by Gennady Sheyner and Chris Lee / Palo Alto Weekly
Uploaded: Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 7:37 am 25 Updated: Fri, Sep 29, 2023, 8:37 am Time to read: about 11 minutes 15 Mva Transformer
Resident Abby Boyd stands in her backyard, where power lines stretch over her fence, on Sept. 26, 2023. Photo by Gennady Sheyner.
When Naphtali Knox served as Palo Alto's top city planner in the 1970s, burying power lines underground was considered a worthy and deeply valued endeavor.
"The city was pursuing it for beautification reasons," Knox said.
Moving electric lines underground was consistent with what city leaders believed Palo Alto should look like and with the policies of the city's guiding land-use document, the Comprehensive Plan.
"The Comprehensive Plan talks about the importance, for example, of Embarcadero Road as an entrance to the city from 101 and how beautiful it can be if we can get the wires down," Knox recalled.
The effort was fairly new and wildly popular. Members of the City Council, who at the time were at odds over issues of growth and development, set aside their differences and voted 14-0 in 1965 to adopt a law requiring all newly constructed developments to include underground utilities.
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Council members also established a process for creating underground districts, with a special focus on business districts and prominent traffic arteries.
The top priority for the council and the Utilities Department was aesthetics, said Knox, who worked as the city's planning director from 1972 to 1975 and as the director of planning and community environment from 1975-81.
Oregon Avenue, Foothills Park, Alexis Drive and El Camino Real became Palo Alto's first four underground districts. By the end of the 1970s, there were 20 districts, as neighborhoods including Crescent Park, Professorville and Evergreen Park joined the trend.
Currently, there are 45, and eight others are proposed, according to the Utilities Department.
For much of the program's existence, city leaders and utility officials routinely provided estimates of how long it would take to underground wires across the entire city. As recently as 2014, the city converted electrical wires for about 200 homes per year to undergrounding. At that pace, officials estimated, it would take about 100 years — and about $296.1 million — to convert the remaining 14,100 homes that had overhead wires.
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Since then, however, the program has largely run aground. Palo Alto no longer has an annual target for underground conversion and it has no short- or long-term plans to bury utility lines in any residential neighborhoods.
Thanks to a combination of high costs, recently established environmental goals and a mid-1990s shift toward "pad mounted" equipment, the Utilities Department has effectively stopped undergrounding utilities in residential neighborhoods and has little appetite for resuming the practice.
Today, the city has about 472 miles of distribution lines, of which 211 miles (45%) are overhead and 261 miles (55%) are underground, according to the Electric Utility Financial Plan. It also has about 2,000 overhead line transformers and 1,100 underground and substation transformers.
Prior projections of undergrounding the entire city within a century now seem optimistic, if not impossible.
It's not for lack of interest. Residents still routinely request undergrounding of electric equipment, whether for aesthetic reasons or for reliability. Nobody likes to lose power when a car hits a utility pole, a tree topples onto power lines, a hungry squirrel exercises poor judgment or a Mylar balloon short circuits a transformer.
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Abby Boyd, who lives in the Meadow Park neighborhood, is among those who believe putting lines underground is a matter of both beauty and safety. From her backyard in the Eichler-style south Palo Alto residential enclave, she can see two large eucalyptus trees, two utility poles and at least eight power lines that stretch and dangle at various elevations above her fence.
It's not hard for Boyd to imagine scenarios in which a power line falls on a tree or vice versa.
"I just think it's a hazard for a variety of reasons," she said in an interview.
Barring a major policy reversal, residents like Boyd are unlikely to see their blocks' power lines buried any time soon. In the past decades, underground districts have become both rarer and smaller.
The city launched 10 districts in the 1960s, nine in the 1970s and 11 in the 1980s. The number dropped to six in the 1990s, the decade during which the city stopped burying transformers underground, and five in the first decade of the 2000s. There was just one underground district initiated in the 2010s and two so far in the 2020s.
The Utilities Department's current plans offer proponents of undergrounding little reason to feel hopeful. The city's 2023-27 Electric Utility Plan states that "there will be a reduction in funding for undergrounding conversion from overhead to underground as current projects are completed and others are delayed."
And Palo Alto's current capital budget, which the council approved in June, envisions only two overhead-to-underground conversions in the next four years, both on busy arteries. One project would be along Embarcadero Road, between Middlefield Road and Emerson Street; the other on a small segment Alma Street between Addison and Melville avenues. Neither project is slated to begin until either 2026 or 2027.
This map shows the locations of Palo Alto's existing underground districts. The segments in green are proposed. Courtesy city of Palo Alto Utilities.
Palo Alto's shift away from undergrounding occurred with surprisingly little public debate. The council, which routinely spends hours debating issues like shadow impacts, building setbacks, the noise impacts of electric appliances and whether accessory dwelling units should be allowed to have underground garages, hasn't had a substantive discussion about the city's strategy for moving electrical equipment underground in well over a decade.
Its last public hearing relating to the topic took place in 2019, when council members debated the narrow topic of whether residents in existing underground districts should have to pay extra to cover the costs of placing transformers underground rather than in pad-mounted enclosures that some found unsightly. (The council decided that they should.)
The Utilities Advisory Commission has also been relatively disengaged. During an April discussion of its annual priorities, the commission added undergrounding as one of its priority topics for the coming year. In doing so, commissioners argued that the city needs to do better when it comes to clearly laying out its strategy for undergrounding utilities and informing residents about this strategy.
"This is something I've been asked about by multiple residents who obviously want to underground in their neighborhood," Commissioner Phil Metz said at the April 12 discussion. "Do we need a set of guiding principles to tell us when we underground and we don't? … It seems like we need some kind of a way to decide, or maybe it already exists and I'm just not aware of it."
Catherine Elvert, communications manager at City of Palo Alto Utilities, told the Weekly that the utility has been moving away from installing underground electric equipment for several reasons. Underground equipment tends to have a shortened service life, can be more difficult to maintain and presents safety concerns for the public and utility workers, Elvert said in an email.
"By installing equipment above ground, as in the case with pad-mounted transformers, utilities experience better electrical service reliability, longer service life and improved safety," Elvert wrote.
Money is also a factor. In the past, Palo Alto relied on AT&T to share some of the costs of undergrounding electric lines. While the telecom's participation in some projects is required by California Public Utilities Commission, the commission's underground tariff does not apply to most residential neighborhoods, according to utilities staff.
In the past, AT&T funded its underground structures in some residential areas even though it was not strictly required to do so under state law. But in 2011, utilities staff reported that AT&T had informed them that it will "strictly follow the tariff in all future undergrounding projects," according to a 2011 report.
Elvert noted that there is still a path for neighborhoods like Boyd's to obtain underground utilities. It would require the council to adopt an ordinance establishing an "underground district." In order for this district to be formed and approved, Elvert wrote in the email, "All customers in the district area must agree to the undergrounding requirements and pay any associated fees for the conversion."
