This has to be the biggest batch of bullshit excuses I have ever heard. Gas, water, and sewer are all buried, but somehow burying electrical is “impossible”.
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Honestly, I expected it to be impossible.
The stuff that’s already buried was put in as the city was built, and all easements and rights of way were baked into development.
Burying new stuff en masse would require new easements and that would either require negotiated payments or eminent domain and the legal fights that come with it. Even if they managed to get all the land rights needed, there would be a decade of torn up streets, sidewalks, back yards, etc to deal with before it was all buried.
Most of this right of way is already owned by the city, state, or county. It’s where the telephone poles are dug in and the water lines are buried. Most electrical in the city follows road routes and could be placed under bike lanes, sidewalks, and roads.
Torn up streets are nothing new in Austin. Might as well start integrating it into existing road and sidewalk projects.
Robolemmy is right. The right of way where lines would be buried is mostly private property with a utility easement. Most of the mileage that needs to be buried are lines that run along the backside of single family lots, and then the line that runs to the house would also need to be buried. This would entail tearing up many thousands of properties.
The lines in my neighborhood, built in '82, are already buried. If AE had to come dig up the entire line along my block, it would cause catastrophic damage to every single home’s backyard. We’re not talking about burying coax line or fiber, electrical lines are going 4-5 feet deep. In my neighborhood, the telecom lines are buried on top of the electrical too. Imagine having to lay a new electrical conduit beneath existing telecom lines.
You’re really underestimating how labor-intensive excavation is, especially when you’re talking about lines that crisscross existing infrastructure. $50 billion for this work is absolutely in alignment with realistic expectations.
All this said, the only reason this is on the table is because of the outages we had in '23, when ice took down lines all over the city. I can’t even remember when anything like that happened before, and it hasn’t happened since, so reactively spending a bunch of money to avoid some people having another rare 48-72hr outage seems unwise.
I wonder how much $250 billion in liability insurance would cost Austin Energy?
