It seems kind of primitive to have power lines just hanging on poles, right?
Bit unsightly too
Is it just a cost issue and is it actually significant when considering the cost of power loss on society (work, hospital, food, etc)?
physics. cost.
lived a lot of places, some of which (like here in PNW) have neighborhood buried cables. It’s lovely, and hella reliable. We don’t lose power in windstorms or floods or snow.
It is expensive. And not appropriate for all places - for example, places with high water tables won’t be able to do it, like Louisiana - you can’t keep the water out year round even with a billion pumps. Also hard to do in places with bedrock near the surface for expense reasons.
One reason for my region: overhead lines on wooden poles will better withstand an earthquake and will be quicker to rebuild after a major disaster. Stuff underground will get all shifted around or filled with water and mud.
Don’t make the mistake of looking at one region and generalising to a universal. Where are you looking at?
Here in Switzerland practically everything <1kV is buried.
For high voltage lines they have only built one section to experiment so far. It’s pretty expensive, heats the ground a bit and blocks water with all the concrete, so it’s not so clear if it’s a good choice for agriculture happening above.I’ve wondered a lot why they don’t bury more infrastructure in hurricane regions in the US for example.
It sure is frustrating as an American to be like “why is x not done this other way that’s better and makes more sense?” And for the almost universal answer to be “we do it that way in <European country>”
Everywhere. La fires were caused by sparking lines, previous fires as well. Ice storms knock out power anywhere, it makes sense to bury them when possible.
I’ve seen them buried in some hurricane prone areas here but not many of them. I don’t think they’d need to bury most of the high voltage lines as those are easy to maintain above ground but there are a lot of disaster prone areas that could benefit from residential power being buried locally
So yes we’d need to be smart about choosing the appropriate places for it but nearly all the places that could use it dont because $$
Because it’s much harder to bury things above ground.
I approve of this meme.
Harder to maintain if it is underground.
Harder to maintain if it is underground.
? fewer calls for cables cut by trees / stupid people, known junction boxes in the ground placed at regular intervals to access it (not having to guess which set of poles are carrying for which residences etc), if it’s cut you’re still going to have to replace the line, that’s gonna happen whether they’re 20’ up or 3’ down… less working at height which is a great boon to safety.
I’d ask lineworkers tbh, I can see lots of advantages for underground but cost may override everything else. and physics, some places are never gonna work for it - wet lowlands, bedrock etc…
Nonsense. It’s just about being cheaper.
Saving money is a valid choice, but it may just be short term outlook here.
My brother used to work for a public electric utility and they buried their power lines where possible. The neighboring private utility guys always pointed out how much cheaper their lines were to maintain. But the public utility had solid data providing they saved money over the long term, by better protecting their lines
Yeah, this makes sense to me. Less likely for something to go wrong but more difficult to deal with when it does. The end result is a product of both of those, so depends on how much less likely and how much more difficult.
Which is what i’m saying.
You don’t pay for all the space between poles. Its also cheaper ad quicker to stand a pole than to build a manhole.
It would be better for everyone if was all underground. It is purely cost with a smidgen of time efficiency.
It would save money in the long run though.
You would pay thousands for each meter of duct built including resurfacing whereas you would likely stand two poles with the same distance for less than a grand.
Take it that overhead is more likely to cause future issues, they would need to be significantly more for that to be the case. Where this comes in is regulations on SLAs and fines, loss of service costs. But on a pure cost basis it likely would take a long time for underground to balance out.
Companies also dont care and would prefer to lower build costs at the risk of future operational costs
It would definitely depend on circumstances on this one. In california it would pay for itself with less fires alone. But all areas would have less service costs fixing them after storms. My power just went out a few weeks back here, and last year north a ways all the power got knocked out, some for weeks, in an ice storm that left .5 to over 1 inch of ice on stuff or something.
Please provide the research you are basing that claim on.
Yes, do people in power care though?
At best they do not care no. They are extracting money for donors. As such more often they oppose more efficient ways of doing things on behalf of the ones doing it now.
They are. In developed countries.
In some countries it’s way more important that a few people can buy a third Yacht.
Let me reverse the question
Why do power cables need to be buried in non dense urban area?
Yes it will make it a bit ugly, but so what?. It’s not like it being ugly will do anything anyway. It’s not like being a bit ugly is a very annoying thing unlike when there a trash heap and it smells bad.
I think we should just keep it up there for sub-urban and rural areas, and invest the saved money on other things.
