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Why Aren't Powergrids Underground?
jonging asks: "It is common knowledge that an underground power grid is less susceptible to the effect of a large thunderstorm. The American Transmission Company cites numerous reasons why it (and other power companies I assume) do not bury their transmission lines underground (e.g. environmental concerns, cost of installation and repair, etc.). Exactly how detrimental are underground transmission lines to the environment? Wouldn't the time spent without a power outage generate more than enough revenue to offset initial costs? Aren't the need for repairs in cities with successful underground power grids rare?" The linked article goes into extensive detail about the disadvantages in initial costs of putting in underground lines, but doesn't go into any detail about the maintenance costs of either option. With storms getting worse and worse (Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia have weathered torrential downfalls this week), might underground lines prove more resistant to storm-related power outages?
Sure, it would be nice to put it underground, but it costs more that way...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Though I'm not addressing TFA directly, let me comment on the DC thing. Yes. We have been utterly hammerered unto oblivion with rain in the last 5 days. But even at that, the power grid in DC is remarkably stable.
My office, which is about 3 blocks from the White House, has never had a major event that would have an effect on our network. In about 10 months of running monitoring 24/7 on our UPS, I've never seen a major "power event" (outage, surge, something else big). I've never seen a big spike or dip. Hell, I've barely seen any variation at all in the signal.
Perhaps it's a function of living in the big city. Perhaps it really is the fact that I'm on the same power grid as the White House. Perhaps it's just a coincidence and some really nice wiring, and me with a little too much tinfoil in my hat. Regardless, I think something is special about the power grids in the DC area.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
More expensive to dig, harder to cross roads/othershit when digging, MUCH easier to repair above-ground lines than below-ground lines (all you need is a cherry-picker truck), and what would squirrels walk on if there weren't above-ground power lines?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Why do they keep asking essentially the same question over and over? And why do they ask questions that were clearly just answered in the answer before?
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
They are here, generally. Where do you live?
It's true that underground lines require less maintenance. A lot less maintenance. If we changed all our lines from overhead to underground, NES would have to layoff 4/5 of their maintenance team. Rather than realizing that it would take years to convert every powerline in Nashville from overhead to underground so they'd have excellent job security until they retired, they have decided not to convert to underground lines. I wouldn't be surprised if this is true in other areas, but I know that's the deal here. So everytime there's a thunderstorm the power goes out, and the cable goes out with it, cause the cable lines follow the powerlines.
just some guy
Let me get this straight:
You have a question. ATC gave you some straightforward answers.
Now, an intelligent person might find that the answers raised new questions.
But you just asked the same question again.
It's been a while, but I recall that in Hawaii I did not see any power lines (likely due to the risk of heavy winds and storms). Can any Hawaii residents confirm this?
And you know what? I'd say it looked pretty damned nice.
You know what else? I sound like a old rambling grandpa. I remember in my day to get to Taliesin we had to walk 5 miles uphill both ways in the snow...
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Each cable that transports AC is subject to drain by the capacity the parallel lines themselves represent. The closer the wires, the higher the capacity. At about 30 km on a regular high voltage cable, you reach a point where the reactive power drain reaches the maximum power the cable can transport - the cable is saturated without draining a single watt at the end.
DC does not have this issue however then you have all the problems that killed Edison's original DC power distribution in favor of Telsa's AC distribution.
Peter.
"With storms getting worse and worse (Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia have weathered torrential downfalls this week), might underground lines prove more resistant to storm-related power outages?"
I have some friends in the Baltimore area. There has been severe flooding in the area.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
My apartment complex has its power fed in through a buried line, and I can attest to one good reason why power companies may not want to bury all (or even most) of their power lines: water.
My power has gone out three times already, this year, due to water seeping in where it shouldn't and causing a major short. Aside from the obvious risk of losing power, there's also the possibility of pedestrians and pets being electrocuted.
~UP
Eat the Path.
Underground powerlines would suffer higher capacitive losses than overhead lines, and losses between the generating plant and the user would be power that the utility company can't (directly) bill for.
With all the public concern about EMF exposure, the situation would be made much worse when all those distribution transformers move from 40' up a pole to concrete pads at ground level. And then there is the everpresent problem of "backhoe fade"...
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Backhoe power outages are much less likely to happen with overhead power lines. There's also shovel outages, which took out the phone lines to my neighborhood once (dam cable company).
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Air is not a very good insulator -- but it's free, and you can use a lot of it.
In the Southeast United States fire ants are a big problem. The just love low- and medium-voltage electricity.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Downtown Washington rarely has power outages because the power lines are underground.
..but it's just small, neighbourhood-size power in my town. But on the west coast here, we don't get huge storms that will knock out power - I see lightning 3 or 4 times a year. What does matter is an earthquake threat that'll knock out anything above ground (poles) and below (pipes, etc). Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Death by snoo-snoo!
Here in Australia, or at least large (for big values of large) amounts of it, it's all above ground too. Where I'm coming from, the Netherlands, it's all below ground.
When I discuss it with the people here, they give me all kind of reasons why it should be above ground (limited but not only to unable to quickly repair, the famous cable cut from people digging and, believe it or not, the people who are doing the repairs now would be jobless).
Just a quick glance about how it could be done and you'll see that it would be quite a trick anyway: All footpaths in Australia are large blocks of concrete or asphalt, and the nice small tiles you see in shopping centers are also just laying above a concrete layer. Opening up that would be a major++ operation. Compare it to the Netherlands where all footpaths (and most of the bicyclepaths) are just 30x30 cm tiles laying on top of yellow or black sand, you'll see that it has a historical tradition to put things underground and have them easily accessible.
bash$
if the powerlines companies were liable for even a small part of the losses caused by line failures, then the costs of going underground would probably be a lot less than going overground. in auckland, nz, we recently suffered a major power outage in the central business district due to the failure of a corroded shackle holding an overhead earth line at a switching sub-station. if only the cost to business of that outage were factored into the lines cost, it would definitely be cheaper to go underground. not only lines could go underground but also switching stations.
Well theres thirteen hun'red and fifty two telephone linemen in Nashville
And they can clock more hours than the number of ants on a Tennessee anthill
Yeah, there's thirteen hun'red and fifty two utility belts in Nashville
And any one that hitches his belt could earn twice as much money as I will
Nashville cats...
where not only does the circuit die, but so does the backhoe, its operator and anyone standing near it.
But wouldn't underground lines be more susceptable to flooding and/or earthquake failure? Also wouldn't it be a lot slower to fix any problems that do happen with those? It's very quick to throw up a new pole. I can't imagine that safely digging a new trench, or tracking down leaks underground is very fast.
Having power out for an extended period effects people more (and are harder to privately circumvent) than more, quicker outages.
Everytime a new house is built, construction workers have to dig so pipes for gas, sewer, water, ... What if they hit the lines and get an entire neighborhood off the grid?
People are blowing the events in Maryland and northern Virginia way out of proportion. Yes, it is raining. Yes, there is some flooding. But people are behaving like it is the end of the world.
It isn't.
The flooding is isolated with some ground shift near streams and creeks. Old Town Alexandria is partially flooded, but that happens every summer at least once. The entire eastern coast has been getting rain, but somehow residents of DC and its outskirts have been moaning that we are getting “hammered”.
(Yes, I live in NOVA and have driven all over the area since the rain started.)
We could continue to debate this endlessly, but maybe you could save time and just read the official report?
I'll also mention that 4 of the 5 NYC boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx) have their electricity distribution almost entirely below ground. It was a massive investment, but it was long ago.
What? Do you think it would be cheaper to put lines underground?
No, I do not have the numbers, but the folks who put the lines on poles do... of that I am sure.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I work for an electrical contractor in Eastern Iowa and we regularly have to work near these high lines and work with the power companies. As far as I can see, it is exceedingly expensive to bury these wires. There are alot of farmers around here and they regularly hit buried power lines when digging in their fields. This is a often an expensive and timely problem to fix involving the power company, an electrician and usually a whole day. I noticed the article doesn't say maintenance issues. From my experience, they need less maintenance, but the particular maintenace is very costly in money and time.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
The same reasons most houses in coastal areas of Florida and other sandy-soil areas near water don't have basements. Water pushes right into them.
Try putting underground *anything* in gulf-coast Florida, etc.
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Nice doomsday quote in there, Editor. Have you seen "An Inconvenient Truth" ?
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In urban areas in Sweden it's all below ground. It's in part, I believe, because of snow; rural areas (where underground cables become far too expensive) have a predictable power outage mess every winter as some storm weighs down lines enough to break them (cue predictable news images of army units clearing snow off calbe poles and some farmer with no backup generator milking his cows by hand). It's also because of zoning laws - power companies have no choice. I believe much of nothern Europe at least is similar in this regard?