The homeowner could face a bill anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000, with the exact amount determined by factors such as the type of underground district they're in, the distance from the electrical service box to the homeowner's panel and the location of the trenching work, according to the city.
WHEN SOME UNDERGROUNDING IS ABOVE GROUND
A utility worker stands by a pad-mounted utility box, which the city of Palo Alto is proposing to use in local neighborhoods to replace aging underground transformer vaults. Photo courtesy city of Palo Alto.
For most neighborhoods, lobbying for underground districts, getting unanimous support and then paying for the installation would be a tall, if not insurmountable, task. But it's made even more complicated by the fact that unlike in the past, today's underground districts aren't truly underground.
While electric wires in new districts are buried, transformers and other associated equipment are now pad-mounted — placed in above-ground boxes whose utilitarian appearance complicates any discussion of aesthetic improvements.
The trend toward pad-mounting equipment started in April 1996, when the council approved a rule that states, "All new equipment in underground areas required to provide Electric Service to a Customer will be pad-mounted."
Like other utilities across the state, Palo Alto began to favor pad-mounted transformers in the 1990s after concluding that such equipment is safer, cheaper and more reliable than underground lines. Underground vaults require workers to enter a very confined space with limited room to work, with high temperatures that result from limited ventilation and hot oil in the transformer, a Utilities Department report states.
They also tend to accumulate water and run-off such as oil, which can "attack" the metal shell of the transformer, and debris that can prevent heat from escaping the equipment, the report states. Excessive heat can cause a transformer to fail, the report further notes.
Pad-mounted equipment, however, "is always exposed to ambient air flow unlike the subsurface equipment. Pad-mounted equipment is also less susceptible to water intrusion and contaminants."
But while rooted in safety concerns, the rule change also had the effect of turning what was once a broadly popular effort into an increasingly contentious one. Boxes with transformers may not seem out of place along busy commercial corridors and traffic arteries, but residents in single-family neighborhoods have shown little appetite for living next to them.
"Nobody wants to have a transformer," Utilities Director Dean Batchelor said during an April public hearing on undergrounding. "Everyone wants them underground, but no one wants the box in front of their home."
During a June discussion of electrical grid updates, Batchelor suggested that some neighborhoods would need three or more pad-mounted transformers to accommodate underground electricity (in Green Acres, the upgrade called for eight transformers for about 100 residences).
Who, he asked, will be the lucky one who will now have to see the box all of a sudden?
"I think it's going to be some long conversations and we're going to have to work through that," Batchelor said during the meeting of the utilities commission.
The city's forthcoming effort to modernize its electrical grid — its largest such upgrade in decades — will further hamper any new undergrounding initiatives in residential neighborhoods.
A biker rides by the substation on Park Boulevard in Palo Alto on April 21, 2021. Photo by Magali Gauthier.
The grid project will cost between $220 million and $306 million and will involve converting 4 kV lines to 12 kV so that they could power the hoped-for proliferation of electric vehicles, hot water heat pumps and other electric appliances. It is key to Palo Alto meeting its goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80% by 2030, with 1990 as the baseline.
And it will almost certainly start with overhead lines.
The city has "prioritized upgrading the overhead electric distribution system rather than undergrounding utilities," Elvert said.
"Our ability to meet the current sustainability goals of reducing carbon emissions by 2030 requires the electric system to be upgraded as quickly as possible," she said in an email.
Even if the city were to move ahead with undergrounding at an accelerated pace, that conversion would take decades to achieve. And Elvert noted it would also cost at least three times as much upgrading the overhead system.
Tomm Marshall, assistant director for engineering at the Utilities Department, made it clear during the June discussion of grid modernization that underground districts will be last in line when it comes to grid upgrades.
Utilities officials are bracing for more tough discussions about pad-mounted equipment. To date, friction over the above-ground boxes has been limited to the few areas where the city has upgraded existing underground equipment that has reached the end of its useful life.
When the city proposed installing pad-mounted equipment in 2019 in Green Acres 1 which had long enjoyed the benefit of a fully buried utility system, residents took umbrage. Nina Bell, head of the Green Acres I association, told the council that her neighbors remodeled and rebuilt their homes based on an expectation that they would be living in a "neighborhood without wires or poles or pad-mounted cubes."
With the citywide grid modernization looming, such complaints are likely to grow more common, and utilities staff are preparing for, quite possibly, tougher stances on mounted equipment.
"Are we going to try to negotiate or are we just going to say, ‘It's got to go here'?" Marshall said during a June hearing. "We don't want to be in a public relations nightmare with our customers out there either. There's a balance that we have to do on that."
A REVERSAL, THANKS TO FIBER
A similar cost calculus applies to Palo Alto's long-awaited effort to upgrade its municipal fiber-optic network. Here, residents in already-underground districts will in most cases find themselves in the back, not the front, of the line.
Known as "Fiber to the Premises," the effort advanced last year when the council approved a plan created by its consultant, Magellan Consulting, for expanding the network. The initial phase would cover 7,160 homes and about 875 businesses in various sections of the city, including parts of Downtown North, College Terrace and Midtown.
Most of these areas share a common feature: overhead lines.
John Honker, president of Magellan, told the utilities commission last summer that the goal is to focus initially on areas of the city that have both demonstrated higher demand for fiber and where the cost of doing the conversion would be lower.
Construction of the aerial equipment, rather than underground equipment, would be easier and allow the city to connect more customers for less money, Honker said. As such, he recommended focusing on areas with aerial lines and large customer bases.
"The benefit of having some aerial construction is that that could go quicker if the make-ready and pole-prep work is done relatively efficiently," Honker told the utilities commission in August 2022. "You have that going for you.
"The underground construction is hard work. It's going to be difficult — we can't sugarcoat it."
Despite these financial and engineering complications, the Utilities Advisory Commission acknowledged earlier this year the importance of undergrounding to residents and agreed that the topic warrants more discussion in light of forthcoming grid modernization and fiber expansion.
"It's a good time, especially as we're starting to roll out fiber, or small portions of fiber," commission Chair Lauren Segal said at the April discussion, "because undergrounding projects will have an impact on which districts we start fiber."
"If we're about to underground a district, we wouldn't want to put fiber up in there."
Commissioner Robert Phillips concurred and said it's important for the city to bring more transparency to the underground discussion. He said he often has people ask him about the city's plans for undergrounding various neighborhoods, including their own.
"It doesn't necessarily mean we need a day and time, but certainly more outreach to the community about what's going on would be very useful," Phillips said.
Eight power lines stretch between trees in the Meadow Park neighborhood. Photo by Gennady Sheyner.
Boyd, for her part, hopes the city will reverse the recent trend and go back to burying lines.
She acknowledged the concerns in other neighborhoods about pad-mounted equipment but suggested that this can be mitigated by placing boxes away from homes and closer intersections.
The city can also do what Santa Cruz did with its traffic signal boxes and invite artists to paint murals and other decorations to improve the aesthetics.
