After the recent Los Angeles wildfires, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order in late March 2025 to bury more than 150 circuit miles of distribution power lines in the hopes of preventing future devastating fire damage. Following up on that order, Southern California Edison released a plan for Altadena and Malibu, where the Palisades and Eaton fires took place.

The decision comes in part because the vast California fires are thought to have been potentially sparked by Southern California Edison transmission equipment and because there’s evidence that power lines have sparked some of the most destructive and deadliest fires in California history.

The practice of burying power lines for the purpose of preventing fire is a relatively new idea. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) began the practice in 2021. According to Duncan Callaway, associate professor of energy and resources at UC Berkeley, the move resulted from the 2018 Camp Fire, the most destructive and deadliest fire in California history, which was sparked by PG&E equipment.

Now, after the deadly LA wildfires, Southern California Edison (SCE) is poised to do the same, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is planning to follow suit by putting 4,000 power lines in the Palisades area underground, at a cost of $1 million to $14 million per mile.

SCE estimates the cost to underground power lines ranges from $3 million to $5 million per mile. In comparison, the cost to cover lines with fire-resistant material through Edison’s “covered conductor” program is about $700,000 per mile. Installing covered conductors is also faster— typically completed within 16–24 months compared with 25–48 months or longer for underground projects that involve digging trenches, working around underground infrastructure such as sewer systems and potentially redoing roads and sidewalks, said Jeff Monford, spokesperson for SCE.

The total cost to complete this mammoth task is expected to range from $860 million to $925 million and will likely be passed along to the consumer through rate increases. Both SCE and LADWP are looking for state, federal and philanthropic funding to help offset higher rates.

Suggestions to control costs include burying power lines only in areas with the highest fire risk and limiting undergrounding to distribution lines (because transmission lines are less likely to spark fires since they’re much higher above vegetation).

Undergrounding works best in areas where the risk is “so high that deploying some of the other measures that are lower cost, like depowering lines and vegetation management, are not going to deliver significant risk reductions,” said Meredith Fowlie, a UC Berkeley professor of agricultural and resource economics who has studied the costs and benefits of wildfire mitigation by the state’s major utilities.

However, defining “high risk” is a moving target exacerbated by climate change. SCE currently plans to underground lines in a few areas that hadn’t been considered high-risk before, but California’s new fire-hazard maps have significantly increased the number of areas considered high risk.