arxiv: 2604.08789 · v2 · submitted 2026-04-09 · 📡 eess.SY · cs.SY· stat.AP

Recognition: 2 theorem links

· Lean Theorem

Quantifying the resilience benefits of undergrounding a circuit with utility data

Arslan Ahmad , Ian Dobson , Anne Kimber

Authors on Pith no claims yet

Pith reviewed 2026-05-12 01:46 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 📡 eess.SY cs.SYstat.AP

keywords undergroundingpower distributionoutage dataresiliencecustomer hours lostutility reliabilitygrid hardening

0 comments

The pith

Undergrounding circuits cuts customer hours lost by 75% and 78% for two studied cases by replaying historical outage records.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper compares the actual history of outages on two overhead circuits with a counterfactual history in which those same circuits had been undergrounded from the start. It measures the difference in four quantities: number of outages, number of customers affected, outage duration, and total customer hours lost. The comparison is made by removing or adjusting the outage causes and durations that would no longer apply underground. A reader would care because the resulting percentages give utilities a concrete, data-based estimate of the resilience return on investment in undergrounding.

Core claim

The central claim is that undergrounding the two selected circuits would have reduced customer hours lost per year by 75% and 78%, while also producing large drops in the average annual number of outages and the average number of customers affected. The authors obtain these figures by taking the recorded overhead outages and substituting the causes and durations expected under underground conditions, then recalculating the four resilience metrics. They repeat the exercise with a 10% faster restoration time to separate the benefit of quicker repairs from the benefit of fewer outages.

What carries the argument

The direct mapping of historical overhead outage causes and durations onto a hypothetical undergrounded circuit to recompute the four metrics of outages, customers affected, duration, and customer hours lost.

If this is right

Undergrounding produces 75% and 78% reductions in annual customer hours lost for the two circuits examined.
The average number of outages and the average number of customers affected per year both fall markedly.
A 10% improvement in restoration speed yields additional measurable gains when applied to the same historical record.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

Utilities could apply the same historical-replay method to rank many circuits by expected resilience gain before deciding where to bury lines.
The results isolate weather and vegetation as the dominant drivers of customer hours lost in overhead systems.
Pairing the method with cost data on underground construction versus ongoing overhead maintenance would produce a fuller investment comparison.

Load-bearing premise

That the causes and durations seen in the overhead historical record can be straightforwardly removed or adjusted to represent what would have occurred if the circuit had been undergrounded, without separate data on underground failure rates or maintenance differences.

What would settle it

Collecting real outage data from circuits that have actually been converted to underground and checking whether the observed customer hours lost differ substantially from the 75-78% reduction predicted by the historical mapping.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2604.08789 by Anne Kimber, Arslan Ahmad, Ian Dobson.

**Figure 2.** Figure 2: Empirical (blue) and estimated (red) probability density plot of the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p005_2.png] view at source ↗

**Figure 3.** Figure 3: Estimated probability density of the log of the durations of unsched [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p005_3.png] view at source ↗

**Figure 4.** Figure 4: Empirical (blue) and estimated (red) probability density plot of the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p006_4.png] view at source ↗

read the original abstract

We leverage historical outage data to quantify the resilience benefits of undergrounding a circuit. The historical performance of the overhead circuit is compared to the performance if the circuit had been undergrounded in the past. The number of outages, customers affected, outage duration, and customer hours lost are used as metrics to quantify the benefits of undergrounding. Results show 75% and 78% reductions in customer hours lost per year for two selected circuits, as well as a significant reduction in the average number of outages and customers affected per year, highlighting the advantages of undergrounding. The benefits of investments that result in 10% faster outage restoration are also calculated by rerunning history with the faster restoration included.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Desk Editor's Note private letter to a colleague

This paper uses real utility outage records to estimate 75-78% drops in customer hours lost from undergrounding two circuits, but the numbers come from subtracting weather-related events without checking against actual underground failure data.

read the letter

The core move here is straightforward: take the overhead outage history for two circuits, remove events tied to weather, vegetation, and animals, and treat the remaining outages and durations as what an underground version would have seen. That produces the headline reductions in outages, customers affected, and customer hours lost, plus a quick sensitivity run with 10% faster restoration times. The numbers are tied directly to one utility's operational records, which gives them a practical flavor that abstract models often lack.