"Like everything else, people learn how to do things better, and this is an idea that has been explored in other places," Boyd said. "The city of Palo Alto does studies all the time. They might want to look around and try to find ways to mitigate these problems."
Knox also said he believes that any major project involving the city's electrical grid should seriously consider undergrounding — a topic that became more urgent after last winter's severe storms toppled overhead lines throughout the region, causing power outages.
"If new money is going to be spent for the grid, it ought to go underground," Knox said. "It's just something that was started so long ago and abandoned that we should have been doing."
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by Gennady Sheyner and Chris Lee / Palo Alto Weekly
Uploaded: Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 7:37 am Updated: Fri, Sep 29, 2023, 8:37 am When Naphtali Knox served as Palo Alto's top city planner in the 1970s, burying power lines underground was considered a worthy and deeply valued endeavor. "The city was pursuing it for beautification reasons," Knox said. Moving electric lines underground was consistent with what city leaders believed Palo Alto should look like and with the policies of the city's guiding land-use document, the Comprehensive Plan. "The Comprehensive Plan talks about the importance, for example, of Embarcadero Road as an entrance to the city from 101 and how beautiful it can be if we can get the wires down," Knox recalled. The effort was fairly new and wildly popular. Members of the City Council, who at the time were at odds over issues of growth and development, set aside their differences and voted 14-0 in 1965 to adopt a law requiring all newly constructed developments to include underground utilities. Council members also established a process for creating underground districts, with a special focus on business districts and prominent traffic arteries. The top priority for the council and the Utilities Department was aesthetics, said Knox, who worked as the city's planning director from 1972 to 1975 and as the director of planning and community environment from 1975-81. Oregon Avenue, Foothills Park, Alexis Drive and El Camino Real became Palo Alto's first four underground districts. By the end of the 1970s, there were 20 districts, as neighborhoods including Crescent Park, Professorville and Evergreen Park joined the trend. Currently, there are 45, and eight others are proposed, according to the Utilities Department. For much of the program's existence, city leaders and utility officials routinely provided estimates of how long it would take to underground wires across the entire city. As recently as 2014, the city converted electrical wires for about 200 homes per year to undergrounding. At that pace, officials estimated, it would take about 100 years — and about $296.1 million — to convert the remaining 14,100 homes that had overhead wires. Since then, however, the program has largely run aground. Palo Alto no longer has an annual target for underground conversion and it has no short- or long-term plans to bury utility lines in any residential neighborhoods. Thanks to a combination of high costs, recently established environmental goals and a mid-1990s shift toward "pad mounted" equipment, the Utilities Department has effectively stopped undergrounding utilities in residential neighborhoods and has little appetite for resuming the practice. Today, the city has about 472 miles of distribution lines, of which 211 miles (45%) are overhead and 261 miles (55%) are underground, according to the Electric Utility Financial Plan. It also has about 2,000 overhead line transformers and 1,100 underground and substation transformers. DEMAND FOR UNDERGROUNDING Prior projections of undergrounding the entire city within a century now seem optimistic, if not impossible. It's not for lack of interest. Residents still routinely request undergrounding of electric equipment, whether for aesthetic reasons or for reliability. Nobody likes to lose power when a car hits a utility pole, a tree topples onto power lines, a hungry squirrel exercises poor judgment or a Mylar balloon short circuits a transformer. Abby Boyd, who lives in the Meadow Park neighborhood, is among those who believe putting lines underground is a matter of both beauty and safety. From her backyard in the Eichler-style south Palo Alto residential enclave, she can see two large eucalyptus trees, two utility poles and at least eight power lines that stretch and dangle at various elevations above her fence. It's not hard for Boyd to imagine scenarios in which a power line falls on a tree or vice versa. "I just think it's a hazard for a variety of reasons," she said in an interview. Barring a major policy reversal, residents like Boyd are unlikely to see their blocks' power lines buried any time soon. In the past decades, underground districts have become both rarer and smaller. The city launched 10 districts in the 1960s, nine in the 1970s and 11 in the 1980s. The number dropped to six in the 1990s, the decade during which the city stopped burying transformers underground, and five in the first decade of the 2000s. There was just one underground district initiated in the 2010s and two so far in the 2020s. The Utilities Department's current plans offer proponents of undergrounding little reason to feel hopeful. The city's 2023-27 Electric Utility Plan states that "there will be a reduction in funding for undergrounding conversion from overhead to underground as current projects are completed and others are delayed." And Palo Alto's current capital budget, which the council approved in June, envisions only two overhead-to-underground conversions in the next four years, both on busy arteries. One project would be along Embarcadero Road, between Middlefield Road and Emerson Street; the other on a small segment Alma Street between Addison and Melville avenues. Neither project is slated to begin until either 2026 or 2027. WITHOUT A TRACE Palo Alto's shift away from undergrounding occurred with surprisingly little public debate. The council, which routinely spends hours debating issues like shadow impacts, building setbacks, the noise impacts of electric appliances and whether accessory dwelling units should be allowed to have underground garages, hasn't had a substantive discussion about the city's strategy for moving electrical equipment underground in well over a decade. Its last public hearing relating to the topic took place in 2019, when council members debated the narrow topic of whether residents in existing underground districts should have to pay extra to cover the costs of placing transformers underground rather than in pad-mounted enclosures that some found unsightly. (The council decided that they should.) The Utilities Advisory Commission has also been relatively disengaged. During an April discussion of its annual priorities, the commission added undergrounding as one of its priority topics for the coming year. In doing so, commissioners argued that the city needs to do better when it comes to clearly laying out its strategy for undergrounding utilities and informing residents about this strategy. "This is something I've been asked about by multiple residents who obviously want to underground in their neighborhood," Commissioner Phil Metz said at the April 12 discussion. "Do we need a set of guiding principles to tell us when we underground and we don't? … It seems like we need some kind of a way to decide, or maybe it already exists and I'm just not aware of it." Catherine Elvert, communications manager at City of Palo Alto Utilities, told the Weekly that the utility has been moving away from installing underground electric equipment for several reasons. Underground equipment tends to have a shortened service life, can be more difficult to maintain and presents safety concerns for the public and utility workers, Elvert said in an email. "By installing equipment above ground, as in the case with pad-mounted transformers, utilities experience better electrical service reliability, longer service life and improved safety," Elvert wrote. Money is also a factor. In the past, Palo Alto relied on AT&T to share some of the costs of undergrounding electric lines. While the telecom's participation in some projects is required by California Public Utilities Commission, the commission's underground tariff does not apply to most residential neighborhoods, according to utilities staff. In the past, AT&T funded its underground structures in some residential areas even though it was not strictly required to do so under state law. But in 2011, utilities staff reported that AT&T had informed them that it will "strictly follow the tariff in all future undergrounding projects," according to a 2011 report. Elvert noted that there is still a path for neighborhoods like Boyd's to obtain underground utilities. It would require the council to adopt an ordinance establishing an "underground district." In order for this district to be formed and approved, Elvert wrote in the email, "All customers in the district area must agree to the undergrounding requirements and pay any associated