Did you know that our top causes of outages include vehicle accidents hitting our equipment or trees outside of our right of way falling on our equipment? Many customers ask us, “Why can’t you just bury your lines to avoid those outages?” It’s an important question, and there are pros and cons when it comes to underground wires. Hear from one of AEP Ohio’s underground construction supervisors in the video below.
We seek out individual solutions for all our customers and their communities. Decisions are made after careful analysis and planning by our engineers, who consider factors such as right of way, the location of trees, distance to a power source and ease of repair. It’s also important to note that when there’s an outage, it takes us longer to restore power if the wires are underground versus overhead.
Should you ever have questions about electrical equipment on your property or concerns about service reliability, please feel free to contact us at 800-672-2231.
90% of low voltage and 73% of medium voltage lines are underground in Germany. Many other European countries also have a high percentage of underground lines. The only reason AEP does not do this is “cost” which actually means profit for AEP. That video was lame in its misleading information. It is actually the case that damage to underground lines is less likely than above ground thereby requiring less maintenance. You can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all the time.