Xcel Colorado begins burying power lines in Boulder County

Finally, after a long planning process, Xcel Energy broke ground on Friday for a project to bury overhead powerlines in Boulder County.

"It's one of the ways in which we're keeping our customers safe," said Robert Kenney, the Xcel Energy of Colorado president.

With Colorado's dry winters and sometimes windy weather, overhead lines have become a wildfire threat to communities. Just this winter, Boulder County residents faced outages because Xcel deenergized the lines on extremely windy days, so that if one blew over, it wouldn't start a fire.

Don Morris is a long-time resident of the Gunbarrel neighborhood directly across from the construction site. He says he doesn't mind the commotion or the project. In fact, he wishes they would do more.

"I thought they were going to bury the high-power lines, but they're not," Morris said.

But just burying the smaller overhead lines is a huge project. Xcel had to get the correct permits from local municipalities as well as stormwater permitting, and have an environmental survey done to protect burrowing owls.

Not to mention, it's expensive. Xcel says it will cost them about $4 million per mile. Still, the company says that isn't stopping them from burying miles of line across the state.

"We've got just over 70 right now queued up for undergrounding. And I'm already looking at the next year's to follow for our undergrounding projects," said Arlyn Parker, project manager for targeted undergrounding.

Morris says he didn't lose power this winter but wants to be safe from wildfire, so he supports the effort.

"That's fine with me," Morris said. 

With that $4 million per mile price tag, you may wonder how Xcel is going to pay for all of this and if your bill will go up. Well, Xcel says that the average bill will go up about $9 per month to pay for the wildlife mitigation plan.