As in Arlington, the discussion of undergrounding power lines has been on the minds of a lot of folks in Alexandria.
The scope of outages hit a breaking point in Alexandria in 2021 when a widespread power outage derailed the Art on the Avenue festival, sparking a new battle between city leaders and Dominion Energy.
Dominion’s been working on improvements to the city’s infrastructure, but city leaders still say there’s a long way to go toward making the city’s power grid reliable.
Last year, Alan Bradshaw, vice president of strategic partnerships for Dominion Energy, told ALXnow that undergrounding all utilities in Alexandria would be outlandishly expensive.
Northern Virginia Magazine previously reported that the price tag for state-wide undergrounding is around $80 billion. Dominion has said undergrounding utilities isn’t just costly, it’s complicated as well — needing easements to access properties for undergrounding work.
So, like ARLnow, we’re wondering: should Dominion Energy step up its undergrounding efforts or are you mostly content with the current improvement plans?