Now that the second nor’easter in less than a week is over, I have grave doubts on the ability of our electric utilities to keep the lights on.

As I am writing this today JCP&L has 129, 000 customers without service while PSE&G has 83,000. Somehow this seems to be a bit too high a set of numbers, especially for JCP&L. After Superstorm Sandy both utilities were assuring the public that they would make sure that the massive power outages that happened would not occur again.

From PSE&G own website, “Energy Strong infrastructure projects completed to date include:

• Raised, eliminated or rebuilt 18 substations or switching stations that flooded during severe weather events. At the end of the program, 26 projects will be in service, including protected and eliminated substations and switching stations.
• Installed 240 miles of new, sturdy and durable plastic natural gas pipes in flood-prone areas. Approximately 90,000 customers served by those pipes are no longer at risk of losing gas service from floodwaters seeping into these previously leak-prone mains.
• Created redundancy and installed technology to reduce the number and duration of outages for 260 critical customers, including hospitals, wastewater treatment facilities, and police and fire stations. Also benefiting from this work are 412,500 customers and businesses in close proximity to critical customers.

In addition to making New Jersey’s energy system stronger, the work is benefiting the state’s economy by creating thousands of jobs over the life of the program.

“Our Energy Strong investments have gone a long way in making our system better able to stand up to severe weather events,” Latka said. “But there is much more to be done. We have aging equipment that needs focused replacement programs, and a need to make the grid smarter, raise more stations in flood prone areas, and protect more customers against weather and gas supply outages.””

That does sound great and PSE&G even further had a program to cut back trees that might fall onto their power lines. And yet there were massive power outages during both of the nor’easters we experienced, so what is wrong with how our electric grid is maintained?

Well one major problem is that it is above ground on poles that are subject to the weather and to vehicles striking them and downing the electric lines. The second is that the power substations are still subject to weather related damage, from being flood-prone to having a tree limb fall and/or be blown into the equipment.

The answer to this is to put the power lines underground and the substations need to be covered to protect them from the weather. The problem is that putting the lines underground is that it costs a lot of money to do and the cost of maintaining them would be much more than the current lines on poles system.

So what is the solution, well in my own opinion it is to underground the most critical sections of our power distribution grid and reevaluate how we string the power lines on poles. What I would like to see is instead of just an insulating material surrounding the copper conductor power lines, that instead a outer load bearing shielding material surround the insulating material so that when a tree limb impact or serve icing happens this load bearing shielding would be able to prevent the line from parting. Right now our high voltage transmission lines are, “Most of the hundreds of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines in this country are made solely of metal—either aluminum or aluminum wrapped around a steel core.”

So why not do this for the residential power lines? Because it would be cost prohibitive would be the answer from the power companies and yet it would prevent the lines from coming down. So while both choices are expensive something has to be done or the power company’s customers will continue to suffer from more and more power outages.

That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike