Editorial | A subterranean grid

Andrew Holness has put the issue of subterranean power lines back on Jamaica’s agenda, but the matter, in the current circumstances, insists on a deeper, and more urgent, discussion than the prime minister allowed in his comment on the question in Parliament on Tuesday.

To be fair to Dr Holness, his remarks were a small part of his summation of the damage caused by the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the island, rather than a strategic analysis of the future of the electricity grid.

However, in the age of global warming and climate change, where extreme weather events are the new normal, the question of where, and how, utilities are run, have to be part of resilience planning of the government of service providers. The increasingly frequent severe damage of electricity grids and the broader economic cost of this, measured in terms of the cost of repair and lost production, have to be factored against the cost of enhancing their resilience.

Therefore, a long-term programme to place the bulk of Jamaica’s power lines underground – starting with new developments and critical, tightly-packed urban commercial centres – must be part of the negotiations of the issuance of a new power transmission and distribution licence, to replace the exclusive one currently held by Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS).

That licence expires in just over a year-and-half and the Holness administration has told the JPS that it won’t be renewed – at least not in its current form. In fact, the government acted under a provision of the contract that required it to give two years notice of its intention to reacquire the light and power company, as a going concern, at the end of the agreement.

It is possible that there are legal frameworks and other interpretations of the licence that would allow JPS (owned by Japan’s Maurubeni Corporation and South Korea’s East-West Power) to continue without having to enter a sale and repurchase agreement.

In that regard, it is important that the government should report on its negotiations with JPS for a new licence, its alternative should they fail to reach an agreement and how these matters are impacting the light and power company’s current posture to reconstruction. These approaches are likely to be different if JPS is rebuilding to satisfy the terms of its licence for its remaining year-and-a-half, or whether it is doing so for a longer haul.

Hurricane Melissa, a category five storm, pummelled the western third of Jamaica with sustained winds of 185 miles an hour, and gusts that reached over 250 mph. It smashed homes and infrastructure, including transmission and distribution systems, including in areas well beyond the direct path of the storm. Hundreds of thousands of people and businesses remain without electricity.

It will cost several hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the grid, as it did last year when Hurricane Beryl side-swiped the island’s south coast, leaving large swathes of the region badly damaged, including of the areas that faced the worst of Melissa.

At that time, The Gleaner, as it has periodically done over many years, raised the prospect of Jamaica placing its electricity transmission and distribution lines underground to save the system from frequent destruction by storms. This idea is not new. It was placed on the agenda in 1988 by the then prime minister, Edward Seaga, after Jamaica was severely battered by Hurricane Gilbert.

The matter, however, was never pursued. Neither has there been any significant public discussion around it as a national policy question. Which has been the case with The Gleaner’s interventions.

However, Prime Minister Holness has now given a nod to the issue in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa.

Dr Holness said that the government had told the JPS to explore the possibility of running some of its lines underground, focusing initially on the tourism corridor leading into the north-western city of Montego Bay.

“Going underground is expensive, so we have to balance between expense and getting the grid up,” Dr Holness said. “But if we’re getting the grid up and we can get some resilience in it, then we have to get the resilience in.”

Placing power grids underground are indeed expensive ventures, costing, depending on the types of subterranean systems used, between three and five times the amount of running them overhead. Their maintenance can also be more challenging, requiring better-trained technicians, as well as specialist, and technologically more advanced, equipment.

That largely explains why it is mostly more developed economies that run substantial segments of transmissions and distribution lines underground; why it happens mostly in compact urban centres; and why JPS has resisted updating, at its cost, the subterranean system in the Kingston suburb of Hope Pastures.

However, implementation costs and maintenance difficulties have to be analysed against the social and economic consequences of having to rebuild grids every few years from the effects of huge storms, whose presence is now the norm for the Caribbean. In the past two years three category five hurricanes have traversed the Caribbean, and the current Atlantic hurricane season isn’t over as yet.

Preliminarily, the damage done by Beryl is estimated at US$6-7 billion, or over a third of GDP. The figure is expected to rise substantially.

Yet, Jamaica could take another hit next year. And the year after that. And so on.

It would make sense therefore, that any rebuilding, especially of infrastructure, should with greater resilience to make them less vulnerable to catastrophes like Melissa. For power transmission and distribution lines that might mean running them underground.

These are not short-term or inexpensive projects. But barring the emergence of new systems and technologies that make these lines obsolete they may well be inevitable.

That is why The Gleaner suggests the government and the regulators open a formal discussion on, say, a 30 to 40-year project to place distribution lines in major urban centres underground and how, and who, would bear the cost of this. Or perhaps more equitably, how that cost is to be shared.