Here in Japan, on the other hand, it's all above ground. In part because of the relative lack of zoning laws (Japanese city architecture is delightfully, ah, surprising as a result), but according to people here it's mosty because of the prevalence of earthquakes, the one thing buried cables are not protected against. Sure, overhead cables will break too, but it'll be easier to fix.
I can understand the situation here in Japan, but really, it's a pretty hideous sight. So your power may end up getting slightly more expensive as a result (though this is dwarfed by other factors), but it's worth it. If saving money is all there is about city living, why not allow people to dump their trash in the street as well?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"(it did, however, cause me to crap my pants thinking that something of mine exploded)."
*sigh* Memories.
How's about designing roads and sidewalks with utilities in mind in the first place. Bolt down slabs which can be lifted to lay cables and pipes underneath instead of digging up roads continuously bringing traffic to a halt.
Deleted
There's a few reasons why it makes more sence to have above ground power lines. The most obvious is its eisier to maintain above ground cables. Second, its cheaper to install above ground cables. The power companies also make money with above ground lines, they are able to rent pole space to cable, and telcom companies, and make some money from that. Also, the problems with underground lines is there's many things to do to properties such as landscaping, invisible fences for animals, and irrigation. For any new installation or maintanence of these systems, the contractors have to call all the companies to have them mark out where all these lines are, if they dont want the lines to be cut. Most newer neighborhoods are actually getting the lines buried now, and it makes no sence to bury existing lines.
I think this depends on when the power grid was put down. In philadelphia (at least the city proper ) has its power underground. Interestingly my phone and cable are above ground and strung through the back between the buildings while power and gas is under the street somewhere and comes through the front of the house.
probably more importantly, most modern cable plants involve powered devices (called nodes) to convert fiber to coax. they hang on poles and typically don't last long when power goes out.
Something no one has brought up is the ability to upgrade technology. With above-ground poles, it's fairly simple to string along additional wires as needed. If you're undergound and you run out of phone lines, the telco may just say too bad, wait 6-18 months until there's enough demand to dig up the neighbourhood. If the city is rolling out fiber-to-the-home, the undergound neighbourhoods are likely to be the last to get it. Most likely they won't get it until the road needs to be dug up anyways to replace the surface, or sewer or water lines.. That can take 20-30 years, or even longer sometimes.
My parents live in an area with everything undergound. It definately looks nicer, but their cable reception is on some channels is terrible, and has been that way for years. They've had the line going up to the house replaced and all the inside wiring replaced, but it's still not as good as it would be. Replacing the main line in the road would mean digging up the bottom couple feet of 50-60 driveways (most paved, some interlocking brick.. you usually can't find the exact same replacement bricks either, so it would never look the same). It's just not practical to do to fix a few snowy channels for a handful of houses (I'm not sure exactly how many people have the problem, but their immediate neighbours do at least).
Speak before you think
Ever see those construction crews working on a street for literally months? Now imagine that same sort of efficiency working on a stretch of cable miles long every time they need some sort of line upgrade or repair service. Oh yeah and... imagine an earthquake that shreds a line in many places... instead of being able to visually inspect and quickly find the problem spots they'd have to dig up huge sections to work on it.
Forget it. Your power goes out now... back up in a few hours or in major emergencies months. Underground power goes out... they start digging and you wait. Get used to waiting months.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Thermal and electrical. For above ground, you do not have to shield the cables to prevent conductance between them. On the flipside, high tension wires generate a
non-trivial amount of heat and burying them might aggravate the situation?
Were that I say, pancakes?
At least in my area(Charlotte, NC), all new residential developments get buried power lines. This is easier and cheaper to do when building on undeveloped land than it would be when existing infrastructure and structures would be a major factor. I ask why existing lines are buried each winter when the ice storms roll through.
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If William of Ockham were here he would point out the obvious conclusion: The monitoring on your UPS doesn't work.
But that's not the obvious conclusion. If you look at a certain spot for an hour, and don't see anything happen there, is the "most obvious" conclusion that your eyes are faulty, or that...nothing happened there?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
The powerlines in my neighborhood are underground and there are plenty of fire ants around. So far (8 years) the fire ants have been much more interested in biting me than touching any power lines.
What would this do to interference from BPL? It seems to me that it would be very much attenuated.
Rain fall is probably part of the thinking.
Look at it this way.
Rain comes down, creates a small flood. Car skids out, goes into the side of the road where the wire is buried. The soft mud allows it to dig in far enough that it breaks through and exposes the wire. Now all the water around it is electrocuted, probably for a good distance (I can't say just how wide the area would be.)
Obviously, they'd probably have a few layers around it, to fight off burrowing critters as well as incidents like those (or the random retard with a shovel).
Plus, it would cost a lot to move all the wires underground. Could you imagine an entire town with the sides of the roads dug up? No one wants that.
However, new towns, or expanding towns, could easily put the wires under ground to save hastle and money.
Well, I can dream.
Karma: Chameleon - mostly influenced by bad '80s New Wave music
Here in Canada, In most of the major cities Ive lived in (Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto) most of the electricity is delivered underground, except in older neighborhoods. Im currently in Toronto and the typical fix to upgrading and repairing is to run another cable along side the existing one with a fancy robotic crawler thing that goes through the pipe the other cables are in. This way, even in a busy downtown street they can run new lines without interupting much of anything.
maybe you americans just aren't as crafty but it seems awefully obvious to me.
I asked the same question when I did my college internship at the Montana Power Company in 1979. According to the engineer that I queried, for transmission lines 50KV and greater, the cables would have to be in conduit filled with the same insulating oil that fills transformers. This would be extremely expensive to install and maintain. He said the potential environmental liability would prohibit any large scale deployment. At the time, the company was going through environmental problems involving PCB contaminated oils leaking from transformers all over the state.
but seriously, what power lines are we talking about here? Distribution? Transmission? and what storm related damages are we talking about? Are we talking about preventing damage to the powerlines themselves from the storm and thus hopefully keeping power in service? or are we talking about just keeping the power on through a storm. If it is the latter, underground lines aren't going to do jackshit. If it's the former, no normal amount of maintenance costs is gonna outweigh the massive cost per mile of underground lines.
yeah overhead poles are vulnerable to the olde trees falling on wires bit but so what? get a crew out there, clear the tree and reconnect the lines!
If you're talking about having underground lines being more reliable in storms (ie not having blackouts) keep dreaming. powerlines do not exist in vacuum. If there's a frequency spike then your breakers are gonna trip out anyways and your powerlines are gonna be dead anyways. Then you have to wait until a crew recloses the breaker! what did the underground line do better than the overhead lines? JACK SHIT.
if the storm is large enough that it is tripping out whole feeders at the transmission level (ie whole neighborhoods) underground lines are not going to save you from anything. The overhead transmission line that feeds the substation is gonna trip out, then the substation breakers are gonna trip out, and then you're not gonna have power anyways.
the only thing you are really preventing by putting power lines underground are the tree-falls-into-wires faults. Really bad storms, massive flooding, hurricanes, etc etc will knock out the parts of the powergrid that are aboveground (substations, transmission lines, etc etc) anyways rendering expensive underground lines pointless.
If you want a real life example just look at Tropical Storm Allison that hit Houston in 2001. Downtown Houston's underground lines weren't of much help...
-- Believe your Justice!
My father-in-law is a manager for a utility company customer service department -- yes, the people you yell at when your power goes out and you can't understand why they don't burry the lines. I asked him this very question several weeks ago, and he gave a very simple answer -- you can't SEE it when it is underground.
His point was this -- when an overhead line has issues, they average a 30 minute recovery time. When an underground line is out, it can take days for them to dig it up and figure out where the problem is. Especially since they are in the midwester US where the ground is frozen for months at a time, it is simply impractical for them to do that much digging.
I asked why it wasn't possible to use some technology to have the system report exactly what lines are non-function (surely there is some easy way to do this?). His answer was that there is some of that, but not to the level of precision needed to avoid digging.
Apparently the cost to dig vs. string overhead is negligible.
People are talking a lot about how the time it takes to dig up an underground power line is a big factor, but are completely forgetting about the fact that you have to FIND where to dig first! With overhead powerlines, it's easy to see where the line is down, but if it's underground, who knows where the problem is?
Have you never heard of a "Light Emitting Rodent" ?
I live in Florida. I've had 3 hurricanes in 2 years. And those fuckers at FPL STILL won't put in underground power. I've had a total of 7 weeks without power between those three storms. So that's gotta tell you something about cost.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I, for one, welcome our new worm overlords...