Referee Report

3 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper claims to quantify the resilience benefits of undergrounding overhead power circuits by using historical utility outage data from two circuits to construct a counterfactual undergrounded scenario. This is done by removing weather-, vegetation-, and animal-related outages while retaining other causes and durations unchanged, yielding reported reductions of 75% and 78% in annual customer hours lost, plus reductions in outage frequency and customers affected. The work also evaluates a sensitivity case with 10% faster restoration times applied to the historical record.

Significance. If the counterfactual assumptions hold, the results would supply concrete, utility-data-driven estimates of resilience gains from undergrounding that could directly inform infrastructure investment decisions and regulatory cost-benefit analyses in power systems. The direct use of real historical records rather than purely simulated models is a practical strength for the field of distribution system resilience.

major comments (3)

[Methods] Methods section (counterfactual construction): The underground performance is estimated solely by subtracting overhead-specific outage causes (weather, vegetation, animals) from the historical record while assuming unchanged durations and frequencies for residual causes; no underground cable failure rates, maintenance-adjusted durations, or external validation data are introduced, which directly determines the headline 75% and 78% customer-hours-lost reductions and leaves them sensitive to this untested mapping.
[Results] Results section: No uncertainty quantification, error bars, or sensitivity analysis on the outage-cause classification thresholds or duration assumptions is provided, even though these choices control the metric differences between overhead and undergrounded cases.
[Discussion] Discussion or validation: The manuscript contains no cross-check of the counterfactual against actual underground circuit performance data from the same utility or from published underground reliability statistics, which is required to substantiate that the residual non-weather outages would indeed occur at the observed rates and durations after undergrounding.

minor comments (2)

[Abstract] Abstract: The time span of the historical outage data and the selection criteria or basic characteristics (length, customer count, location) of the two circuits are not stated, limiting immediate interpretability of the percentage reductions.
Notation: The precise definition of 'customer hours lost' (whether it incorporates only sustained outages or also momentary events) and how the 10% faster restoration is applied uniformly across all remaining events should be clarified for reproducibility.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

3 responses · 0 unresolved

We appreciate the referee's comments on our manuscript. Below we respond point-by-point to the major comments, clarifying our methodology and indicating planned revisions where appropriate.

read point-by-point responses

Referee: [Methods] Methods section (counterfactual construction): The underground performance is estimated solely by subtracting overhead-specific outage causes (weather, vegetation, animals) from the historical record while assuming unchanged durations and frequencies for residual causes; no underground cable failure rates, maintenance-adjusted durations, or external validation data are introduced, which directly determines the headline 75% and 78% customer-hours-lost reductions and leaves them sensitive to this untested mapping.

Authors: The counterfactual is constructed by retaining all non-weather, non-vegetation, and non-animal related outages with their observed durations, as these causes are not inherently tied to overhead infrastructure. This isolates the benefits of undergrounding in reducing weather- and vegetation-related events, which dominate overhead outages according to the utility data. While we do not model specific underground failure rates, this data-driven approach avoids speculative parameters. We will add explicit discussion of this assumption and its implications in the revised manuscript. revision: partial
Referee: [Results] Results section: No uncertainty quantification, error bars, or sensitivity analysis on the outage-cause classification thresholds or duration assumptions is provided, even though these choices control the metric differences between overhead and undergrounded cases.

