“Bury and Forget” to Preventive & Predictive Asset Management: Treating MV/HV/EHV Cables as Critical Infrastructure

Urban power systems increasingly depend on underground MV/HV/EHV cable networks to meet right-of-way constraints and to supply critical loads. While undergrounding improves aesthetics and public safety, operational experience shows that the traditional “bury and forget” philosophy is failing. Failures in underground cables are high-impact, difficult to detect, slow to repair, and costly. Evidence from Indian utilities—including Delhi/NCR urban networks, metro systems, strategic EHV corridors, and Central Electricity Authority (CEA) failure investigations—shows that external damage, accessory (joint/termination) defects, and thermal issues dominate, and that fault localization itself can take weeks to months.

This paper reframes MV/HV/EHV cables as critical infrastructure assets and proposes a shift to preventive and predictive maintenance using monitoring and analytics. It presents a structured approach—TRAP + Intelligence—combining Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS), Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), and online Partial Discharge (PD) monitoring to deliver early warning, faster localization, and condition-based interventions. The paper concludes that disciplined engineering across the lifecycle, complemented by continuous monitoring, is essential to improve reliability, shorten restoration time and reduce lifecycle cost of underground cable systems.