Before and after
19. Undergrounding, Governors Island, and TikTok
Note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of Energy Impact Partners.
Underground power lines
It almost feels silly to say, but the electrical grid is really, really important. It’s the largest, most complex machine ever built, and more or less every modern innovation is stacked on top of it. People die and businesses fail when the grid goes down. It deserves protection, maintenance, and upgrades once in a while.
Over the next few decades, I think we’re going to find that the grid is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The rock: increasing threats from climate change. The hard place: our increasing reliance on electricity as we decarbonize the economy. One way or another, we’re going to be asking more of a more stressed grid.
In the US, we can already see this happening. In 2013, the average US utility customer experienced less than four hours of service interruption. In 2021, she experienced more than seven. The difference is due to “major events,” which is the US Energy Information Administration’s term for natural disasters. We talked about this a few months ago, but it’s still not great.
There is, of course, a lot that grid operators and technologists can do about this situation:
We can redirect how power flows through the grid to make it more resilient to shocks. Switched Source is a startup engineering existing “tie points” on the grid to do just this.
We can strategically reduce demand at times of peak stress through pre-arranged agreements to turn down water heaters, air conditioning, and so on. EnerNOC pioneered this approach during the mid-2000s.
We can harden the grid infrastructure we already have. EIP portfolio company RS Technologies has developed composite poles that excel in extreme weather.
We can time-shift loads by storing electricity in strategic locations on the grid. Many battery companies are working on this.
We can devise better backup options for when the grid does go down. Rooftop solar and battery storage do this.
When the political winds are just right, we can simply build more grid to handle more electricity.
There are certainly others.
But there’s an unsung hero of a technology I think we ought to take another look at: putting electrical infrastructure underground.
Undergrounding is awesome. It reduces outages, it takes advantage of a skill we already have (drilling lots of holes in the ground), and it’s just more pleasant. Look at this before-and-after from Hermosa Beach, CA. After undergrounding, you can suddenly see the whole sky.
There are, of course, a few challenges: digging up the earth is slow and expensive, it’s harder to repair buried cables, and it just doesn’t make sense in some areas based on subsurface and surface factors. So as you might imagine, there’s a wide range of costs associated with undergrounding power lines. A series of studies aggregated here by ARPA-E highlights how extreme this range is.
To make some sense of this, let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say that we’re in a fairly expensive area, and we’re contemplating installing lines for the first time. Overhead lines cost $5MM per mile, and underground lines cost $15MM per mile, so there’s a difference of $10MM per mile.1 That’s our cost.
One key measure of success in undergrounding is failures avoided. A rule of thumb is that overhead lines fail about 90 times per 100 miles per year, while underground lines fail fewer than 10 times per 100 miles per year. So let’s say that by undergrounding, we avoid 80 outages per 100 miles per year. That’s our benefit.
That gives us:
($10MM / mile) / (80 outages / 100 miles / year)
$10MM / (0.8 outages / year)
$12.5MM yr / outage
So in this made-up, oversimplified scenario, we spend $12.5MM per outage avoided per year. Is that worth it?
That’s a complicated question — it depends! How many people and businesses are served by that line? What about government and military? How are funds raised and allocated in that service territory? If we’re talking about a town of 100, that’s one thing ($125k/person),2 but if we’re talking about a city of 100,000 with some critical infrastructure, it’s another thing entirely ($125/person + intangibles). Again, these are made-up numbers, but I think they illustrate something real. Today, undergrounding power lines is a tradeoff between cost and quality of service. We have to want it.
I’m hopeful that someday it will be an easier trade to make. We’ve gotten good at putting holes in the ground cheaply, so why can’t we improve here? To that end, ARPA-E recently launched a funding program called GOPHURRS, whose goal is to reduce undergrounding costs by at least 50%. The main categories they’re targeting are 1) autonomous drilling and casing, 2) improved sensing and surveying, and 3) automated joint installations and advanced slicing. I’m watching with great interest — there’s a lot of technology we can bring to bear on these challenges.
