Survey Questions - Edison Electric Institute

Chapter 7: State Policies and Utility Approaches to Undergrounding
provide trenching and conduits for cables and vaults for transformers to help defray some of the
undergrounding costs.
Some state utility commissions have set rules in place (e.g., California Rule 20) that dictate a process by
which municipalities and utilities work together to identify a limited number of facilities that can be
converted to underground each year. Once the conversion is completed, the associated cost is added to the
utilities’ rate base.
Other utilities are running pilot projects. For example, Duke Energy Carolinas will work with municipalities
to place qualifying areas underground. The expenses for these conversion projects are funded by a Duke
fund with municipality matching funds for up to 0.5 percent of Duke’s taxable gross receipts from furnishing
electricity within the municipality. Duke has indicated that very few municipalities have contacted them
about this rate.
Appendix C provides an overview of different company policies for overhead to underground conversions
for the utilities that provided feedback to the EEI survey.
Additional Policies
In the survey, EEI sought to determine if there were other policies that played a role in encouraging the
conversion of overhead facilities to underground. EEI’s survey asked the following additional questions:
� Are there special rate areas associated with these types of conversions?
� Does your public utility commission (PUC) have additional policies that you must comply with
associated with converting existing overhead facilities to underground?
The overall responses to these questions were negative. No utility indicated that they had a special rate for
overhead to underground conversion customers or that their PUCs had additional compliance policies.
36 Edison Electric Institute