Authors: The analysis uses the complete historical outage record for the two circuits, making the primary metrics deterministic based on the recorded events and classifications. However, we acknowledge the value of sensitivity analysis. In the revision, we will include additional cases varying the classification thresholds for outage causes and assumptions on durations to quantify the robustness of the reported reductions. revision: yes
Referee: [Discussion] Discussion or validation: The manuscript contains no cross-check of the counterfactual against actual underground circuit performance data from the same utility or from published underground reliability statistics, which is required to substantiate that the residual non-weather outages would indeed occur at the observed rates and durations after undergrounding.

Authors: Direct cross-validation with actual underground data from the same circuits is not available, as the study focuses on overhead historical records to construct the counterfactual. We will expand the discussion to explicitly state the assumptions and limitations of the approach, including the lack of direct underground performance data for comparison. revision: partial

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

Direct data-driven counterfactual comparison with no equations or self-referential steps

full rationale

The paper compares observed overhead outage records to a hypothetical undergrounded version by removing weather-, vegetation-, and animal-related events while retaining all other causes and durations unchanged. This is an explicit modeling assumption stated in the abstract and methods, not a quantity derived from equations, fitted parameters, or prior self-citations. The 10% faster restoration case is presented as a separate sensitivity rerun of the same historical data. No load-bearing step reduces to its own inputs by construction, and the central metrics (outage counts, customer hours lost) are computed directly from the filtered records without intermediate self-referential predictions.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

Analysis rests on historical data comparison without introducing fitted parameters, new axioms, or invented entities; the 10% restoration speed is an exogenous scenario input rather than a fitted value.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5414 in / 966 out tokens · 47481 ms · 2026-05-12T01:46:09.670853+00:00 · methodology

Review history (2 revisions) →

discussion (0)

Lean theorems connected to this paper

Citations machine-checked in the Pith Canon. Every link opens the source theorem in the public Lean library.

IndisputableMonolith/Foundation/AbsoluteFloorClosure.lean absolute_floor_iff_bare_distinguishability unclear

?

unclear
Relation between the paper passage and the cited Recognition theorem.

We remove all the overhead outages from this circuit except 20% overhead outages chosen by random sampling... Using the λ_ug calculated in (1), we calculate the number of outages per year that would have occurred...
IndisputableMonolith/Cost/FunctionalEquation.lean washburn_uniqueness_aczel unclear

?

unclear
Relation between the paper passage and the cited Recognition theorem.

Results show 75% and 78% reductions in customer hours lost per year...

What do these tags mean?

matches: The paper's claim is directly supported by a theorem in the formal canon.
supports: The theorem supports part of the paper's argument, but the paper may add assumptions or extra steps.
extends: The paper goes beyond the formal theorem; the theorem is a base layer rather than the whole result.
uses: The paper appears to rely on the theorem as machinery.
contradicts: The paper's claim conflicts with a theorem or certificate in the canon.
unclear: Pith found a possible connection, but the passage is too broad, indirect, or ambiguous to say the theorem truly supports the claim.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

15 extracted references · 15 canonical work pages

[1]

Out of sight, out of mind 2012. an updated study on the undergrounding of overhead power lines,

K. L. Hall, “Out of sight, out of mind 2012. an updated study on the undergrounding of overhead power lines,” Jan. 2013, Report prepared by Hall Energy Consulting Inc. for the Edison Electric Institute. Available at: https : / / woodpoles . org / wp - content / uploads / OutofSightOutofMind2012.pdf

work page 2012
[2]

A review of electric utility undergrounding policies and practices,

Navigant Consulting, “A review of electric utility undergrounding policies and practices,” Mar. 2005, Report prepared by Navigant Consulting Inc. for the Long Island Power Authority

work page 2005
[3]

Undergrounding assessment phase 1 final report: Literature review and analysis of electric distribution overhead to underground conversion,

R. Brown, “Undergrounding assessment phase 1 final report: Literature review and analysis of electric distribution overhead to underground conversion,” InfraSource Technology, Raleigh, NC, USA, Tech. Rep., Feb. 2007, Report submitted to the Florida Public Service Commission per order PSC-06-0351-PAA-EI, Feb. 28 2007

work page 2007
[4]

