Editorial | Discuss subterranean power lines

By Daryl Vaz’s best estimate, it could be up to six weeks before the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) can fully restore power to all its 680,000 customers.

It won’t take that long for the telecommunications services providers to have their systems fully functioning. But it will be days before all subscribers of Cable and Wireless (Flow) and Digicel have unimpeded access to the Internet and mobile telephone.

This is one of the effects of Hurricane Beryl’s passage just south of Jamaica last Wednesday.

To be clear, Jamaica didn’t, as was threatened, take a direct hit from the storm as it passed the island as a category four hurricane. It had tracked a bit to the south in its westerly movement.

So, by late afternoon on Wednesday, the northern eyewall of the storm was “brushing” Jamaica’s south coast, which probably explains why the island’s south-central and south-western regions appear to have taken the biggest hit from Beryl.

Given what happened, what would have been the case if the storm had maintained its original path and slammed frontally into Jamaica as a category five hurricane, as was the forecast up to Tuesday night?

The answer, on its face, we fear, would have been major devastation. Which raises the question, previously posed by this newspaper, of what is to be done to harden Jamaica’s infrastructure, especially its utilities, against future storms and associated natural disasters.

BROKE RECORDS

Beryl broke records as an Atlantic hurricane. It morphed into a tropical storm and hurricane further to the east than any previously recorded system for the Atlantic hurricane season. And it became a major hurricane faster than any before. Within two days of its formation, it reached category four.

Those records, unfortunately, are unlikely to be long-lasting. For while the onset of the La Niña weather phenomenon, with the lessening of the upper-level wind shear, may have aided Beryl’s early development, the general conditions for the aggressive formation of tropical storms are becoming the norm.

Global warming has made Earth hotter. And warmer, rising seas provide conditions conducive to more, bigger and more aggressive storms.

Countries like Jamaica have to be better prepared for them, even as the world’s big powers drag their feet in taking action to mitigate the catastrophe of climate change that small, vulnerable countries, like those in the Caribbean, did very little to cause. This region accounts for no more than two per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that is heating Earth.

Securing the national grid and telecoms infrastructure from storms is one of the things that demands urgent attention. Or, at least robust discussion.

When Hurricane Gilbert ravaged Jamaica in 1988, it cost the country an estimated 90 per cent of its GDP. Eighty per cent of the island’s homes lost their roofs; many were totally destroyed. The electricity transmission and distribution systems collapsed. Some people had to wait nearly a year for the return of electricity.

Such data, however, doesn’t readily tell of Gilbert’s full impact. The lack of power severely compromised production and productivity.

Sixteen years later, in 2004, Hurricane Ivan, though not nearly to the extent of Gilbert, also caused significant damage in Jamaica. Electricity transmission and distribution system were damaged. The repair cost was put at over J$1 billion (2004 dollars).

HAPPEN AGAIN

Since then, storms, though to a lesser degree, have damaged the power infrastructure. It will happen again, with more plentiful, bigger and more dangerous in the offing.

As the The Gleaner has reminded several times, in Gilbert’s aftermath, the then prime minister, Edward Seaga, floated the idea of the subterranean laying of Jamaica’s utilities cables. Mr Seaga lost power the following year. Since then, there has been no significant public discussion of the issue, although fibre-optic trunk lines for telecommunications systems are generally placed underground.

This hasn’t happened for light and power. Indeed, at Hope Pastures, sole community which was planned with subterranean power cables over 60 years ago, residents are in a long-running court battle with the JPS over who should pay for any rebuilding of the system, which the company says is obsolete. Its mandate, JPS says, is to deliver power via overhead cables.

There is, however, an opportunity to place this matter on the national agenda, especially given Beryl’s impact on the utilities.

In January a joint select committee completed a long, meandering, stop-start review of Jamaica’s Electricity Act. The committee’s work was halted at the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, ostensibly to allow the government to take stock of the global energy environment.

It is not clear how that supposed review informed the committee’s work. In any event, its report hasn’t yet been tabled to guide any amendments to the existing law. This is important given that the law will inform any decision to renew JPS’s licence, which expires in 2027, as the monopoly transmitter and distributor of light and power.

There is no evidence that the parliamentary review group debated the subterranean placement of power cables. In the event, it might make sense for Mr Vaz, the energy minister, to reconvene or cause to be reconstituted, the joint select committee to look at this aspect of Jamaica’s electricity grid. The Office of Utilities Regulation, the industry regulator, should be asked to prepare a study of the matter.

Running underground power lines is more expensive than doing so via overhead pylons and poles – by three times and more, depending on the technology employed – open trenching or directional drilling. Underground cables have to be appropriately insulated to deal with the heat that is naturally dissipated from overhead cables. But many studies, including by the UK’s Institution of Engineering of Technology, have shown that once built, subterranean networks are no more expensive to maintain than overhead ones. They are less susceptible to storms, and in those circumstances, less worrisome of national economies.

Given the realities of climate change, Jamaica should seriously consider the question of underground cables. How it is paid for is the issue. But given larger social and economic imperatives of going this route, taxpayers will have to contribute. Designing how this would be done can’t be beyond us. At least, a conversation should begin.