fees for the conversion." The homeowner could face a bill anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000, with the exact amount determined by factors such as the type of underground district they're in, the distance from the electrical service box to the homeowner's panel and the location of the trenching work, according to the city. WHEN SOME UNDERGROUNDING IS ABOVE GROUND For most neighborhoods, lobbying for underground districts, getting unanimous support and then paying for the installation would be a tall, if not insurmountable, task. But it's made even more complicated by the fact that unlike in the past, today's underground districts aren't truly underground. While electric wires in new districts are buried, transformers and other associated equipment are now pad-mounted — placed in above-ground boxes whose utilitarian appearance complicates any discussion of aesthetic improvements. The trend toward pad-mounting equipment started in April 1996, when the council approved a rule that states, "All new equipment in underground areas required to provide Electric Service to a Customer will be pad-mounted." Like other utilities across the state, Palo Alto began to favor pad-mounted transformers in the 1990s after concluding that such equipment is safer, cheaper and more reliable than underground lines. Underground vaults require workers to enter a very confined space with limited room to work, with high temperatures that result from limited ventilation and hot oil in the transformer, a Utilities Department report states. They also tend to accumulate water and run-off such as oil, which can "attack" the metal shell of the transformer, and debris that can prevent heat from escaping the equipment, the report states. Excessive heat can cause a transformer to fail, the report further notes. Pad-mounted equipment, however, "is always exposed to ambient air flow unlike the subsurface equipment. Pad-mounted equipment is also less susceptible to water intrusion and contaminants." But while rooted in safety concerns, the rule change also had the effect of turning what was once a broadly popular effort into an increasingly contentious one. Boxes with transformers may not seem out of place along busy commercial corridors and traffic arteries, but residents in single-family neighborhoods have shown little appetite for living next to them. "Nobody wants to have a transformer," Utilities Director Dean Batchelor said during an April public hearing on undergrounding. "Everyone wants them underground, but no one wants the box in front of their home." During a June discussion of electrical grid updates, Batchelor suggested that some neighborhoods would need three or more pad-mounted transformers to accommodate underground electricity (in Green Acres, the upgrade called for eight transformers for about 100 residences). Who, he asked, will be the lucky one who will now have to see the box all of a sudden? "I think it's going to be some long conversations and we're going to have to work through that," Batchelor said during the meeting of the utilities commission. UPGRADING THE GRID The city's forthcoming effort to modernize its electrical grid — its largest such upgrade in decades — will further hamper any new undergrounding initiatives in residential neighborhoods. The grid project will cost between $220 million and $306 million and will involve converting 4 kV lines to 12 kV so that they could power the hoped-for proliferation of electric vehicles, hot water heat pumps and other electric appliances. It is key to Palo Alto meeting its goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80% by 2030, with 1990 as the baseline. And it will almost certainly start with overhead lines. The city has "prioritized upgrading the overhead electric distribution system rather than undergrounding utilities," Elvert said. "Our ability to meet the current sustainability goals of reducing carbon emissions by 2030 requires the electric system to be upgraded as quickly as possible," she said in an email. Even if the city were to move ahead with undergrounding at an accelerated pace, that conversion would take decades to achieve. And Elvert noted it would also cost at least three times as much upgrading the overhead system. Tomm Marshall, assistant director for engineering at the Utilities Department, made it clear during the June discussion of grid modernization that underground districts will be last in line when it comes to grid upgrades. Utilities officials are bracing for more tough discussions about pad-mounted equipment. To date, friction over the above-ground boxes has been limited to the few areas where the city has upgraded existing underground equipment that has reached the end of its useful life. When the city proposed installing pad-mounted equipment in 2019 in Green Acres 1 which had long enjoyed the benefit of a fully buried utility system, residents took umbrage. Nina Bell, head of the Green Acres I association, told the council that her neighbors remodeled and rebuilt their homes based on an expectation that they would be living in a "neighborhood without wires or poles or pad-mounted cubes." With the citywide grid modernization looming, such complaints are likely to grow more common, and utilities staff are preparing for, quite possibly, tougher stances on mounted equipment. "Are we going to try to negotiate or are we just going to say, ‘It's got to go here'?" Marshall said during a June hearing. "We don't want to be in a public relations nightmare with our customers out there either. There's a balance that we have to do on that." A REVERSAL, THANKS TO FIBER A similar cost calculus applies to Palo Alto's long-awaited effort to upgrade its municipal fiber-optic network. Here, residents in already-underground districts will in most cases find themselves in the back, not the front, of the line. Known as "Fiber to the Premises," the effort advanced last year when the council approved a plan created by its consultant, Magellan Consulting, for expanding the network. The initial phase would cover 7,160 homes and about 875 businesses in various sections of the city, including parts of Downtown North, College Terrace and Midtown. Most of these areas share a common feature: overhead lines. John Honker, president of Magellan, told the utilities commission last summer that the goal is to focus initially on areas of the city that have both demonstrated higher demand for fiber and where the cost of doing the conversion would be lower. Construction of the aerial equipment, rather than underground equipment, would be easier and allow the city to connect more customers for less money, Honker said. As such, he recommended focusing on areas with aerial lines and large customer bases. "The benefit of having some aerial construction is that that could go quicker if the make-ready and pole-prep work is done relatively efficiently," Honker told the utilities commission in August 2022. "You have that going for you. "The underground construction is hard work. It's going to be difficult — we can't sugarcoat it." Despite these financial and engineering complications, the Utilities Advisory Commission acknowledged earlier this year the importance of undergrounding to residents and agreed that the topic warrants more discussion in light of forthcoming grid modernization and fiber expansion. "It's a good time, especially as we're starting to roll out fiber, or small portions of fiber," commission Chair Lauren Segal said at the April discussion, "because undergrounding projects will have an impact on which districts we start fiber." "If we're about to underground a district, we wouldn't want to put fiber up in there." Commissioner Robert Phillips concurred and said it's important for the city to bring more transparency to the underground discussion. He said he often has people ask him about the city's plans for undergrounding various neighborhoods, including their own. "It doesn't necessarily mean we need a day and time, but certainly more outreach to the community about what's going on would be very useful," Phillips said. Boyd, for her part, hopes the city will reverse the recent trend and go back to burying lines. She acknowledged the concerns in other neighborhoods about pad-mounted equipment but suggested that this can be mitigated by placing boxes away from homes and closer intersections. The city can also do what Santa Cruz did with its traffic signal boxes and invite artists to paint murals and other decorations to improve the aesthetics. "Like everything else, people learn how to do things better, and this is an idea that has been explored in other places," Boyd said. "The city of Palo Alto does studies all the time. They might want to look around and try to find ways to mitigate these problems." Knox also said he believes that any major project involving the city's electrical grid should seriously consider undergrounding — a topic that became more urgent after last winter's severe storms toppled overhead lines throughout the region, causing power outages. "If new money is going to be spent for the grid, it ought to go underground," Knox said. "It's just something that was started so long ago and abandoned that we should have been doing."