Needless to say, if you’re working on this, please get in touch.
The next climate tech hub?
Long-time readers will know that I’m interested in climate tech hubs. Innovation happens fastest when people have lots of effective collisions, and I believe that that will continue to be rooted in specific places for a while. So it caught my eye when I saw that Governors Island in New York is going to be the site of a $700MM climate campus:
On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams announced a $700 million campus dedicated to finding solutions to address the climate crisis.
The city chose a consortium led by Stony Brook University to transform one of the island’s last big chunks of developable land into a 400,000-square-foot hub called the “New York Climate Exchange.” The campus, which will focus on researching climate solutions and training for green jobs, is expected to open in 2028.
The climate hub will serve as a “living laboratory” that features resilient design, with renderings showing shiny sloped buildings covered in vegetation that are intended to evoke the hills of Governors Island. It will include two newly constructed classroom and research buildings on three acres of land that are currently undeveloped and will also make use of some historic buildings on the island. The existing public amenities will remain.
Will this help transform NYC into a climate hub? I hate to be that guy, but… I don’t really see it. Here’s why.
Let’s start with the original framework from 2021. Any climate tech hub has five things: lots of tech talent, two or more major research universities, abundant capital, accessible office and lab space, and a strong culture. In my judgment, New York was good on tech talent, great on capital, great on universities, poor on infrastructure, and so-so on culture. Overall yellow:
This new campus seems like it should go a long way: build it and they will come. By easing the infrastructure constraint, you’ll debottleneck the whole hub. Right? Alas, there are a few reasons I don’t think it actually will do that:
You can only get to Governor’s Island by ferry.3 I suppose this could be a good way to build a tight-knit community on the island, but it doesn’t really tap into the city’s broader talent pool.
Columbia and NYU are missing from the consortium. No disrespect to Stony Brook, which does some of the world’s best work in applied math and materials science, but if this is really going to move the needle, the city’s top two universities for founders should probably be involved. Also, Georgia Tech is involved for some reason?
Last but not least, it’s not clear this center will be productive anytime soon. If everything goes according to schedule, the campus won’t open until 2028, let alone hit its stride. Recent history of major infrastructure projects in the city isn’t promising, but universities are at least good at building.
I hope I’m wrong — we could use more climate hardware startups in NYC — but unfortunately, this one feels like yet another city trying to create Silicon Valley in its backyard. That usually doesn’t go well.
This week on climate TikTok
If Tuvalu disappears into the ocean, what happens to its very popular top-level domain, .tv?
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I’ll just call this one “Carbon Offsets.”
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People love to hate it, but it’s clear to me that TikTok is a great app. Yeah, I waste too much time on it, and yeah, I’m concerned about the data I’m handing over to the Chinese government, but it’s a fun and fascinating place to spend some time. And holy cow, is its recommendation algorithm powerful. If Instagram is like a Camry, TikTok is like a Ferrari. The app speeds straight toward your interests, but it also turns on a dime. You do have to be careful with it.
I like to highlight climate and energy TikToks here because I’m interested in how these things I care about show up on what’s become one of the most popular platforms in history. In some ways, TikTok is downstream of technology, but in other ways it’s upstream — shaping who sees what, when, and in what context. You could imagine it bring millions of climate warriors into battle, or turning millions off entirely. Either way, it’s important to understand. Every new media platform has winners and losers. I’m doubtful there will be a ban,4 so we in the climate tech world might want to get good at this one.
Elsewhere:
Thanks for reading!
Please share your thoughts and let me know where I mess up:
For simplicity, we’ll also ignore any cost difference in operations and maintenance.
The Rural Electrification Administration was created to serve cases like this.
As an aside, it’s worth marveling at the phrase “three acres of land that are currently undeveloped” in reference to an island off of Manhattan. New York is a strange place.
And so are forecasters.