Here in Oz (or more specifically victoria) new estates are almost exclusively built with underground power - which is good because it reduces the number of drop bears in the burbs.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Reminds me of this thread
The Backhoe, The Internet's Natural Enemy
Always carry a length of fiber-optic cable in your pocket. Should you be shipwrecked and find yourself stranded on a desert island, bury the cable in the sand. A few hours later, a guy driving a backhoe will be along to dig it up. Ask him to rescue you.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
But there are other considerations. Ok, it costs a heap to dig up the ground and bury the cables. You gain, though, from the lesser amount of maintenance necessary (eg: a storm can damage overhead cables, but not -- easily, anyway -- underground cables.) You lose from the greater cost to dig up the cable if they need repair (unless you built them with access hatches, in which case you need to make sure those hatches are secure).
...
But. People reckon that high tension power lines cause all sorts of health issues. Let's assume for the sake of discussion that they're correct - I don't know if they are or not, but let's assume. The electromagnetic field that these lines produce will be a certain value at ground level (which will vary depending on humidity and other factors). The key factor that determines that value is the permittivity of air (see Wiki).
Turns out that the ground's permittivity is higher than that of air, meaning that even if you bury the cables to the same depth as they would stand above ground, you'd have a higher EM field at ground level
But that's really just showing the ignorance of people that complain about the health risks and want the lines underground. It basically boils down to money.
Dunno about Gulf area, but the Eastern side of Florida, especially since I was on the bullseye for Francis, Jeanne, and Wilma, those developement (I mean very large developements) with underground power lines had power days if not a week before I did. FP&L has begun a program of paying 25% of the cost of burrying power lines under ground. City of Palm Beach (island proper) was one of the first townships to opt for it and they sit between the Atlantic and the Indian River so there isn't much elevation.
Dammy
Out in the air the water drips off and broken cables are easier to get to.
Companies like this rarely ever build infrastructure unless they can get an enormous government grant for it they can milk mercilessly while providing something that doesn't work or barely works - so are unlikely to be involved anyway.When an outage occurred at home, it took at two days for cables to be unburied, repaired, and reburied. Road traffic was disrupted, Lawns torn up. And NO POWER!
At work we found the cable was not where it was supposed to be. Mislabeled drawings over 20 years old.
Farms had overhead cables were repaired in hours!
In flood areas, buried power cables will float to the survace.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Being raised in the Netherlands where all power (except for some transmission lines) is underground. I can count the number of blackouts during the 'Dutch' period of my life (28 years) on the fingers of one hand. I have lived in Brisbane (Oz) for 20+ years now and during the summer storm season we have (at least) 1 black out a week.
You never catch me alive
What makes an "up-front" cost so bad, is the opportunity cost of doing that. The money you don't spend burying the lines can be spent building out more, or it can be put to work on other projects or investments. You gamble that the lines won't get blown down, but if you spend the money to bury them, your odds of winning the wager are zero! At least with the cheaper above-groud solution, the odds are pretty good that the lines will stay up for years.
The other assumption people are making is that putting them under ground is really better. Yeah, they don't blow down, but wind isn't the only force of nature. Gas and water lines are underground, and they still have to be serviced. It's not like, "put the lines underground, forget about them". You've got water infiltration, frost heave, seismic shifts, etc.
Also, it's bad enough when water or gas come flying out of the ground. When electricity gets loose underground, it can do wierd things. I remember hearing about something where such "leaking current" was shocking cattle on a guy's farm, and IIRC it killed some.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe on Mars or Los Angeles, neither of which have weather or intelligent life. But here on Earth, where it rains, underground utility conduits are notorious for flooding, resulting in extensive telephone and electric outages where such conduits are deployed.
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competition creates its efficiencies; but it also creates its inefficiencies.
it has been remarked by a german that america is often very innefficient.
why? well, in america, first they construct a road. then they remember
that they need sewers, so a different department goes and tears up the
street the road crew had built, and lays in sewers, and puts the road back
together again.
then the power company comes along, they want to lay power -- so they
dig another ditch, tear up the road, and put in the power. then comes the
gas company, and then the phone company, and then the cable company,
all digging their own ditches -- that's america.
in germany, the town gets together, find out all who need to be involved,
and then lay down one large pipe -- road and concourse are built together
from the outset, and then you can lay in your: gas, water, cable, etc. as you
wish. anyone who wants to use it pays a fee. --road doesn't need to get
torn up, community works TOGETEHER.
now, whether it be america and germany -- or whoever
(or pick your favourite parties) -- the efficiency of good community
is not always factored in by those who only value competition.
2cents
j
In Alaska, there was a law that for any maintenance to be done on a line, it had to be put underground at the time of maintenance.
Most people have some type of belief that high voltage lines cause cancer in humans... you want to find out what it does to an earthworm?
New Orleans had all kinds of power systems underground, including powering their pumps. When Katrina hit, they flooded and failed, just like they did for years in smaller storms.
If New Orleans didn't learn to do it different before Katrina, why should we learn to do it different after Katrina?
--
make install -not war
http://www.usfcam.usf.edu/McCollumPDF/42.Masters.p df
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Also check out this famous Usenet post:
http://jwz.livejournal.com/94645.html
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I live in Auckland, New Zealand. A couple of weeks ago a rusty link on a high power cable broke and the entire of Auckland was without power. It would cost a huge amount, but the long distance high power cables which supply the north of NZ should be underground.
that has nothing to do with community or competition. it has to do if the city engineering office is organized or not and how many lawyers get involved. For new subdivisions, usually what you described for the "German senario" happens if the city is on the ball. in other cases, the road may be there for years or decades before it is determined that utilities need to be run into that area.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
This was one of the things that struck me as weird when I moved from the UK to the US (Pacific NW) - all the urban powerlines in Britain are underground. Our house now has the power coming in through the roof, and it is constantly being menaced by trees. Never had that problem with any house in Britain.
I'm sure the cost of conversion is the major barrier, but I would guess that the points about union concerns are valid too. To give another example of this, in the US around road works you have people employed to hold stop signs to control the traffic. In Europe you have automatic traffic lights.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
"So there will be SOME areas where underground meets the TCO spread over, say, 10 years. Some won't. They key is having the guts to sacrifice short term profits for long term gains, which is tough if the CEO has stock options that expire in 3 years."
In your zeal to do *another* slashdot rant about businesses. You forgot we're talking about public utilities. Some are private companies but most aren't and the rules are different for public utilities.
Not sure if Nashville is an extreme case or if it is rather representative of the reliability of overhead lines, but after I moved here I felt like I was living in a developing country in terms of power supply. Back in Germany, where all power lines are underground, I would experience a power outage every 3-5 years. Here in Nashville, it's more like 3-5 per year. Oh well, at least now I finally understand what a UPS is useful for.
I imagine strays are included with "pedestrians".... and disowned humans (homeless/indigent/discounted) are Petestrians...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I used to work for a NSW power company, and as I left they were completing the south sydney project. The city CBD needed more power than the current lines could provide, but there was no way to put in overhead high tension lines. Instead, they started in the inner south-west suburbs (the nearest new power source) and ran 3 x 330kV cables under the back-street asphalt. When they got close, they started digging (ie tunnel boring machines) and ran it underground. At Haymarket, they built an underground substation, and connected it up to the grid. 330kV overhead lines in NSW are bloody huge and very high, with lots and lots of insulation and separation. Putting them underground was a challenge.
I live in Houston, TX, which was hit by a bad hurricane...5 years ago? Something like that. And gets hit now and again by other hurricanes. I would not want underground lines here. 2 reasons:
1. The soil here is moist. And by moist, I mean that Houston is basically built on old swampland on top of millions of years of sediment. The ground here sinks. Over the 50 years that my house has been in place, some parts (like the front walk) have sunk more than a foot. Basically, the ground is not stable. It moves. And occasionally it breaks water mains, which start spurting into the air. If a power line broke, lord knows what it would do.
2. I don't trust engineers. Sorry. I don't. I was one of the guys pulling patients out of the Texas Medical Center the next day after Allison. The TMC, or the hospitals there, all have things like backup generators, UPS-es, flood walls to keep out the water flowing around them. Well, guess what happened...The flood walls broke or were simply flowed over, the UPS-es and backup generators, believing they were safe, we mounted in the basements (it was cheaper...), and suddenly lots of very, very sick people were left high and dry.
So yeah...no thanks. You'll have to do a lot of proving to me to get me to sign up for underground lines...
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
This question comes up twice a year here in Portland, OR, once in early spring and once in winter. Or at least it used to come up in winter before global warming took away our ice storms.