When Naphtali Knox served as Palo Alto's top city planner in the 1970s, burying power lines underground was considered a worthy and deeply valued endeavor.
"The city was pursuing it for beautification reasons," Knox said.
Moving electric lines underground was consistent with what city leaders believed Palo Alto should look like and with the policies of the city's guiding land-use document, the Comprehensive Plan.
"The Comprehensive Plan talks about the importance, for example, of Embarcadero Road as an entrance to the city from 101 and how beautiful it can be if we can get the wires down," Knox recalled.
The effort was fairly new and wildly popular. Members of the City Council, who at the time were at odds over issues of growth and development, set aside their differences and voted 14-0 in 1965 to adopt a law requiring all newly constructed developments to include underground utilities.
Council members also established a process for creating underground districts, with a special focus on business districts and prominent traffic arteries.
The top priority for the council and the Utilities Department was aesthetics, said Knox, who worked as the city's planning director from 1972 to 1975 and as the director of planning and community environment from 1975-81.
Oregon Avenue, Foothills Park, Alexis Drive and El Camino Real became Palo Alto's first four underground districts. By the end of the 1970s, there were 20 districts, as neighborhoods including Crescent Park, Professorville and Evergreen Park joined the trend.
Currently, there are 45, and eight others are proposed, according to the Utilities Department.
For much of the program's existence, city leaders and utility officials routinely provided estimates of how long it would take to underground wires across the entire city. As recently as 2014, the city converted electrical wires for about 200 homes per year to undergrounding. At that pace, officials estimated, it would take about 100 years — and about $296.1 million — to convert the remaining 14,100 homes that had overhead wires.
Since then, however, the program has largely run aground. Palo Alto no longer has an annual target for underground conversion and it has no short- or long-term plans to bury utility lines in any residential neighborhoods.
Thanks to a combination of high costs, recently established environmental goals and a mid-1990s shift toward "pad mounted" equipment, the Utilities Department has effectively stopped undergrounding utilities in residential neighborhoods and has little appetite for resuming the practice.
Today, the city has about 472 miles of distribution lines, of which 211 miles (45%) are overhead and 261 miles (55%) are underground, according to the Electric Utility Financial Plan. It also has about 2,000 overhead line transformers and 1,100 underground and substation transformers.
Prior projections of undergrounding the entire city within a century now seem optimistic, if not impossible.
It's not for lack of interest. Residents still routinely request undergrounding of electric equipment, whether for aesthetic reasons or for reliability. Nobody likes to lose power when a car hits a utility pole, a tree topples onto power lines, a hungry squirrel exercises poor judgment or a Mylar balloon short circuits a transformer.
Abby Boyd, who lives in the Meadow Park neighborhood, is among those who believe putting lines underground is a matter of both beauty and safety. From her backyard in the Eichler-style south Palo Alto residential enclave, she can see two large eucalyptus trees, two utility poles and at least eight power lines that stretch and dangle at various elevations above her fence.
It's not hard for Boyd to imagine scenarios in which a power line falls on a tree or vice versa.
"I just think it's a hazard for a variety of reasons," she said in an interview.
Barring a major policy reversal, residents like Boyd are unlikely to see their blocks' power lines buried any time soon. In the past decades, underground districts have become both rarer and smaller.
The city launched 10 districts in the 1960s, nine in the 1970s and 11 in the 1980s. The number dropped to six in the 1990s, the decade during which the city stopped burying transformers underground, and five in the first decade of the 2000s. There was just one underground district initiated in the 2010s and two so far in the 2020s.
The Utilities Department's current plans offer proponents of undergrounding little reason to feel hopeful. The city's 2023-27 Electric Utility Plan states that "there will be a reduction in funding for undergrounding conversion from overhead to underground as current projects are completed and others are delayed."
And Palo Alto's current capital budget, which the council approved in June, envisions only two overhead-to-underground conversions in the next four years, both on busy arteries. One project would be along Embarcadero Road, between Middlefield Road and Emerson Street; the other on a small segment Alma Street between Addison and Melville avenues. Neither project is slated to begin until either 2026 or 2027.
Palo Alto's shift away from undergrounding occurred with surprisingly little public debate. The council, which routinely spends hours debating issues like shadow impacts, building setbacks, the noise impacts of electric appliances and whether accessory dwelling units should be allowed to have underground garages, hasn't had a substantive discussion about the city's strategy for moving electrical equipment underground in well over a decade.
Its last public hearing relating to the topic took place in 2019, when council members debated the narrow topic of whether residents in existing underground districts should have to pay extra to cover the costs of placing transformers underground rather than in pad-mounted enclosures that some found unsightly. (The council decided that they should.)
The Utilities Advisory Commission has also been relatively disengaged. During an April discussion of its annual priorities, the commission added undergrounding as one of its priority topics for the coming year. In doing so, commissioners argued that the city needs to do better when it comes to clearly laying out its strategy for undergrounding utilities and informing residents about this strategy.
"This is something I've been asked about by multiple residents who obviously want to underground in their neighborhood," Commissioner Phil Metz said at the April 12 discussion. "Do we need a set of guiding principles to tell us when we underground and we don't? … It seems like we need some kind of a way to decide, or maybe it already exists and I'm just not aware of it."
Catherine Elvert, communications manager at City of Palo Alto Utilities, told the Weekly that the utility has been moving away from installing underground electric equipment for several reasons. Underground equipment tends to have a shortened service life, can be more difficult to maintain and presents safety concerns for the public and utility workers, Elvert said in an email.
"By installing equipment above ground, as in the case with pad-mounted transformers, utilities experience better electrical service reliability, longer service life and improved safety," Elvert wrote.
Money is also a factor. In the past, Palo Alto relied on AT&T to share some of the costs of undergrounding electric lines. While the telecom's participation in some projects is required by California Public Utilities Commission, the commission's underground tariff does not apply to most residential neighborhoods, according to utilities staff.
In the past, AT&T funded its underground structures in some residential areas even though it was not strictly required to do so under state law. But in 2011, utilities staff reported that AT&T had informed them that it will "strictly follow the tariff in all future undergrounding projects," according to a 2011 report.
Elvert noted that there is still a path for neighborhoods like Boyd's to obtain underground utilities. It would require the council to adopt an ordinance establishing an "underground district." In order for this district to be formed and approved, Elvert wrote in the email, "All customers in the district area must agree to the undergrounding requirements and pay any associated fees for the conversion."
The homeowner could face a bill anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000, with the exact amount determined by factors such as the type of underground district they're in, the distance from the electrical service box to the homeowner's panel and the location of the trenching work, according to the city.