Also, im from developing country so my perspective is bit different for this topic.
I work for a Telco and most of our service interruptions are caused by fibre cuts, falling trees on poles, and ice or fire damage to aerial cables. Underground is just so much better.
It makes life harder on Spider-Man if you bury things.
storm damage.
In Germany: They are in the more urban areas.
The more rural have it either on street poles, poles on the roof, both or underground.They are in most residential areas here in Denmark.
They are safer and less prone to fault underground.
It just costs more.
One point for above ground is that it is far easier to know when it’s damaged to the point of being unsafe for the general public and much simpler and quicker to repair. For underground, you don’t know that until there is a failure that causes outages or someone/something gets hurt.
While I have seen numerous downed power lines, I have not know anything actual hurt by them. On the other hand, I have known multiple dogs who’ve died stepping on top of electrified access points while out for walks. While this is purely anecdotal, it’s not black and white either.
Other underground utilities have more obvious failure signs to the public (smells, flooding, water damage etc) and generally have minimal short term consequences while electrical faults tend to go unnoticed until a significant failure event (i.e. power goes out or something gets killed). Our town has hundreds of reported natural gas leaks, that is take years to fix while pole repairs tend to happen within an hour of being reported with police standing by until the crew shows up.
Almost anything infrastructure related, however it exists is probably the most efficient cost/maintenance ratio for that area. That is basically the only requirement for the engineers in charge of designing that kind of shit.
Unless you’re the Texas power grid. Then it’s literally the cheapest possible way to still be able to bill people for it.
If you value stuff like safety, there’s also regulations.
If we can see that the huge influence corporations have is messing up the Texas power grid, and why don’t we assume that they are also influencing other infrastructures?
It’s roughly 5-7 times as expensive per km to bury the cables. It’s mainly a cost issue.
It makes sense in dense areas, it does not make sense everywhere. Critical infrastructure has backup power anyway because digging does not solve all reliability issues.
And you can have aerial fiber 😁. That’s how france “fibred” the countryside.
Here in Aroostook county Maine I can tell you I have yet to see anywhere that didn’t have everything on telephone poles. Not that I can recall anyway.
Converting existing (and i hope working) infra has its own problems too and unless its absolutelly necessary it often gets sidelined.
You cant just dig a trench and drop the lines there. You need to make sure roadsides have enough space and if at any point it would require purchasing or getting permit from land owners it will get quickly complicate. Especially if there are many different owners on the stretch.
There needs to also be plans and precautions to secure that the electricity wont be cut for too long time during the work.
Also the road sides migh need to be cleaned from any vegetation and stones that might be big enough to be problem, not to mention the road it self might need additional work if its badly kept or if they need to widen it and that all rounds back to making sure there is enough space.
Its much easier to build underground cables from the get go, than change infrastructure that was build with telephone poles in mind.
Where did you get your numbers?
I found 2-3x and it’s quoating it as $5-$15 per foot vs $10-$25
- 5-7 Sweden
- 5 to 6. UK
- 4.5 UK
https://benhopkinson.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-burying-our-grid
The second one has a link to an actual study on pricing. That study indicates directed buried is twice as expensive.
It’s also has numbers on tunnel buried which is five times more expensive. Which makes sense but also means there is now a tunnel.
Though in development of an area you probably already dig up the ground for other utilities, so in that case it is relatively easy and cheap to also put electricity lines in there too. But retrofitting in an already developed area is really expensive. So it becomes more a question of the default.
Cost and ease of maintenance. Isn’t it obvious? The only ugly thing is instead of having separated multuple conductors without isolation on the wire, you can have isolated wires, and twisted together, so instead of 50 wires throughout the air, you would have one thicker.
My city sits on a filled in swamp.
My entire state if we’re honest.
Louisiana?
I would assume. That’s where I am.
I grew up far from it, in a vastly different terrain and climate, and I’ve lived here kost of my life. But I remember having a cartoon book as a kid that depicted a house in a swamp (I think it may have been one of the books about The Woozles), and the memory resurfaced when I had to drive from Houston TX to Galliano LA. It was swampy to say the least. Many of my fellow countrymen have accidentally hit a moose while driving. I’m the only one I know who has run over an alligator.
How do you survive hitting a moose? I feel like that’s equivalent to hitting a brick wall.
It’s pretty dangerous, yes. But since moose are so tall, you usually hit the legs, and thr beast comes in through the windshield. Duck, and it’ll pass over you. However, they might then start to flail and kick you from the backseat out of panic.
And?