In early spring we usually get heavy rains, and some years (this year, for instance) we get really heavy rains and flooding. You have to figure if the cable company's TV signals get swamped by the water that underground power lines wouldn't fare well, if we had them.
And then in the winter we used to have at least one ice storm a year in which freezing rain and 100% humidity at 0 degrees Celsius would build up inch-thick casings of ice on the overhead powerlines, and a lot of them would fall down. The last time this happened in a big way there was a public outcry for putting the lines underground, until the power company (used to be an unholy-owned subsidiary of Enron) announced the capital expenditure for that would be $250 million (that's Million, with a capital 10^6).
Now that we only get an ice storm every four or five years, instead of every year, there's not so much call for burying the powerlines, but I'll bet that will change when the SUV goes extinct and we get our carbon budget back on track.
Speaker
I recently watched several documentaries on power distribution system maintenance. The thing that really got my attention is the fact that maintenance is almost always done on hot lines. That is the exact opposite of the what I was taught when I was an electronics technician. I'd want the power turned off and locked out before getting within 10 feet of any of that stuff.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Here in Western Australia, they're slowly migrating all the above-ground utilities (power and phone) to underground facilities - and I'm quite sure all new installations are underground. We have a lot of issues with poletop fires and storms, but we're hardly a tropical climate, you'd think somewhere like Florida might invest in that kind of thing.
I'm not sure, but I think they might also be running cable TV services as part of the conversion. It would suprise me if they weren't, as it's a pretty good way of subsidising the cost.
I like underground. Let's face it, above ground is ugly, is vulnerable to weather, gets taken out by drunk drivers far too often.
Underground lines getting cut by construction. They do that all the time, mostly when the old lines weren't recorded, or recorded properly. And the occassional idiot that doesn't check. Of course, they seem to accidentally trash above ground lines just as often around here.
Electricity through the ground. Well, in those area with copper phone lines underground (there's a lot of them) it doesn't really seem to be an issue. Sure the phone lines don't have the same level of current, but the basic principle is the same.
Electricution of Pedestrians. That's going to be a trick. Electricity wants to take the path of least resistance. So that means that whatever route it's going to take includes going out of it's conductor, up through your shoe/foot, leg, torso, other leg, other shoe/foot, and back to the same conductor it was already in. For that to happen, that route through you must have less resistance than the route it was already on. Unless of course it had a high resistance/insulation value, in which case, if that much juice is hitting your feet, you're already standing on a smoldering surface. Flame this paragraph all you want. It's a simplification of electrical paths, but it's still shows a valid point.
Fire ants. They are a problem wherever they exist. It's not the powerlines they like, it's the material that is often used for insulation. You have to use one they don't like. Evil little monsters from the netherplanes of hell that they are. Oh, they like stuff high up also, they just target the closer stuff first.
Repair and upgrades. I don't have a perfect solution, but here is an idea to think about. Have the lines in sections with extra pipes and room for new lines. Include room for robots. (Inspection and repair) have access points spread around. Probably at placement points for transformers and the like. Changing a cable could be like running new network cable through a conduit. In addition, these low height structures could be easily disguised to match location, and be concrete reinforced so drunk drivers don't trash them. Is it more expensive? Yes. Modular tends to be more expensive in the short term, but it usually makes up for it in the long run. Besides, esthetics is a little hard to price.
Heat dissipation. That was brought up. Good point. Of course the underground structure could be built to enhance heat dissipation. This would mitigate (but not eliminate the issue.) Also, there is a new form of transformer (about 10 years old or so) that generates about 70% less heat. This also improves the amount of electricity it moves. Of course, most electricity companies either don't know about it, or feel there is no reason to replace the current ones unless they blow up or something. (A transformer blowing up is a rather surprising thing to witness. I've seen it from a distance.) Even then, they tend to use the ones they have on hand, rather than order a new type that they've never used before.
Another thing with regards to digging them up and such. Currently powerlines have a protected space under/around them. I see no reason why an underground system shouldn't have a physical boundry also. Also, include marker 'stones', or even small posts like roadside reflectors. Choose something that's not intrusive, that uses a standardized symbology to indicate what it is. If it's properly marked, the accidental interuptions by construction and farmers will drastically reduce.
Enough babbling by me, flame all you want, it's just a concept.
Institutional holders certainly care about the value of their holdings, and do employ analysts, but that analysis may not be as objective and scientific as some may think. The ideal of analysts applying Graham & Dodd type Fundamental analysis to wisely choose their investments is kind of a romantic view, especially given the limited visibility and flexibility of accounting practices (Pro-Forma, beat-by-a-penny).
If analysts only focus on fundamentals, why are so many still in Fanny Mae (FNM) which has not produced a financial statement since 2003? Why does GOOG, a company with 5000 employees which sells (easily blocked) ads on a free search engine given a market cap of 120B against earnings of 1.5B, when a company like Ford, which employs 300,000 people and makes actual useful stuff gets a measly 12B market cap against earnings of 2B?
The reason is because GOOG stock has MoMo, and Ford is old and boring. But Looking at the major holders of both companies and you will find the same cast of staid-sounding financial institutions. That's because those institutions are just as willing, maybe even more willing to chase MoMo plays as those pesky but mostly mythical day-traders.
If Analysts do not chase yield, they are fired. Since it is not their money, they are often willing to take big risks since they are encouraged to be aggressive. This leads to the short-term focus that they are not supposed to have. Also, many analysts are wrong, since companies are not always eager to share bad news, the market is ruled by much more than just fundamentals, and is far less information efficient than many believe.
When Analysts are not chasing the market, they are helping to manipulate it. Many major, staid-sounding institutions employ lots of traders. These traders are aided in setting up positions for their companies by analysts who are sent out to say the right thing at the right time, thereby "enhancing their position in the capital markets". Most analysts you see on CNBC, Marketwatch, etc. are there to tout stocks and push the markets around.
For example, you may see an analyst downgrade a stock, causing suckers large and small to sell. They could be unknowingly selling to traders employed by the downgrading firm. After the firms traders have a position, there is coincidentally news about how the stock beat earnings by more than the usual one penny, or got a big contract, etc. the stock goes up on volume generated by the suckers that sold in the first place who now want back in. They are unknowingly buying back from the same traders they sold to, who walk away with their non-staid, but very green, instant profit. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If this sounds illegal, it is. But there is not a lot resources for active enforcement in the chronically underfunded SEC. Coincidentally, the US financial markets are a huge source of income for the US government, as well as being the mechanism for monetization of the national debt (It's cheaper and more efficient than using a printing press). Many also consider the financial markets as a strategic tool of the USA, a tool which extends US power farther and faster than any army can travel. Actually, maybe near-zero enforcement is not a coincidence after all.
Anyway... Long story short, big institutions chase MoMo too.
There are many underground power lines and transformers in San Francisco. Every few months, a transformer explodes, sending manholes flying and injuring pedestrians with hot gasses and debris. Perhaps that's a function of the age of the equipment coupled with earthquakes adding to the wear and tear over the years. In any case, when underground power gear fails, the confined spaces channel the force of any gasses or explosions in a way that concentrates the impact on bystanders.
When overhead lines and equipment fail, the risk to bystanders is primarly due to falling shrapnel and live wires. At least people have a chance of seeing those coming and jumping out of the way.
If I had a choice, I would rather take my chances on overhead lines.
Unsightly above-ground wires or expensive below-ground cables? Bah, a false choice.
How about making above-ground wires a little more sightly?
Where I live, power and phone and cable are all spliced and diced and strung in sloppy fashion from poles to homes. With about 2 minutes of thought and very minimum investment in cable races, ties, etc., the neighborhood "spider webs" could be easily tamed. Hell, use green colored cables and races and blend it into the foliage. Put flower planters and ivy up the sides of the poles. There a lots of things that could be done.
Here in North Carolina we get thunderstorms all the time and my power nev
Switching to underground power would require not just the upkeep of underground wires:
Underground wires will require insulated wire to replace much of the uninsulated wire used in overhead lines.
Underground wires will require that thousands of miles of trenches be dug.
Underground lines will require that houses have power inlets underground rather than on the roof, as present.
Underground lines will require that Millions, if not billions, of towers and poles be constructed.
Underground lines will require pole-top transformers be moved to ground level or below.
The costs of converting are staggering, and will take probably at least a decade.
