Burying Electric Lines On 10th Would Be Costly

As Cookeville’s 10th Street prepares for widening, many question if power lines along the entrance way could be buried.

Cookeville Electric Director Carl Haney said many of the 10th Street power lines have five times more voltage than your regular power line. Haney said the price tag to bury those lines can skyrocket.

“Once you bury those lines, the insulation that has to be on them gets to such a magnitude, it’s not that they can’t be buried it’s just that it becomes not-feasible because of the cost involved,” Haney said.

For reference, Haney said a normal distribution line can cost $1,000,000 per mile. The more powerful lines running along parts of 10th Street would cost over $1,000,000 dollars to bury per quarter mile.

“We got a preliminary cost estimate from an engineering consultant a couple years ago when the developer first bought it and was looking at that, and at that time that preliminary cost estimate was about $1.15 million dollars for that 1,300 feet,” Haney said.

Once you can go underground though, the connection to businesses have to go underground as well. Haney said this makes the expenditure continue to go up.

“If you went up and lets use Jefferson or Willow, those businesses have overhead services to them and you also have to convert those, then again your costs just keep going up and up,” Haney said.

Haney said subdivisions and residential areas are really where burying lines makes the most sense.