WHEN SOME UNDERGROUNDING IS ABOVE GROUND
For most neighborhoods, lobbying for underground districts, getting unanimous support and then paying for the installation would be a tall, if not insurmountable, task. But it's made even more complicated by the fact that unlike in the past, today's underground districts aren't truly underground.
While electric wires in new districts are buried, transformers and other associated equipment are now pad-mounted — placed in above-ground boxes whose utilitarian appearance complicates any discussion of aesthetic improvements.
The trend toward pad-mounting equipment started in April 1996, when the council approved a rule that states, "All new equipment in underground areas required to provide Electric Service to a Customer will be pad-mounted."
Like other utilities across the state, Palo Alto began to favor pad-mounted transformers in the 1990s after concluding that such equipment is safer, cheaper and more reliable than underground lines. Underground vaults require workers to enter a very confined space with limited room to work, with high temperatures that result from limited ventilation and hot oil in the transformer, a Utilities Department report states.
They also tend to accumulate water and run-off such as oil, which can "attack" the metal shell of the transformer, and debris that can prevent heat from escaping the equipment, the report states. Excessive heat can cause a transformer to fail, the report further notes.
Pad-mounted equipment, however, "is always exposed to ambient air flow unlike the subsurface equipment. Pad-mounted equipment is also less susceptible to water intrusion and contaminants."
But while rooted in safety concerns, the rule change also had the effect of turning what was once a broadly popular effort into an increasingly contentious one. Boxes with transformers may not seem out of place along busy commercial corridors and traffic arteries, but residents in single-family neighborhoods have shown little appetite for living next to them.
"Nobody wants to have a transformer," Utilities Director Dean Batchelor said during an April public hearing on undergrounding. "Everyone wants them underground, but no one wants the box in front of their home."
During a June discussion of electrical grid updates, Batchelor suggested that some neighborhoods would need three or more pad-mounted transformers to accommodate underground electricity (in Green Acres, the upgrade called for eight transformers for about 100 residences).
Who, he asked, will be the lucky one who will now have to see the box all of a sudden?
"I think it's going to be some long conversations and we're going to have to work through that," Batchelor said during the meeting of the utilities commission.
The city's forthcoming effort to modernize its electrical grid — its largest such upgrade in decades — will further hamper any new undergrounding initiatives in residential neighborhoods.
The grid project will cost between $220 million and $306 million and will involve converting 4 kV lines to 12 kV so that they could power the hoped-for proliferation of electric vehicles, hot water heat pumps and other electric appliances. It is key to Palo Alto meeting its goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80% by 2030, with 1990 as the baseline.
And it will almost certainly start with overhead lines.
The city has "prioritized upgrading the overhead electric distribution system rather than undergrounding utilities," Elvert said.
"Our ability to meet the current sustainability goals of reducing carbon emissions by 2030 requires the electric system to be upgraded as quickly as possible," she said in an email.
Even if the city were to move ahead with undergrounding at an accelerated pace, that conversion would take decades to achieve. And Elvert noted it would also cost at least three times as much upgrading the overhead system.
Tomm Marshall, assistant director for engineering at the Utilities Department, made it clear during the June discussion of grid modernization that underground districts will be last in line when it comes to grid upgrades.
Utilities officials are bracing for more tough discussions about pad-mounted equipment. To date, friction over the above-ground boxes has been limited to the few areas where the city has upgraded existing underground equipment that has reached the end of its useful life.
When the city proposed installing pad-mounted equipment in 2019 in Green Acres 1 which had long enjoyed the benefit of a fully buried utility system, residents took umbrage. Nina Bell, head of the Green Acres I association, told the council that her neighbors remodeled and rebuilt their homes based on an expectation that they would be living in a "neighborhood without wires or poles or pad-mounted cubes."
With the citywide grid modernization looming, such complaints are likely to grow more common, and utilities staff are preparing for, quite possibly, tougher stances on mounted equipment.
"Are we going to try to negotiate or are we just going to say, ‘It's got to go here'?" Marshall said during a June hearing. "We don't want to be in a public relations nightmare with our customers out there either. There's a balance that we have to do on that."
A REVERSAL, THANKS TO FIBER
A similar cost calculus applies to Palo Alto's long-awaited effort to upgrade its municipal fiber-optic network. Here, residents in already-underground districts will in most cases find themselves in the back, not the front, of the line.
Known as "Fiber to the Premises," the effort advanced last year when the council approved a plan created by its consultant, Magellan Consulting, for expanding the network. The initial phase would cover 7,160 homes and about 875 businesses in various sections of the city, including parts of Downtown North, College Terrace and Midtown.
Most of these areas share a common feature: overhead lines.
John Honker, president of Magellan, told the utilities commission last summer that the goal is to focus initially on areas of the city that have both demonstrated higher demand for fiber and where the cost of doing the conversion would be lower.
Construction of the aerial equipment, rather than underground equipment, would be easier and allow the city to connect more customers for less money, Honker said. As such, he recommended focusing on areas with aerial lines and large customer bases.
"The benefit of having some aerial construction is that that could go quicker if the make-ready and pole-prep work is done relatively efficiently," Honker told the utilities commission in August 2022. "You have that going for you.
"The underground construction is hard work. It's going to be difficult — we can't sugarcoat it."
Despite these financial and engineering complications, the Utilities Advisory Commission acknowledged earlier this year the importance of undergrounding to residents and agreed that the topic warrants more discussion in light of forthcoming grid modernization and fiber expansion.
"It's a good time, especially as we're starting to roll out fiber, or small portions of fiber," commission Chair Lauren Segal said at the April discussion, "because undergrounding projects will have an impact on which districts we start fiber."
"If we're about to underground a district, we wouldn't want to put fiber up in there."
Commissioner Robert Phillips concurred and said it's important for the city to bring more transparency to the underground discussion. He said he often has people ask him about the city's plans for undergrounding various neighborhoods, including their own.
"It doesn't necessarily mean we need a day and time, but certainly more outreach to the community about what's going on would be very useful," Phillips said.
Boyd, for her part, hopes the city will reverse the recent trend and go back to burying lines.
She acknowledged the concerns in other neighborhoods about pad-mounted equipment but suggested that this can be mitigated by placing boxes away from homes and closer intersections.
The city can also do what Santa Cruz did with its traffic signal boxes and invite artists to paint murals and other decorations to improve the aesthetics.
"Like everything else, people learn how to do things better, and this is an idea that has been explored in other places," Boyd said. "The city of Palo Alto does studies all the time. They might want to look around and try to find ways to mitigate these problems."
Knox also said he believes that any major project involving the city's electrical grid should seriously consider undergrounding — a topic that became more urgent after last winter's severe storms toppled overhead lines throughout the region, causing power outages.
"If new money is going to be spent for the grid, it ought to go underground," Knox said. "It's just something that was started so long ago and abandoned that we should have been doing."