As a resident of the DC suburbs (southern MD to be precise) we aren't having too many power outages due to these recent storms. Mostly flooded roads.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
My parents live in a neighborhood with buried power, phone, and cable. Early last fall the power went out and the power company came and dug around the pole where all the power goes underground before going into the neighborhood it took about a day, but the power came back on. A month later it happened again. Then it started happening on a weekly basis. There was one week, and it wasn't a warm week, where the power was on and off constantly. My parents and the rest of the neighborhood patiently waited it out. How, I don't know, but they did. Problems were ongoing until this spring after the ground thawed when they dug up the main line and replaced it. All this for a neighborhood of maybe 100 homes who aren't paying any more per KWh than I am. If the problem had been in my neck of the woods they would have been able to find and fix the problem very easily since the wires are on poles and can be tested from any point they want.
Yes, I liked growing up without power lines, and for the entire time I was growing up we never had a problem like that although since our power was aerial until the last quarter mile or so, we still had the normal storm outages. These lines are now a little over 30 years old, and I suspect that some of the other lines off the main might eventually have similar problems. They're replacing poles down the road from my house that are probably also about 30 years old, although I don't know for certain.
The thing I know I couldn't stand is having the power off for hours or even a day at a time in the middle of winter. My parents have a wood burning stove, but if that happened to me I'd have to buy something that ran on propane or kerosene to keep my kids warm.
On the other hand, with overhead power lines what would the rats tunnel in? That's right, underground power lines routinely get infested with rats enabling them to travel anywhere.
I feel sick after reading this drivel:
Is it more expensive to put transmission lines underground?
Yes. Transmission lines supply electric power to large areas serving large numbers of people, and they are much more expensive to build. The extra cost of placing these lines underground is quite significant. An equivalent underground transmission line can cost several times more than the cost of an overhead transmission line.
Why does it cost so much more?
Transmission lines can provide enough electricity to power whole cities and are much more technically complex and material intensive. The design, installation and maintenance costs are all higher for underground lines. Installation costs for underground transmission lines can be several times those of an overhead line.
Why do we even NEED power lines???!!
The Admin and the Engineer
As weird as it may sound, quite a number of small towns here, in Ukraine have their powergrids (mostly) underground. It is so because in the 90s it was not uncommon for every piece of cable/wiring to get stolen sortly after being installed. So, back in day it used to be financially effective. Now with crime rates down it, probably, would not be worth the price, thought. But it stays as it was.
Wired has a great article on this, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70040-0.htm l
"Long term it still costs more."
I'd say that's debatable. My power bills were more in Denver than an hour north. In Fort Collins, Colorado, a study found that the quality of life was higher because the skyline lacked the unsightly transmission lines. I can say, being here, that it is a benefit to creating an overall, less-clustered atmosphere (I like to see the mountains when the pollution isn't in the way). The plan to bury lines was started before the town started growing, so various infrastructure was already well established to handle a growing population, e.g., roads, schools, etc. The cost of labor, materials and fuel was also cheaper when they started the program over a decade ago. They continue to add more buried lines to new neighborhoods and are still burying exposed lines in the back of older neighborhoods to this day. I'd like to note that our city handles water and electric, not a privately-held utility, like our gas company, Xcel.
Sure, our town is in a budget crunch. Well, more like we have a six million dollar deficit, but there's other reasons for that. I've often wondered why places like Florida don't bury their lines as they suffer so many storm-related disruptions. That's got to take a bigger hit on the economy, but when you think that every person has to start over to some extent, they will spend their insurance money on a new PS2 as much as a new house (unless the insurance company goes broke trying to settle claims). The Miami Herald has an article about the debate to bury or not to bury:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12502044.htm
The long-term cost of maintaining the conduit may be offset by increased services the government can give in the event of crisis because they don't have to bear the cost of repair and/or the cost of lost productivity when responding with reduced public services. I admit that the environment here is completely different than Florida. I would imagine, because it is dry here, we don't have to worry too much about drainage/plant related problems with our conduits, but ICBW... I also notice that our utility crews seem very well-prepared and, at least, look like they're working!
No sig for you! Come back one year!
What happens when it floods ?
Who is responsible for the new-in-town person that digs one up & zaps themselves before downing the grid ?
What about sinkholes ?
Some stoner managed to pass a drug test & get a job installing the stuff, said stoner says "fuck it" & burys a questionable piece of line, how do we know where to dig when it fails ?
How much longer is the permit for my new pool going to be delayed because I have to get clearance from yet another utility ?
That's just a handfull of questions off the top of my head.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Nice Republican regurgitating. Read any good Coulter books lately?
I used to work for civil engineering offices for some years. Here in sitzerland many power cables are underground. this is nearly for 100% true on the last mile (connection inside cities to the houses) and inter city conenctions. only the very large "main" lines are build overground.
The biggest problem we are facing is lack of documentation of older underground lines. These are frequently damaged on building sites. When machines digg out a hole and they are not aware of the power cables (these cables could partially be detected, however nobody is payed for doing this). this is dangerous for the workers and leads to (ususally small) outages within, let's say, a block of houses.
Once or twice a year we are hit by storms which reach 200kmh, personally i think having these lines underground helps prevent large power outages, but it has some drawbacks too. in our case maintenance costs are high due to the lack of documentation, high costs for documenting now (what should have been done when they put it into the ground in the first place).
There are places that have an entirely underground power grid. I know because I live in one.
All of our high and low voltage supplies are underground (66/33KV transmission and 240V household supplies).
The benefits are the reduced susceptibility to wind damage, and the aesthetic issue of not having large, bulky cables handing from poles everywhere. (If only the telephone company could be persuaded to take the same approach!).
The downside is that the costs of any repair, taken in isolation, are probably higher. However the probability of a repair being required (due to wind damage, trees) is substantially lower.
The fact that I live in a small (and windy) island (Guernsey) in the Atlantic off the French coast is another factor. Relative prosperity a further factor - although it has been a policy here to put power lines underground since at least the second world war (when things were much less prosperous).
Housing density must be another issue - Guernsey is relatively densely populated (1000 people per square mile on average). It is notable that in the less densely populated "country" areas there are a few overhead supplies to remote houses.
Are the costs of maintaining underground electric cables really any worse that those for other underground untilities - such as water or gas?
Always astonishes me when visiting the US, how blind people are to the web of cables above their heads. It defines the view of many populated parts of the country. Please look up and realise just how damn ugly all those cables are. They look like a bunch of temporary repairs. Almost 3rd world.
My grandfather was an engineer and was responsible for laying many gas and electrical networks in the Netherlands after WWII. He visited the United States in the early 50's together with my mother and one of the things that astonished him was that all of the power grid and phone lines were up in the air! Naturally, lightning strikes are an eternal problem with this design.
In the Netherlands, as in many (most?) European countries, most of the power grid (except for the very high voltages) and all of the phone system is underground. More expensive? Well, maybe initially, which I'm sure is the reason why US utility companies are not so enthusiastic about the idea, but certainly not afterwards. Environmentally invasive? Oh, give me a break! You bury them along the roads, not somewhere in the woods! The roads will always be more of a problem environmentally than the power- and phone lines buried in the ground next to them! Longer repair times? Perhaps, but then they wouldn't have to be repaired nearly as often, now would they?
One of the reasons why beautiful Japan looks so damn UGLY is because of all the bloody power lines EVERYWHERE. This has a lot to do with all the power lines being made out of concrete and the concrete lobby being exceedingly powerful (right next to the RICE lobby). So, yeah, in a country with a hell of a lot of earth quakes (just had one three hours ago), you would think that having all this above ground power would cause problems... and it does... But do they change? No... oh Japan...
I presume that the Germans, because of the constraints of their language's syntax at the end of which their sentences most of their verbs must put, cultural constraints that ahead they must think required are.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Wow. That's a bit mad. Isn't that dangerous ?
In Ireland, householders go crazy if they move into a new house to find that power lines haven't been buried yet. Of course, it's likely that all the talk of EM from power lines causing cancer is complete bullshit, but its certainly unsightly, and doesn't cost that much to bury them, if you have telecoms cables that need to be buried anyway.
It just needs a little planning and cooperation; something local governments force on Irish utility companies.
John
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
Why this is modded +5 informative shows how bad the average person's logic is. Unless you pegged my sarcasm meter (which is possible) it seems more plausible that keeping the nations government stably powered is a more significant factor than the placement of the lines.
Power has gone out at least once a year for the past five years to my (Downtown San Francisco) neighborhood. Due to underground power lines. A couple months ago an underground substation exploded and burned the hell out of a woman walking on the sidewalk. A couple years ago directly in front of my apartment a short underground ignited flammable (sewer) gases which blew the manhole covers 40 feet in the air (And the power out for the whole day). No one was hurt, but one of the covers did go most of the way through a car.
My UPS gets a good work out.
They're up there for the birds.. what would they sit on otherwise, now that telephone cables are all going underground!
