track record of keeping the lights on.

Other local communities have expressed interest in breaking away from the big utilities and going it on their own, with the option of upgrading to an underground system.

But legislation that would open the door for such changes has been bottled up for years on Beacon Hill amid a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign.

Meanwhile, the Patrick Administration, even as it convenes a task force on grid modernization, doesn’t appear to be rushing to explore the idea.

When I asked the flack for the state’s energy/utility department whether the idea of putting wires underground was on the task force’s agenda, I was told that it was up to the power companies to bring the issue to the table.

Sorry, but fat chance of that happening!

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com