The cost benefit ratio ratio just is not there to underground wires except for the foothills. We are running a huge unfunded city employee retirement deficit that needs make up funding. Electrification is 100s of millions, we need a second electric line into the city and grade separation is also very expensive. I too wish the city had unlimited funds but it does not. If you believe so much in it, then I propose put it on the ballot with a commesurate tax to cover it and let the voters decide if its worth paying the extra tax.
This is what makes Silicon Valley the butt of jokes all over the world. Here we invent all the technology the rest of the world uses, but we can't put our power underground and we lose power when it rains! We have ugly wires hanging all over town that is more like third world views. Unbelievable.
If you think the wires are unsightly, take a look at the actual telephone poles!
At the rate the under grounding was going, this is hardly surprising. A few years ago, I attended some Utility Advisory Commission meetings, I learned that the underground utilities had a 30 year life time. This mean that they were having to replace the first set of installations, further slowing down the installation of new ones. My conclusion was that it would never be finished at the current installation rate. Where I live, the utilities are on poles behind my house. Was I charged for under grounding of the power lines elsewhere in the city? If they are going to stop doing it, should everyone with above ground utilities get a refund? Surely this was part of the utility rates.
I’ve not been an advocate of over head electrical lines ever since high winds blew tree branches (still attached to healthy trees) into power lines, causing sparks that ignited the shakes on my absent neighbor’s roof. These power lines run above the fences at the back of properties and are partially hidden. Fortunately, the resulting smoke was seen quickly and the PAFD responded immediately. However, if it had not been seen, many surrounding homes would have been affected.
Of course there was no debate about something this major since PA bases its annual priorities on "surveys" that get 343 responses. They love pretending that there's community involvement here while ignoring all the people complaining about the frequency and duration of power outages who want refunds for service outages (which even PG&E grants). The headline "Palo Alto quietly abandons decades-long program..." whitewashes the city's long history of sneakily ignoring real concerns WHILE wasting OUR money. PS: We're STILL waiting for our rebates in the Miriam Green lawsuit against CPAU for overcharging us. Maybe we can celebrate with a 10-yr anniversary party? Let's do another meaningless survey. The statement about how those of us who paid to be undergrounded decades ago have to go to the back of the line for the absurdly costly fiber to the home project is sadly laughable on many counts, including the fact that the city "leafers" A) couldn't answer questions about how undergrounded neighborhoods would get fiber for a month and B) then asked ME which neighborhoods were undegrounded. The city fiber "survey" on the $144,000,000 fiber project was the height of arrogance because A) there was no way to say we DID NOT want it at any of the 13 price points they asked about and B) they were already taking advance deposits so they knew they were going to shove this down our throats.
What an awesome and well-researched story! Thanks and big kudos to Gennady Sheyner and Chris Lee! Re: "Was I charged for under grounding of the power lines elsewhere in the city? If they are going to stop doing it, should everyone with above ground utilities get a refund? Surely this was part of the utility rates." IIRC the zones getting undergrounded had to pay at the time (our zone was done in the 70s). Over the years, the utility rates were indeed supposedly also covering maintenance/repair/replacement of lines, poles, transformers and so forth. Maybe instead that was the money the City siphoned off every year from CPAU to add to the City budget? In any case, the problem with the de-undergrounding existing transformers is not just that the new metal boxes are large and ugly, but that they make noise (from fans) and the homeowner has no say about their location. It's like having an A/C unit plopped into your front yard without being able to locate it toward the edge or back of your property. It's also my understanding that replacing like-with-like (underground with underground for already-undergrounded locations) costs the homeowner more like $30,000 than $10,000, adding injury to insult. :(
Can we just face up to the fact that our electrical grid and all its parts are not working well, and that we have no good solution to that? Surely someone can design a better box if that is what us required. Could we please see a well thought plan that takes costs and quality of life factors into account? The lines are underground on my street, and we generally are not affected by power outages surrounding us. Aesthetically better and reliable. Create an alternate solution that also looks good and works.
Very few town initiatives will have as much a substantive impact on the beauty of our town and the value of our homes. In addition few initiatives like this one will help preserve the beautiful yet fragile tree canopy that our town enjoys. Take a few minutes to visit some of the areas that have the cables underground so you can appreciate this.
Who woulda thunk? It is Palo Alto after all, the self proclaimed "leader" in all things technology. LOL !!!
This was a well done article, but I’d like a little more information please. Some things don’t seem to add up. First, it’s my understanding that one of the advantages of undergrounding is that you then have conduits for lines that make it relatively easy to pull fiber (which can exist with electrical lines) through. That 3rd scenario of pulling fiber through existing underground conduits (which is done all the time) does not seem to have been differentiated from cost overhead vs. new undergrounding. That 3rd scenario is probably complicated by public vs. private access for companies like AT&T. But that’s a separate issue. Secondly, I’m having trouble understanding what was written about Greenacres. Greenacres I is one of the smallest neighborhoods on the City. Why would it need so many aboveground transformers? Also, Greenacres II is a relatively small neighborhood, with undergrounding—I see above ground transformers there already. Am I missing something? And, the City in the past has a bad history of running roughshod over the public there, then being surprised (and retaliatory) when they vociferously object. The fiber should be prioritized based on neighborhoods near our schools. The areas mentioned near startup businesses already often have existing access to T1 lines (that they probably paid for themselves) but neighborhoods near schools could really benefit from fiber. Lastly, financing something like this should be more fair to all residents and can happen through bonds. Typical 30 year terms make the cost manageable for most, especially if the City owned system results in reduced access costs.
This is a huge disappointment. I was told the city had a program to move the wires underground or I would have applied to do it when we renovated 25 years ago.
But never fear, City Council just voted to add two more paid holidays for city workers! (Virtue signaling at its best.) So in addition to PA city residents/taxpayers who will fail to see universal and uniformly undergrounded utilities, you'll be paying city workers two more days a year not to work at all.
@Silver Greenacres I is in underground district 15 on the map above, which is actually slightly bigger than district 6 containing Greenacres II. Dist 15 also contains Fletcher School, Terman Park and the Terman Apartments, which may explain the larger-than-expected transformer count. The mooted "de-parking" of Terman Park, presumably so PAUSD or others can develop that land, would also lead to an increased need for transformer capacity for such development. I believe new construction or rebuilding that requires additional transformer capacity (e.g. upping service from 100A to 200A or 400A) has resulted in individual above-ground boxes in recent years, which may explain your observations in Greenacres II.
With grade separations, for once, please do south PA first before the money runs out and the city never gets to us on that too. North PA already has FIVE existing grade separations. South Palo Alto has ZERO. Nada. NONE. That will be a huge problem when electrified train service increases the frequency of at-grade crossing closures.
Running a huge unfunded city employee retirement deficit is the main reason we the city can not work on sizeable infrastructure projects. Since the .com boom and the showering of benefits, cities have not kept up their infrastructure let alone improve it. Just look at the state of our common transportations, cities had 25 years to improve it and see where we are at today. China build the number one high speed rail network in 10 years, we can not even get an electric train between palo alto and sf. (anyone has taken caltrain lately, dirty, smelly toilets, slow...) .
