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)?
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>”
Not frustrated at you, frustrated at the US
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 $$
Harder to maintain if it is underground.
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.
Because it’s much harder to bury things above ground.
I approve of this meme.
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 most residential areas here in Denmark.
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 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.
places with above ground lines are effectively low priority for the municipality and utility companies. it’s the common way in places where it’s common because short term benefits are always treated as more important than long term benefits
One thing to be aware of is that it’s much easier and cheaper to repair damages or upgrade it. Underground is not without problems too, moisture or ground movement for example.
There is moisture above ground too and ground movement can affect the poles as well. I would think that there is more exposure to damages above ground with cars hitting them, tree limbs, strong winds, animals chewing through wires, etc. While it’s easier to repair damages above ground I believe there would be less of them with buried lines.
Probably harder to maintain easier fixes in colder areas where the ground freezes for half a year.
Shielded and reinforced underground conduits my friend!
Not true. I. Most cases they are better protected against the elements if underground.
But it costs money to do and requires higher tax rates to be spent on it instead of military and paying off corrupted politicians
Flood = Death
First, underground lines will be flooded far sooner. Second, IF water were ever to reach the height of those lines you’re right, everyone in the vicinity would be dead long before that happened.
The discussion was underground lines. Flooding means death with those. If a flood hits hanging lines those MFers died long before the water hit them. Common sense has to be applied.
No, people do not get electrocuted during floods because electrical lines are buried.
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 and the environment, 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?
