THE UNDERGROUND INSTALLATION OF UTILITIES 387 



We should not be deterred in any event by the immediate cost 

 problem since as I have pointed out, economic tools exist both within 

 the electric utility industry itself and by virtue of tax programs to 

 meet this problem. Undergrounding shoud be viewed as a capital 

 investment, the benefits not to be measured by cost alone. There 

 is the enhancement to the landscape which has its own benefit and 

 which in our society can be translated into an improvement in prop- 

 erty values . 



I urge for discussion and study the desirability and feasibility of 

 conferring tax incentives upon public utilities so as to realize the ideal 

 of undergrounding and secondly I urge exploration of the precise 

 form the savings to be realized from power pooling and interties 

 should take. 



CARLTON J. DAISS. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics 

 Engineers has given a great deal of attention to the problems of un- 

 derground distribution and the improved appearance of overhead 

 construction. Mr. C. A. Woodrow is chairman of IEEE's Power 

 Group and Mr. L. J. Weed is chairman of the Underground and 

 Distribution Subcommittee of its Transmission and Distribution 

 Committee. They have prepared the following summary: 



Some 10 or 12 years ago several privately owned electric utilities 

 in the country began trial installations of underground distribution 

 for some of their rapidly expanding developments. 



This concept was rapidly adopted by other utilities and soon there 

 were many similar installations all over the United States. Each 

 utility set up its own standards of construction and consequently 

 there were nearly as many different types of installations as there 

 were utilities using them. 



In order to achieve a semblance of standardization and uniformity 

 in underground residential distribution the Insulated Conductors 

 Committee and the Transmission and Distribution Committee of 

 IEEE set up task groups to study the problem. Questionnaires were 

 sent to all companies known to have installations of this type to de- 

 termine what practices, if any, were similar in the majority of com- 

 panies. The replies from these questionnaires were carefully an- 

 alyzed and a report was prepared indicating the types of construction 

 preferred by a majority of the companies. 



In order to adequately present and discuss the information ob- 

 tained from the questionnaires, a Special Technical Conference on 