@ Mondoman Thanks for replying. The article didn't say whether the above-ground transformers in GAI were put in, but there is one over by Terman park and has been for a long time. There are others throughout GAII, have been for a long time, not just recently. Is the article saying there needs to be more? That GAI needs an upgrade with more than it already has? The article just wasn't clear. If the reason for all those transformers was the Terman Apartments and the school, the transformers would go on those properties, not in people's yards, so that doesn't really make sense as the reason. Again, the article indicated that there would need to be just a few in most neighborhoods, but so many more in GAI and GAII--but again, those are some of the smallest neighborhoods in the City, they already have underground and boxes around the neighborhoods. The article was just too vague. (The only thing that wasn't vague was an ongoing disdain for those neighborhoods, which have had to counter the City trying to run a road right through GAI as a shortcut from Arastradero to El Camino by the Cabana Hotel, selling off Fletcher School site for luxury apartments, turning the cross street at Fletcher into a thoroughfare, and of course trying to sell the zoning in GAII instead of putting equivalent money on that side of town as in the North. As much as I appreciate Shaynor's well-written work, he still seems to have a chip on his shoulder like City employees for those neighborhoods simply because they don't want to be run roughshod over. The only thing that was clear about that section was that one of the neighbor's was against something. It really needed more details.)
It looks like we will stop spending money on studies for underground utilties, and funnel more money into studying the transit money grab. We just can't make decisions that make sense. The idea of spending 100 years and "$296.1 million — to convert the remaining 14,100 homes that had overhead wires" is beyond ridiculous. That's over $20k per home. This decision should not have taken this long to reach its inevitable dead end. I have a couple of questions. For all the people who bought homes where utility lines are visible -- were you blindfolded at the open house? Did you sign a contract promising that utilties would be underground at any time, ever? PA seems to be trying to dig gopher holes everywhere, making any structure on or near them a risky proposition. This is just about utilities. Where the city is brokering utilities to residents who shouldn't have to pay for endless increases to pay for unwise politicking and endless studies. I have calculated how much it costs to flush the toilet and i glued a piggy bank to the lid of the tank. I put up a sign that says, if you flush, put 50 cents in the piggy bank. Most months, I find the piggy bank doesn't take in enough to pay the bill. What's wrong with this picture? Same with gas and electricity. I use less and less of it, and pay more and more for it. I'm sick of paying for more studies. We will have more outages as the trees grow taller and are not pruned properly to prevent service outages due to limbs down. The squirrel excuse has already been used. Basically we are overdue for revitalizing the network to prevent what happened last winter. Instead of studying some futuristic impossibility, CPAU should be studying how to upgrade the network at THEIR OWN COST. Not on my dime. We are already paying for this, if you study the bill and look at all of the fees associated with bringing utilities to any dwelling. "The city of Palo Alto does studies all the time." Boy howdy.
If the program is to be closed down, it would be nice to have a report on why it was not successful and lessons learned. Maybe such a report already exists? Other towns with less money than Palo Alto have done undergrounding projects successfully (Oakland foothills for example) so I'm curious why things stalled here. Were we using the wrong funding model? Are there physical impediments specific to Palo Alto? Judging from comments here it doesn't seem like a lack of homeowner interest. I would happily pay $50k tomorrow to have our power lines buried, in part because it would boost our neighborhood's visual appeal.
I'd be interested to hear who made this "quiet" decision without any public input. Isn't that what quality journalism is supposed to cover?
Of course it was ended without a whisper. The most valuble homes along the creek in north PA have underground utilities. Why bother now with the south. This was promised to be completed years ago. So sad that this has not been abandoned.
@ Book Em We live in a nice section of N Palo Alto, have power lines running right behind us and were not included. I am disappointed though the lines haven’t caused trouble for twenty years. Fingers crossed. Insofar as discussing the beauty of PA, once again I entreat our government authorities to take a basic step (the City, County and Caltrans) clean up the dry, tall, unsightly weeds and trash at the major gateway to,our city, 101 and Embarcadero and Oregon Expressway, all directions/cloverleafs/exits/entrances. It is AWFUL that this is such a mess, visibility of drivers is sometimes compromised, the dry weeds are a fire risk and this region should be cleaned up.
" A REVERSAL, THANKS TO FIBER A similar cost calculus applies to Palo Alto's long-awaited effort to upgrade its municipal fiber-optic network. Here, residents in already-underground districts will in most cases find themselves in the back, not the front, of the line." This was obvious to those of us paying attention to the city's push for fiber but NOT to responsible city staff that wasn't even aware some neighborhoods had been undergrounded! It took them more than a month to respond to questions about undergrounded fiber and then another MONTH to ask me, a regular taxpayer, which other neighborhoods had been undergrounded! The city "survey" gave us no way to reject Fiber, esp. since that "survey" asked for advance deposits FOR fiber! Having pushed its $144,000,000 Fiber Project and hired consultants with little or no local knowledge, it's not surprising that the city's cash-constrained. Obviously they all need a few more paid holidays for reflection while unfunded pension liabilities keep soaring
@Anonymous I agree with you on the weeds. This week's city council meeting did include approving big contracts with at least three companies for cleaning and landscape maintenance services, all with hundreds of pages of photos in the legislative document packet showing exactly what areas are covered and what actions are to be taken. You may find what you are looking for in there. @Silver Linings My info on the transformers/equipment boxes in GA I is mostly second- or third- hand. Undergrounding in GA1 was originally done in the early 1970s - electricity, telephone and cable. 30+ years later, CPAU apparently decided they no longer wanted to install equipment in the underground vaults, without consulting with homeowners/ratepayers. At first, this applied to new construction (and there are a few by houses built in the last 10-15 years), but sometime in the 2010s, CPAU suddenly notified GA I homeowners that they would have new metal electrical equipment boxes appearing on their properties as replacements for the formerly-underground equipment. Understandably, GA I homeowners were shocked and much hubbub ensued. Perhaps in order to encourage acquiescence, CPAU quoted very high prices (tens of thousands of dollars) to homeowners who wanted their equipment to remain underground. I think this is what Nina Bell was protesting at the City Council meeting. In the end, the council supported charging the very high charge to keep status quo, but CPAU has decided not to proceed for now, apparently fearing more homeowner backlash. As you note, installing equipment boxes in the Terman area is much less of an aesthetic/noise problem. Perhaps the large count of transformers is the total including those, but only a smaller number GA I are truly problematic. My personal impression is that CPAU has not been willing to meaningfully engage with the homeowners on this, instead pushing it off as far as possible in the future and hoping the issue will go away.
I suspect that if we have another wet winter we will have many outages. The bottom line has to be dependability. We are far from having that now. Efficiency and reliability are something Palo Alto does not value.
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