Severe weather is knocking out power across the country more often, and one fix — burying lines underground — remains stubbornly rare. Only about a fifth of U.S. power lines sit below ground, according to an NPR report published Monday, May 19, 2026, even though buried infrastructure is significantly more reliable than the overhead wires that serve most American homes and businesses.
The gap isn’t a secret. Utilities have known for decades that underground lines don’t snap under ice, don’t get sheared by falling trees, and don’t whip loose in high winds. Yet roughly 80% of the nation’s grid still hangs in the open air.
Cost is the obvious barrier. Trenching cable beneath streets and soil runs several times more expensive per mile than stringing wire on poles — and somebody has to pay for it. Ratepayers, municipalities, or both.
Northern Michigan’s push
Some utilities in northern Michigan are trying to close that gap, NPR reported, though the piece didn’t name specific companies or price tags for the work. The region’s winters — heavy snow, ice storms, wind — make a brutal case for moving lines underground, and crews there are apparently testing whether the math can pencil out for rural stretches where outages hit hardest.
Minnesota’s exposure
Minnesota faces a similar climate profile: ice storms, blizzards, and increasingly volatile spring weather that’s been blamed for widespread outages in recent years. Whether the state’s own utilities — Xcel Energy is the largest — are weighing comparable underground projects isn’t addressed in the NPR report. No Minnesota-specific data on buried-line percentages was included.
The tradeoff isn’t purely financial. Underground lines are harder to inspect and slower to repair once they do fail. A fault in a buried cable can take days to locate; a downed overhead span is usually visible from the road.
NPR’s report didn’t detail federal incentives or timelines for broader underground conversion, and no national target for buried-line percentage has been set by regulators.
NPR reported this story on May 19, 2026. Read the original report.
