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Dominion Virginia Power won approval Tuesday to bury about 400 miles of power lines, and to charge its typical customer an extra $6 a year to pay for the $140 million project.

The utility will spend an average of $350,000 per mile to reach about 6,000 customers and will add 50 cents to the average customer bill starting next month.

The State Corporation Commission on Tuesday approved the project as a pilot program after voting down the utility's first attempt to recover costs for burying lines.

Dominion originally had sought to implement a broader program that would cost about $263 million, but state regulators were skeptical of the cost.

In its hearing earlier this year for the pilot program, an expert witness for Dominion argued that the impact of line burial in reducing outages during storms would include economic and societal benefits of more than $2 for every dollar spent on the project.

The SCC said it has placed a $140 million "hard cap" on the cost for identifying and replacing lines in the pilot program. The company was given approval to place a rider on customer bills of about 50 cents per 1,000 kWh of usage.