- There's no place like 127.0.0.1
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
...is that nearly all local power cables are underground, and it's just the backbone 132kV stuff that's on pylons. People don't like the look of overhead cables, and they are a blight to nearby properties because of unproven cancer fears.
We still get rare powercuts, usually because a thunderstorm has tripped something at a substation. This still happens with underground cables.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
With storms getting worse and worse
Looks like you fell hook line and sinker for the latest stupid thought of the year. The problem is people are building in areas they shouldn't be building in. Add in failure to maintain levies and dams - including relying on ones that are not up to par.
The storms may be getting worse but I bet if you look at the big picture you'll see a cycle is in effect. You know like the 100 year flood they always talk about.
Of course silly me I'm trying to make sense. Go go on and build on that flood plain. Or in an area that is slowly sinking each year below sea level. Don't worry after mother nature is done smacking you upside the head we'll be dumb enough to give you the aid to build there again.
Let's play philosophy! I'll start:
You can't be blind to ugly.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I lived through a US hurricane season back in 1996 and the area had underground power and phone lines. Two major hurricanes hit the area with enough force to knock down trees and cause other damage, yet I spent my time during both hurricanes gaming online with no service interruption. Yes the lights blinked a few times and the power went out once for 3 minutes, but I had a decent UPS and didn't go offline ONCE during either hurricane.
It's possible to make the basic service infrastructure in an area resistant to storm damage, but it takes a dedicated effort that many regions are unwilling to undertake. In the meantime, your only practical option is to take a look around for power and phone lines when you move into an area. If you don't see any poles or lines, then maybe your power and phone lines are underground and safe from everything but unchecked water intrusion and the occasional casual backhoe operator.
The problem with any such debate is that practical application is a far cry from the theoretical efficiency. On paper, buried powerlines are a great idea: they're less susceptible to damage, there's no pole for Cletus to ram his truck into, and it's "invisible" so no ugly lines all over the neighborhood. You'd think installing an underground power line would make it last forever, since it doesn't get rained on or blown by the wind, little critters won't climb and chew at them, and the ever-present stupidity factor of dumb guys knocking poles over with trucks. In practice though, there are compromises to be made, budgets to be met, cheap conduit materials that break down, lazy ass blue collar workers who think "job security" means "making sure we have to do it over in 6 months", other blue collars who "didn't know there were buried cables" when they ripped it all out with a backhoe. In a perfect world and a perfect economy, buried cabling would be the be-all-end-all, but humankind is anti-perfect by design.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Let's assume (though this is far from obviously true) that underground lines are indeed more reliable. Having a reliable electric supply generates lots of positive externalities--and of course unreliable power has large negative externalities.
The problem is that the positive externalities generated by the underground lines would not be captured by the power company. Even if the buried lines generate benefits to society far in excess of their high costs, the power company would see only a fraction of those benefits (e.g. less money spent on repairs, assuming that's even true.) The cost, though beneficial to society, is prohibitive to the utility.
Possible solutions of course involve government subsidies to bury the power lines, or perhaps requiring them to be buried and allowing the higher cost to be passed to consumers (for instance in Maryland, where electricity has been deregulated, it's only the generation of power that's deregulated. Retail delivery is still regulated.)
Penny - plain text accounting
Why not switch to Tesla's World System instead?
Free electricity for everyone, everywhere, at all times. Electrocution was never that simple!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Put fiber optics underground, and no matter how well you try, someone is going to hit them. Whether by contractor laziness/mistake, or due to utility locates being off by more than 20 feet, it's going to happen. Also, you have the problem of lazy install contractors who will find the softest dirt, and bury fiber optics right smack dab on top of existing utilities. And repairing overhead is more cost efficient than repairing underground utilities. I work in this field, so I know what I'm talking about.
In my opinion, string that garbage up in the air where it can be seen, and make a "treefall" zone around any above ground utility (nothing shall remain standing that can at any time fall and interupt service. There are plenty of trees, and what would be cut can be replaced).
Why do we use fiber optics anyway when there's wireless? The only thing that should be in the ground are gas, storm drains, and water and sewer lines.
This experiment in burying wires has gone on long enough, time for it to end.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
i didn't rtfa. i think putting an online ups and generator will be far cheaper and better than trying to rely 100% power supply from your utility. i think that cost of equipment + overhead transmission underground transmission.
it will be crazy if critical infrastructure (hospitals, telephone exchanges, etc.) will assume that utility power will be reliable 100% of the time. it may even be better in some areas to actually run of generators 24 hours than having to get it through utility. these scenarios don't justify spending too much on underground cables as cost outweight benefits.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I'm taking it upon myself to get some solar panels
Perhaps you should also put these underground. Solar panels are expensive and could be damaged by flying debris in high winds!
Another poster suggested you should consider wind instead of solar. Here, you would want to bury the wind mills to protyect them, and also to protect flocks of birds. But the worm evangelists would come after you
Cause some bubba with a backhoe would dig it up.
Is there a specific reason why sewers can't be used for cables aside from the unwillingness of technicians to get dirty?
The transformers and whatnot could remain above-ground, of course. This question has been bugging me for years.
Note: Not a good idea in Earthquake-prone areas.
When lightning hits the earth it naturally find the path of least resistance. If it strikes anywhere near a buried power line, it will find that power line and overload the circuit. When lines are hung from towers, lightning hits the tower to find ground, essentially ignoring the line.
Germany has 1/3 the people of the USA crammed into a space 1/27th the space.
That might suggest that a single US utility consumer might be paying for a bit more infrastructure.
It is not the full 9x factor that the numbers imply since you can localize your sources, but it is a SIGNIFICANTLY larger distance that must be covered to convey the same service.
This is true of highways.
I find it absolutely amazing that our prices are even in the same ball park as those of Europe on goods and services that are impacted by population density. In most cases in the US it is cheaper even if you do not take government subsidies into consideration.
Ok, train travel is MUCH cheaper in Europe, but electricity, water, septic, garbage, postal, trucking, auto and air are all cheaper in the US.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
This is a no-brainer.
The lower the current, the lower the power loss caused by cable resistance. P-loss = I ^ R-cable (lost power equals squared current times cable resistance.)
The higher the voltage, the lower the current for the same total power. I = P-tot / V (Current equals total devided by voltage.)
The higher the voltage, the more insulation you need.
Air insulates fine as long as you have plenty of it.
Air to insulate costs nothing.
Insulating high voltages through anything else than air is horribly expensive.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Another surprise after moving to Nashville was how many traffic lights flash yellow/red or go out completely when it rains. Not thunderstorms just rain.
Speaking as the son of a retired rural co-op lineman, underground counduit is a very bad idea in most situation. Whatever conduit you put the lines in breaks down and can leak. You would have to insulate the lines, buy new excavating equipment that most utilities don't own (and train/hire people who know how to operate them), shut down surface streets for extended periods of time. You'd also have to punch holes in the basements of all the hosues served by this underground line and move most, if not all of the meters. It'd be a nightmare, and in many rural environments like ours the terrain would absolutely prohibit it.
Overhead lines are cheap and easy to break, sure, but they're also cheap and easy to repair. Which would you prefer? Having your heat and lights go out in the dead of winter maybe once or twice every year, but you get to have it back in an hour or two; or having your heat and lights go out once every couple of years and not being able to have it back for a day or more (i.e. after grandma's dead because she's frozen to death or because she fell down the stairs or couldn't find her pills in the dark or her respirator's backup batteries died)?
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
By burying the lines, the power companies would be trading one problem for another. Sure, lightning would no longer be a problem, but shovels, backhoes and bulldozers would be. I'm talking about me trying to regrade my yard, bottom-plow my field, the neighbor putting in a sprinkler system, or an old man digging post holes. I ran a water line out to my garden this weekend. Thank God I didn't have to worry about underground power lines.
Underground lines might work well in cities where people just sit around and entertain themselves, but they'd be a disaster out in my neck of the woods where people work the ground.
We refer to Pepco, our local power provider in the close-in Maryland suburbs, as a third-world power company. They've actually improved a little in the past few years, but in general, if it rains or snows, the power WILL go out.
After Hurricane Isabel we went 5 days without power. We've had three-day outages after a normal snowfall.
Yes, in downtown DC the power stays on, because the lines are buried. Outside that area, fugedaboutit.
No sig? Sigh...
Europe manages perfectly well to keep its urban power underground... it doesn't explode or blow up or do anything remotely exciting or sensational (so un-american!!), but it does power all those nice, efficient european appliances... it just works. Sometimes it breaks down, guys fix it and it works... 'nuff said.
