DOE Invests in Tech to Move Power Lines Underground

The federal government is investing in new technologies that will facilitate a large-scale infrastructure upgrade to the nation’s electricity system to protect it from increasing vulnerability to extreme weather events.

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced that it is funding a $34M pilot program to develop a dozen advanced technologies designed to dramatically lower the cost of moving electric power lines underground.

The U.S. electric system has close to 6M miles of line, as well as an estimated 180M power poles. The entire system has exposure to the weather, which is the cause of most power outages.

The California Public Utilities Commission, which has explored moving power lines underground as a means of avoiding wildfires from sparks, surveyed investor-owned utilities who estimated the cost of moving lines underground ranges from $1.85M per mile to more than $6M per mile, according to a report in Smart City Dive.

“Undergrounding power lines is a proven way of improving system reliability for both transmission and distribution goals,” DOE said in a release announcing a program it is calling Grid Overhaul with Proactive, High-speed Undergrounding for Reliability, Resilience, and Security.

The acronym is GOPHURRS, and yes, it will involve a lot of digging. The program is being run by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, the energy version of DOD’s DARPA skunk works, which gave us the Internet and stealth technology.

The projects, which are being developed by national labs, universities and tech businesses spread across 11 states, include a robotic worm tunneling tool and an AI-driven system that will use geophysical survey data to create digital twin and augmented reality tools to direct undergrounding installations.

GE Vernova Advanced Research is developing the robotic worm tunneling tool, which it is calling SPEEDWORM. The worm tool, which will be able to fit on a pickup truck, will dig and install conduit and cable at the same time.

Prysmian Cables & Systems is working on a hands-free power cable splicing machine that can be inserted into a utility access hole for laser cutting that will be directed by a vision system augmented with machine learning.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has received $4M from DOE to develop the AI-driven digital twin that will identify subsurface obstacles before installing underground power distribution lines.

RTX Technology Research Center has a $4M grant to develop a mobile sensing platform that will deploy radar using AI-driven quantum radio frequency sensing to locate existing utility lines.