VIDEO: ‘This is urgent’ – Seattle City Light tells councilmembers what’s wrong with our power system and what it’ll cost to fix

By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

“This is urgent.” That’s how Seattle City Light leaders summarized what they say the utility needs to deal with challenges both new and longrunning.

The briefing for the Sustainability, City Light, Arts and Culture Committee this morning (starting 45 minutes into the video above) was meant to answer questions such as “why so many power outages” – they acknowledged outages are more numerous, and longer, than their target numbers. But they only discussed the 40 percent of outages they say are caused by infrastructure problems such as equipment failure. “We need to focus on not being the cause of our own outages,” declared City Light CEO Dawn Lindell.

To get to that point, City Light reps said, it will cost almost three and a half billion dollars. They say SCL is still suffering from “historically underfunded and deferred maintenance,” staff cuts, and other problems dating back to money woes from the 2001 Enron scandal.

One of the biggest points of failure: Direct-buried underground cables. That’s the kind currently being replaced in Brace Point; SCl says it has 330 miles of it but they’ve been replacing it so slowly, some of it could be more than a century old before they ever get to it.

Above ground, problems include various components that tend to fail, including lots of small parts with a big impact on reliability. Replacement of such parts has to accelerate to three times the current rate, said Andrew Strong, the City Light executive who did most of the talking. He added that, as seen in other states, transmission-line trouble can spark fires, which are not only devastating to victims, but costly to those culpable – he mentioned one utility’s multi-billion-dollar settlement.

Then there’s the issue of capacity. The demand on the system keeps increasing – the Port of Seattle, alone, for example, needs a new substation because of electrification – ships, trucks, etc.

So City Light is facing building a new substation on Harbor Island that will cost around a half-billion dollars. And they might need a new substation for the south part of their service area (which stretches into Burien). The other potential factors that could increase future demand on the system were listed as including Sound Transit light rail, bus electrification, University of Washington expansion, and new data centers (they have seen proposals for at least five).

In addition to the natural increase of cost with time, City Light – like so many other organizations and companies – is dealing with the uncertainties of tariffs. And a shortage in personnel – Strong said they don’t have enough engineers, field crews, etc., to meet increasing demand. They need technology upgrades too, added Lindell: “Electricity moves at the speed of light,” so they need technology that does, too. (She said that would be the subject of a future presentation.)

So where will the $3.4 billion come from? Some, from rates, the City Light executives readily acknowledged. And that includes a careful analysis of the big customers, they said, ensuring “the right rate burden” falls on “the right customer.”

Back to the topic of outages, there was one brief mention of remedying the tree-vs-line conflicts that have been to blame for so many in areas like ours. Though the old-style direct-buried underground cables are a source of trouble now, modern undergrounding can solve some problems, and is being explored for some areas, they said. (We’ll be following up on that.)

Today’s discussion was just a briefing, nothing to be voted on, so after questions (Councilmember Dan Strauss was very interested in the technical points), it ended, Here’s the full slide deck from which we pulled a few individual graphics shown above.