City Utilities of Springfield, Mo., has created an educational video explaining the challenges and advantages of placing existing transmission lines underground.
In 2025, City Utilities experienced widespread damage from two major storms. The April 29 storm caused more than 50% of customers to lose power, while the June 29 storm impacted roughly 35% of customers, noted Jamie Presley, Manager of Communications for the public power utility.
Both storms brought significant tree damage across the service area, resulting in numerous broken poles and downed power lines. In total, crews replaced 402 utility poles and more than 120,000 feet of service wire as part of restoration efforts.
“Following the storms, many customers asked why more electric lines are not buried underground,” Presley noted.
To help answer those questions, City Utilities created the educational video explaining the advantages and challenges of underground electric infrastructure, including reliability, restoration considerations and cost impacts.
The video has been shared across City Utilities’ social media channels as part of a broader customer education campaign focused on electric outages and system restoration, she noted.
The campaign launched in March and aimed to provide customers with a better understanding of how the electric system operates, what causes outages and the work required to safely restore power after major storm events, Presley said.
In the video, James Case, Electric Line Operations Manager at the utility, notes that almost all new construction going in -- “be it subdivisions or commercial, almost all of that is going to go underground.”
With respect to existing overhead lines, studies have been done in the past “and we’d be looking at somewhere north of $1 million to $2 million per mile of overhead line if we’re going to convert that to underground,” Case said in the video.
“To put that into perspective, we have twelve to 1,400 miles of overhead lines. We’d be looking at somewhere” in the range of $3 billion to $5 billion in costs tied to placing those lines underground, he said. “That’s just not a cost we can absorb. It would require rate increases in a very specific decision to make that move.”
Case also points out that undergrounding transmission lines does not mean there will not be any power outages experienced by a utility’s customers.
