Trees precariously balanced on power lines, dragging them down to the ground, surrounded by darkened streetlights and homes.
Road-closed signs warning of downed electrical cables ahead.
The sound of chainsaws wielded by line workers trying to safely remove felled trees and restore electricity to homes, schools, doctors' offices, and businesses.
The smell of gasoline-powered generators for those intrepid enough to keep them filled.
These year-round scenes are becoming more common in Windham County, as harder, heavier, more destructive weather events hit rural roads and busy villages more frequently.
Tropical storms dump unprecedented amounts of water, which flows downhill from the higher elevations, eroding the landscape along the way as it floods the deep valleys.
With its hilly terrain, Windham County has recently seen some of the worst, and most frequent, power outages in the state.
Every time the lines come down and the power goes out, crews rush in from around Vermont and beyond to try to quickly and safely restore electricity as soon as possible.
These expenses show up on ratepayers' electric bills.
These power outages make Vermont less safe for its aging population where more elders have been encouraged to "age in place," far from the hospitals and medical facilities that brace for such impacts. Patients bring home oxygen machines and other necessary medical devices. They all need electricity.
In response, Vermont's largest electrical provider, Green Mountain Power (GMP), has started the Zero Outages Initiative (ZOI), a project that uses a three-pronged approach - burying cables on back roads, strengthening lines on main roads, and boosting energy storage - to maximize the utility's ability to keep the juice on no matter what the wind and clouds bring.
The goal of the investment, which GMP has said in testimony to the Vermont Public Utility Commission (PUC) could total up to $1.5 billion is zero outages for all GMP customers by 2030. This is according to the petition the utility submitted to the PUC in 2023 seeking approval for a 3.55% rate increase to raise $280 million for the first two years of the initiative. It was granted last fall.
The work has begun. And, according to GMP Vice President of Operations Michael Burke, nearly every town in Windham County is on the list to receive these improvements.
The following towns have either already seen crews out on the roads, or they will start making the improvements this year or next: Brattleboro, Dover, Dummerston, Grafton, Guilford, Halifax, Jamaica, Londonderry, Marlboro, Newfane, Putney, Rockingham, Stratton, Townshend, Wardsboro, Westminster, Whitingham, and Wilmington.
The Brattleboro Department of Public Works published an announcement recently, alerting those planning to drive on Ames Hill that this major utility project has begun. It will last until the fall, and drivers are urged to use caution to help keep workers and other travelers safe. ["Green Mountain Power begins underground utility project on Ames Hill," Around the Towns, Aug. 20].
The main lines in Londonderry will be next, along with Weston Village in Windsor County, said Burke. Guilford's work will also begin soon.
A county's unique topography
Of all the counties in Vermont, why is Windham County at the top of the list for the zero outages project?
It's the topography, said Burke.
"Because of the ridgeline and the storm damage it brings, we're focusing on southeastern Vermont - Windham County and southern Windsor County - and central Vermont. These are the places that have been hardest hit," he said, so the work begins there.
It's not just the county's topography, though, Burke noted. It's also climate change.
"I've been doing operations for Green Mountain Power since 2008," said Burke. Since then, "we're seeing more and more frequent and fierce storms."
Burke pointed out that, as we saw in decades past, a 20-degree day with 20 inches of snow "brought what we used to call 'Chamber of Commerce' snow, because everyone would come up and go skiing," bringing visitors - and revenue - to the area.
Instead, while climate change may bring us more storms, they are not lucrative. They are costly. Higher temperatures bring heavy, wet snow. Ice storms. More damage to buildings, trees, roads, bridges, and power lines.
The dangers are not limited to winter. The Public Utility Commission agrees with GMP on the utility's statement that "In the summer, tropical downpours that quickly inundate communities will happen more frequently."
In the fall and spring, "the higher moisture content in the warmer air leads to stronger and deeper low-pressure systems that create damaging gradient wind events that interact with Vermont's geography by down-sloping and gaining speed down ridge lines and into communities," GMP said in the petition. "These wind events are also increasing in both frequency and intensity."
"We often see Category 1–force wind gusts here," Burke told The Commons.
According to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, described on the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center, a Category 1 event includes sustained winds of 74–95 mph.
"Large branches of trees will snap and shallowly rooted trees may be toppled," the site says. "Extensive damage to power lines and poles likely will result in power outages that could last a few to several days."
Burke pointed out that Halifax has been particularly challenging to keep powered because "the whole town is at about 1,700 feet elevation, which is pretty high. This means more ice, wet snow, and high winds." (By comparison, the lowest elevation in the county, in Vernon, is approximately 325 feet above sea level.)
Halifax, a town on the Massachusetts border, also has a low population density: People are spread out along mostly dirt and gravel roads. Fewer than 780 people live in a town with just under 40 square miles. Compare that to Brattleboro, with 12,184 residents living on 32 square miles of land.
These conditions - geographic and demographic - make Halifax residents especially vulnerable to live in the dark when storms roll in.
But, with ZOI, that is changing.
Anticipating work in Guilford
Just over the border in Guilford, work will soon begin on Stage Road and River Road, Town Administrator Erika Elder told The Commons.
At its Aug. 25 meeting, the Guilford Selectboard unanimously approved GMP's request to do an undergrounding project on River Road. Tim Jones, a program manager for the utility, noted an agreement with the town had been amended and clarified at Elder's request to include information on offset distances and culvert work.
Jones told the Selectboard the utility will provide two weeks' notice in anticipation of any work done, and there will be no hard road closures without a minimum of 24 to 48 hours. GMP will also provide all road signs, including electronic signs, if the town would like them, alerting travelers of the work.