Undergrounding assessment phase 2 final report: Under- grounding case studies,

R. Brown, “Undergrounding assessment phase 2 final report: Under- grounding case studies,” InfraSource Technology, Raleigh, NC, USA, Tech. Rep., Aug. 2007, Report submitted to the Florida Public Service Commission per order PSC-06-0351-PAA-EI, Aug. 6th 2007

work page 2007
[5]

Underground assessment phase 3 report: Ex ante cost and benefit modeling,

L. Xu and R. Brown, “Underground assessment phase 3 report: Ex ante cost and benefit modeling,” Quanta Technology, Tech. Rep., May 2008, Report prepared by Quanta Technology for the Florida Electric Utilities

work page 2008
[6]

Placement of utility distri- bution lines underground,

Virginia State Corporation Commission, “Placement of utility distri- bution lines underground,” Jan. 2005, Report of the State Corporation Commission submitted to the Governor and the general assembly of Virginia

work page 2005
[7]

WPSC system modernization and reliability project, 2021 post-construction report,

Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, “WPSC system modernization and reliability project, 2021 post-construction report,” Feb. 2022, Available at: https://apps.psc.wi.gov/ERF/ERFview/viewdoc.aspx? docid=430842

work page 2021
[8]

Strategic underground program annual report march 31, 2025,

Virginia Electric and Power Company, “Strategic underground program annual report march 31, 2025,” Mar. 2025, Available at: https://www. scc.virginia.gov/docketsearch\#caseDocs/136692

work page 2025
[9]

20220051-EI, Exhibit MJ-1

Florida Power & Light Company,FPL’s 2023-2032 Storm Protection Plan (SPP)), Submitted to Florida Public Service Commission in Docket No. 20220051-EI, Exhibit MJ-1. Available at: https://www. floridapsc . com / pscfiles / library / filings / 2022 / 02358 - 2022 / 02358 - 2022.pdf, 2022

work page 2023
[10]

Severe weather, power outages, and a decision to improve electric utility reliability,

P. H. Larsen, “Severe weather, power outages, and a decision to improve electric utility reliability,” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford Uni- versity, 2016, pp. 1–226

work page 2016
[11]

Study of the feasibility and reli- ability of undergrounding electric distribution lines in the district of Columbia,

Shaw Consultants International, “Study of the feasibility and reli- ability of undergrounding electric distribution lines in the district of Columbia,” Jul. 2010, Report Submitted to the Public Service Commission of the District of Columbia. Available at: https://www. floridapsc.com/pscfiles/library/filings/2022/02358-2022/02358-2022. pdf

work page 2010
[12]

Undergrounding transmis- sion and distribution lines. resilience investment guide,

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “Undergrounding transmis- sion and distribution lines. resilience investment guide,” Sep. 2024, Available at: https : / / www. energy. gov / sites / default / files / 2024 - 11 / 111524 Undergrounding Transmission and Distribution Lines.pdf

work page 2024
[13]

Component reliability modeling of distribution systems based on the evaluation of failure statistics,

X. Zhang and E. Gockenbach, “Component reliability modeling of distribution systems based on the evaluation of failure statistics,”IEEE Trans. Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 1183– 1191, 2007

work page 2007
[14]

Extracting resilience statistics from utility data in distribution grids,

N. K. Carrington, S. Ma, I. Dobson, and Z. Wang, “Extracting resilience statistics from utility data in distribution grids,” inIEEE PES General Meeting, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2020

work page 2020
[15]

Towards using utility data to quantify how investments would have increased the wind resilience of distribution systems,

A. Ahmad and I. Dobson, “Towards using utility data to quantify how investments would have increased the wind resilience of distribution systems,”IEEE Trans. Power Systems, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 5956–5968, 2024

work page 2024