I think possibly another big issue being missed here in the comments above is the issue of safety. If you have cables that can eletrocute you to death instantly ... it's much safer to have them above ground where they're in plain site, and you know you're close to them ... as opposed to them being underground ... and you accidentatlly digging or cutting into one and boom ... you're dead before you even know it.
A quick google for 'electrocuted dog' will show several stories over the last few years where people have watched their dogs electrocuted (sometimes fatally) simply because poor fido stepped on a metal access cover in Boston.
This has happened quite a lot in Boston, but has also happened in Chicago and Brooklyn.
While this isn't necessarily a "big dollar problem", it should be taken seriously because it's probably only a matter of time before it's a person getting hurt.
As a dog lover, this seems unfortunate, but as a realist, I can see how it goes. A family will demand $74K for the death of their dog and get laughed out of the courtroom, but when it's a person, the settlement will be several million at least. If it's a child, the midden will really hit the windmill.
Granted, it's not generally wise to wander around the city barefoot, but there are a lot of homeless people in the larger cities, and just because it's not wise, doesn't mean someone won't do it. Sometimes it's better to be realistic than practical.
Another major reason you don't bury lines is energy loss in subterrain power systems.
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It's more because being ineficiant will annoy any good German. In the town I spent my high school years in they repaved one of the main roads only to dig up a section less than a week later to upgrade the water lines. A German city planner would have a stroke seeing that.. a North American city planner would just shrug and just not worry about it.
Now, I'm not a physicist (just a geek), but doesn't the power loss translate into a substantial amount of heat being generated?
I mean, high tension lines have all that air around them to dissipate the heat generated. How would they handle it with underground pipes? I recall hearing about underground high tension lines in New Zealand (I think) that used coolant (dielectric fluid)? pumped around the lines in conduits to dissipate heat. What happens if the pumps fail? What happens if lightning or high winds, rather than knocking out a line, takes out the transformer that runs a pumping system, and then the lines overheat and blow anyways?
I'm just askin'. This is all from sketchy recollection and conjecture.
The power lines in front of my parent's house used to be buried, but they aren't any more. The reason: these lines were buried along a length of built-up roadbed that approaches a bridge. Shifting rock and vibration from the roadbed caused the cables to fail frequently. The effort required to identify, dig up, and repair a break was significant.
The answer: dig up the cable and string it across telephone poles. The frequency of power outages has decreased, as has the time to repair an outage.
...with putting the power lines underground is that the phone poles are so tall, it is a total pain to auger deep enough to bury them.
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As a Floridian (I moved to Seattle a couple of months ago) we had a huge debate after the series of hurricanes in 2004 that roared through the state and left a quarter of the population without power. My apartment complex was in one of the few areas of Orlando to never loose power during those storms. We had buried lines in that area and we were very close to a major substation.
The problem lies in the patchwork nature. Even in a state susceptible to hurricanes, unless all of the lines are buried, you'll still have outages in a situation like that. The difference is simple, the number of outages and who is affected. Flying debris causes the most damage in the gulf coast states from storms like that. In New England, I'm sure ice or something is the largest annual problem.
That said, the way the power companies restore power makes sense to everyone except a Floridian without power and therefore lacking Air conditioning. Rebuild and Repair ops begin at the trunk and work toward the branches. each step away from the trunk affects a little less people. So you fix the most in on shot at the trunk and the least at the twiggy little neighborhood branches and individual transformers (where you might fix two families with a single repair versus 100 families on a feeder line repair).
It's always the families on those little single transformer outages that complain the most because 1) they're last on priority (and rightfully so) and 2) they don't care because it's 90 degrees and 70%+ humidity and they're miserable.
In some states, such as Florida, it makes sense to move as much underground as possible because you just have to keep rebuilding the system which is itself expensive and kills profits. In other states, it doesn't make as much sense. Washington state for example has half it's population clustered around Puget Sound. Potential events that could cause those types of events are extremely rare compared to hurricanes along the gulf. Things like Mount Rainier going off or a major earthquake are possible contenders but how often do those happen?
It's all perspective. Most corporations won't invest in something that affects profits with marginal gain at best. Incidentally, in a lot of the Puget Sound the power is a public utility run by or through the government rather than a company like most of the country.
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This discussion needs to clear up an important disctinction. "The Grid" is the Transmission system - bigger towers, higher voltage (usually 100Kv and up), connects generation to substations. It is usually above ground for the reasons aleady described. The Distribution system connects substations to the meters at the consumer's location, usually lower voltage to the local transformer (10-15 Kv in the US) and then 220v from the transformer to the consumer. This is on the poles in your neighborhood if you live in an older neighborhood. It is probably underground if you live in a newer area or a city.
he plan to bury lines was started before the town started growing
You've answered your own question - its cheaper to bury them when you're first laying out the infrastructure.
The problem with above-ground power lines in Florida won't exist in 25 years (since what will be left of Florida will be prtty much uninhabitable) so why bother?
A friend of mine works at con edison, the company the supplies NYC power where everything is run underground. They have many issues with wires and pipes being corroded by different substances underground. For instance, salt.. Every time there is a snow storm and the streets need salting, a big part of the cost to the city is the extra repair that will soon be needed on the underground electric system...
Well I can tell you where I live now, Rochester, NY, has underground power lines everywhere. I've only lived here two years but I haven't seen a power company digging anywhere. TCO aside, I can vouch that the lack of power lines hanging everywhere adds boatloads to the visual appear of a city. It means trees on the sides of roads don't have to be mutilated or cut down.
Actually it's my understanding that some telephone lines -- the ones that are up on the poles -- are actually pressurized with some kind of inert gas. I don't know if they do this continuously, or just as some maintainance procedure, but I once saw a big tank of gas strapped to a telephone pole with a hose running up to where somebody was working, and I asked the other guys (who were shovel-leaning, naturally) what was going on. I think it was nitrogen but it might have been argon or something instead. They were a little cagey about what exactly they were doing, but the compressed gas was definitely theirs. (They were SNET guys, I believe -- this was in Connecticut a while ago.)
... although for sections of line that are particularly difficult to repair, I could see the benefit.
The gas required to continuously pressurize underground conduits (and the labor required to seal them all) would be enormous, I suspect
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Hi Powerlines are not underground because not only will a breakage be difficult to repair, but also if there is a breakage it could be possible that someone could get zapped. In Copley Square Boston for example, where there are underground cables and
fancy street lighting that looks like gas lighting from the early 1900's, well anyway a dog went around to do it's business and
zap! The dog got electrocuted.
What kind of unfounded, subjective environmental doomsaying is that statement supposed to be?
Could this be exploited to build something like a giant fireant-zapper? It would seem more environmentally friendly than spraying pesticide to exterminate the things...
-b.
As a power system engineer, I can tell you that there are good reasons why ALL long high voltage power lines are overhead.
1. Underground is much more expensive.
2. Insulation is much more expensive for underground
3. Large effective wire sizes are much more difficult for underground lines
4. Underground lines are more likely to be damaged. (Backhoe to 500,000 Volts anyone?). This one makes sense too. You can see where the overhead power line is. With the underground line, you are just guessing.
5. Losses are higher in an underground line. Impedances are higher. A long overhead line is more than 100 miles. A long underground line is more than 20. That's for similar impedances and losses. Any accountant can do that math.
6. Lightning damage is less. For an overhead line, the lightning stroke is bled off by the surge arrestors. A large stroke might damage an arrestor, or break an insulator, but doesn't damage most of the line. A lightning strike to an underground line (They do happen) means that you need to replace the line. Overhead power lines typically have shield lines overhead that intercept the strokes anyway.
All that said, if Superconducting cable ever becomes a financial reality, that would shift the economics over to underground. In the end, economics always wins.
With those millions of poles and zillions of miles of hanging wires and cables? Look at Europe to see what your landscape COULD have looked like! But it's too late now. You should have thought of that before. Digging was too much work, wasn't it? So live with the consequences!
Actually the urban city in which I live is gradually burying it's power and other utility lines. They were NOT buried in the first place as the area was heavily developed in a time period in which power lines were not buried, most likely becuase of a combination of cost and adequate waterproofing, insulation, etc. of the lines and their carrying conduits.
ALL new developments in pretty much every area of the country(Florida, Texas, Georgia, Washington, etc.) that I have seen routinely bury ALL utility lines, as I would presume that once the conduit work is in place and lines initially laid that it ends up saving over the cost of maintenance of lines strung from telephone poles and eventual replacements of said poles. Burying of lines in this area is somewhat complicated as it HAS been developed already which GREATLY complicates the burial process resident/commercial concern, access, etc.