GMP representatives have come to three meetings in the past few months. They first proposed the project in June, she said, and gave the town the agreement to sign.
"We revised the agreement a bit, using other towns' feedback with what to look out for," said Elder.
"We were concerned with cleanup, and GMP's need to cut through some culverts. We would like minimal destruction of property for homeowners and businesses," she said, as well as for the utility "to replace the correct culverts and lay down enough gravel" in the areas where the cables are buried.
"The road should look the same way it did before they started the work," said Elder.
She noted the project includes installing some terminals near people's houses. These cabinets connect the lines, coming up from their soon-to-be underground location, to the individual homes.
"Then, if a tree falls on the line, it will only knock the power out for one house, not a whole bunch of them," said Elder.
At the Aug. 25 meeting, Steve Lembke, who lives on River Road, said he approves of the work, as long as adequate notice is given to residents. Elder reported she, too, had received comments from residents in favor of the project.
"The work hasn't started in Guilford yet," said Elder, noting that the utility expects "to be totally done in October."
More storms equal higher power bills
Rising electricity bills was the subject of a recent episode of the 1A, a public affairs radio broadcast on WAMU, American University Radio and distributed nationally, including on Vermont Public, by NPR.
On the Aug. 20 show, host Jenn White interviewed Charles Hua, founder and executive director of PowerLines, a national energy consumer nonprofit organization, and Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap News, a publication focusing on climate and decarbonization news.
Nationally, said Meyer, "electricity prices over the past year have risen twice as fast as inflation overall."
Hua explained that the three major components guiding how electricity rates are calculated are generation, transmission infrastructure - which includes power plants and the poles and wires associated with them - and distribution infrastructure, such as the local poles and wires running in your neighborhood and to your home.
"It's the latter two. It's the grid infrastructure, the poles and wires, that have been the fastest drivers of utility bill increases over the last few years," said Hua.
Meyer detailed the biggest ways climate change puts pressure on this infrastructure. Due to more, and more severe, natural disasters such as storms and wildfires, more poles and wires come down more often. Then, he said, "line crews surge in [...] from all around the country [to] rebuild all that power infrastructure very quickly."
The utility companies then ask their public utility regulators - the Public Utility Commission, in Vermont's case - to allow them to rebuild, said Hua, and "they recover those costs from ratepayers."
Using the same repair methods on the same lines with every heavy storm means the utility acts like a dog chasing its own tail.
GMP is aware of this dynamic.
"We keep fixing the same things," said Burke. "It's more cost-effective to do [the ZOI] work."
"The goal is to invest in solutions that are lasting," said Kristin Carlson, the utility's vice president of strategic and external affairs. She continued, "Let's save customers money in how we respond to storms."
Burying and spacing
Burying power lines in a county with old trees and houses spaced far apart along twisting, unpaved roads seems like an obvious choice.
"We've done 1,500 miles of undergrounding cable so far," said Burke.
Who is digging all those trenches, though? The utility's crews do all of the work, at no cost to the towns.
Burke said GMP's "great new trenching machine" - measuring 10 feet long and 12 inches wide - digs into the dirt and gravel roads. It then lays the cable. "Then, we come in behind it and tamp down the road harder than we found it," he said.
The trencher wheels can even cut through small pieces of ledge, said Burke.
"We're doing this in really rural areas," he said, "where we have the most trouble with outages."
The ZOI also includes storm-hardening the above-ground lines. The lines hang from plastic, triangular spacer cables, ½ inch in diameter. The wires are relaxed and covered with solid steel, explained Burke.
He said the manufacturer of these cables asserts that they "help 90% of lines stay up, preventing weather outages."
The third component of ZOI is energy storage - "essentially," said Carlson, "a battery."
These large devices can be installed in homes and businesses, and, once the technology is finalized, they will be able to send power back to the grid, even to electric vehicles. ["An end to power outages?" News, Nov. 8, 2023].
An existing program allows residential customers to lease home batteries, such as Tesla Powerwalls, from GMP.
The batteries are installed in the home and they remain charged. When the grid goes down, the batteries provide seamless power to the home. The only way the user will know their home's electricity is coming from the battery and not the grid is through an alert from an app on their smartphone.
During times of high community usage, the battery sends power back to the grid. When a storm approaches, the batteries fully charge and no electricity is returned to the grid.
The utility pays for installation, and customers lease the batteries for 10 years by paying either $5,500 up front or a $55 surcharge to their monthly electric bill.
Carlson said "thousands of customers" across the state are using battery storage in this way.
The next step, she said, is for GMP to enlist "new innovations, like electric vehicles, for bidirectional charging. It's really exciting. Your electric vehicle is essentially a battery on wheels, to power your home during severe or damaging weather." Burke noted there are "lots of companies working on this technology."
While other locales have buried their power lines - including Vermont, in some form, for the past half century, said Burke - the combination of the three strategies is unique to GMP, according to Carlson.
"We're putting together the undergrounding of lines, we're storm-hardening the above-ground lines, and we're using energy storage to keep customers powered even when there's been damage to the grid," said Carlson, who added, "We invested money to do this. We're the first in the nation."
But does it work?
So far it has, said Burke.
"In the small areas where we've done this work, we're seeing drastic reductions in outages, responses, and costs, because we have not had to make repairs," Burke said.
He gave an example. In mid-February of this year, "for 76 hours straight there was a high-wind warning [for Halifax]. Because we undergrounded and storm-hardened the lines, the main line stayed on the whole time."
"It was not that way in the past," Burke said.
This News item by Wendy M. Levy was written for The Commons.