Quantifying the resilience benefits of undergrounding a circuit with utility data

2026-04-09

AI Summary

This study quantifies the actual resilience benefits of converting overhead power lines to underground configurations. Leveraging real historical outage data, it employs a counterfactual simulation approach—applied for the first time in this context—to compare the operational performance of existing overhead circuits against their hypothetical underground counterparts. Resilience metrics, such as customer outage hours, are constructed and evaluated using scenario replay techniques to assess both infrastructure conversion impacts and the added value of operational optimizations. Results demonstrate that annual customer outage hours for two test circuits decreased by 75% and 78%, respectively, accompanied by substantial reductions in outage frequency and affected customers. Furthermore, the analysis quantifies that a 10% improvement in repair speed yields significant additional resilience gains.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

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.

Problem

• resilience
• undergrounding
• outage
• utility data
• customer hours lost

Innovation

• undergrounding
• resilience quantification
• historical outage data
• counterfactual analysis
• outage restoration