When they began plans to relocate I-195 through Providence one of the things mentioned was burying the high tension lines that were strung directly over India Point park.
The shit storm went back and forth on that one. At the time Narragansett Electric was hemming and hawing about the cost. I was working at the state AG's office at the time and our public utilities unit knew that Narragansett could afford to bury the lines and still maintain low cost. Even went public with it.
But in the end, our Public Utilities Commission turned a deaf ear to it. Now National Grid (They bought Narragansett and are looking at buying New England Gas.) is going to pass the full cost of the project to ratepayers.
I'm sorry but basic utilities like water, electric and gas should NEVER be run for-profit. Because when things are run for-profit they tend to abuse their power and setup their PUC rules and regs so it ALWAYS benefits the company. Not to mention letting outside plant rot so they can give a return to their shareholders.
Where I live they cheaped out. They wanted the telephone poles removed from the main street so they basically string electric, phone and cable on the back streets, then duct it underground to the main street. So we're still susceptible to power outages during storms.
Highlights of this include watching a transformer get blown off a pole by lightning, and then watching the now conductors arc like crazy until the breakers finally gave out. Or how about watching them have to replace undergroun transformer after transformer because some nitwit had wired one side of it the wrong way. I call National Grid "The Third World Power Company". Because that's exactly what it is.
In the long term, PG&E has found that undergrounding cables is cheaper than fixing cables knocked down by trees, at least in Bay Area I'm sure part of this has to do with the cost of labor in California, so it may not make sense in all areas, perhaps not in all areas in California where labor may be cheaper or there are just fewer trees. Sometimes it the issue is getting towns to go along with it, especially if other utilities are sharing the poles.
Quote: might underground lines prove more resistant to storm-related power outages?
Simple answer: no.
Underground power grids have different problems. Lightning strikes have just as much effect on the grid as above ground, and whats worse, the lighting induced faults don't always occur right away. Also when an underground transformer (or a box in the corner of the lot) floods, it is a much harder job to clean up and bring back on line. If some nicks the cable wiuth a shovel while planting a tree, the cable will fail and the power company will have to dig up the old cable and repplace it. Once more, it takes longer to repair. The only advantage of underground power is no ugly power poles.
These companies have government sanctioned monopolies. While, in somes ways this is a good idea, it does not give the power companies any incentive to increase the reliability of their systems.
When a powerline fails, and they have to replace it, instead of just replacing the cable, they dig a new trench and they bury the cable. If they can't dig, they use the sewers to install the new cables.
If they install a new cable, to add capacity to the existing link for example, they bury the cable too.
I think that Discovery Channel ran a documentary about Paris' sewers a while back (saw it on our localized version of Discovery Channel a few weeks ago). They shown how they use the sewers to install power lines and optic fibers all across the city.
And in Monaco (Monte Carlo) the whole powergrid is already underground.
Another advantage to an underground power grid would be the improvement in appearance for residents. In many towns, an otherwise attractive street can be made ugly by a tangle of phone and electric cables strung up everywhere you look. In addition to reliability issues, the effect of appearance on property values should be considered as one of the costs of having above-ground lines.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
"It is common knowledge that an underground power grid is less susceptible to the effect of a large thunderstorm."
There are three aspects of thunderstorms that can affect transmission lines and distribution lines: a) wind, b) water and flooding, 3) lightning strikes. Moving transmission lines below ground is generally considered impractical for the distances usually seen in North America.
Moving distribution lines underground protects against wind damage, but heightens the risk from water and, counterintuitively, lightning.
A typical lightning strike on above ground distribution lines will usually leave the line to find a shorter path to ground, and only a small fraction of the current will continue on the line, damaging consumer electronics and tripping protective breakers, but not usually damaging the distribution infrastructure.
With a lightning strike near below ground distribution lines, the strike often finds the lines and will travel hundreds of feet along the line, damaging the insulation as it dissipates.
The University of Florida Lightning Research group has done significant research in the area:
http://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/
When I was in high school there were some german exchange students who though it was fantastic when we had a power outage - they had never experienced one before. They thought all the wires in the air were kind of ugly though.
So the question is how does Germany make this work when the American power companies are certain it can't?
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Georgetown frequently has power outages because the power lines are underground.
One big economic reason I know of that is against burying transmission lines underground is heat. The heat created from current flow is not dissipated as easily, creating and more heat and higher resistance due to the heat....This requires larger cables at higher cost, so you have two effects going against you right off....resistance losses, and cable costs. When you add in the labor involved and all of the other odds and ends the economics drive everything towards overhead lines.
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A huge factor I didn't see mentioned below is that buried power lines shed much more electricity than suspended lines. The voltages that high tension wires operate at will create an arc of electricity a few feet long. In order to keep that power from leaking into the earth (Which has an electrical potential of zero, hence the term 'GROUND') the wires would need to either be encased in a glass sheath a foot thick, or be suspended in a tunnel 20 feet across. If you didn't do this, the end of the transmission lines would be dead.
In Florida, after Hurricane Wilma, all of Broward county lost power for 1-4 weeks...except for my town. The only difference is that our power lines are underground. The cost of repairs to the rest of the power grid was estimated at close to $6 billion. At least in hurricane prone areas, the extra investment is well worth it.
I live in a somewhat rural area next to a small (15k population) city. Our development of approximately 3,600 homes is served by two providers: a Rural Electric Cooperative, who has buried lines, and a national (multinational?) company, who has overhead lines. The national company also serves the nearby city.
When someone sneezes in the city, the power is literally out of commission for a week or more for some customers.
However, those of us lucky enough to be on the Cooperative's grid will still have power after a cataclysmic meteorite impact at Ground Zero. In the 5 years I've been there, we've only had an extended (6 hour) power outage once - and that outage was due to an overloaded circuit feeding one of the national company's grids, NOT due to one of the many ice storms, tornado's, or frequent high-wind storms we have. There have been a couple 10 minute outages, but I've been able to personally resolve those by plugging the fridge into the generator - the grid always comes back on within 5 seconds of doing this.
My brother lives in a neighborhood with underground utility lines. It looks pretty nice except for the high tension lines that go right through the middle of the subdivision and the cooling towers about 5 miles away.
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Georgetown's power outages happen not because the lines are underground, but because the lines that were put underground in decades past are now overloaded, due to population growth, universal air conditioning, and of course pervasive computer use. Burying cables makes them harder and more expensive to upgrade, so it brings a risk of inadequate capacity planning. But underground cables are protected from ice storms and falling tree limbs, which cause a lot of damage to pole-hung lines.
The whole idea of generating power in some huge plant in the middle of nowhere and then running miles of wire to deliver it to our homes and offices is just plain nuts. It wastes over half the energy. It would be much cheaper and better for the environment to generate power locally.
What, you say you don't want a huge, ugly, coal burning power plant in your back yard? What makes you think anyone else does?
I have solar panels on my roof. Works just fine.
I live in a development that is fed by overhead wires but the development itself has its wires underground. The development is 30 years old. Over the last 3 years, 6 of 12 houses have had sections of their underground lines replaced. When that happens, everyone is without power for a day or two. During the same time, numerous thunderstorms. Trees on power lines. Generally fixed in 6 hours.
With overhead wires, it is easier to spot problems, easier and cheaper to get at the problem, easier to fix it, and easier and cheaper to move the line if construction causes the need.
Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't it be worse to have underground powergrids during a flood? I would assume that with enough water even the best designed tunnels would flood.
Florida is an extra special fun case when it comes to burying power lines - Large sections of Florida have a water table that is only 3-4 feet below the surface.
Why?
I live in Fort Collins, and the post is correct. Quality of life here is better than nearby towns and cities I think in part due to the not-very-many-poles thing. It really helps. Oh, and business signs can't be higher than something like 9 feet above street level. So you can see the Rockies, but not the McDonald's 4 miles away [like in Mo where I used to live, ugh], which is a good thing.TM Planning is key, but you have to start planning sometime. So if a city decides now is the time to bury all lines, they do it like that from now on, and re-do lines that they can as time goes on. Like here. BTW, not all lines are or will be buried. Oh, and I rarely see blocked streets due to power or telephone or CATV work, all under the dirt. As a plus, and I think the buried lines have something to do with it, out property values are 15-20% higher that all surrounding communities north of Denver Metro/Boulder. Bury the lines!
I lived in Melbourne FL for the last couple years. The newer neighborhoods there mostly do have buried power lines, but the main grid is above ground. One reason I heard for this is that being so close to sea-level is an issue for buried lines, so they only do it in small areas that are high enough. Even then, everyone has to have a green box on their front yard for the juctions that can't be submerged in the wet ground.
Another consideration is that reparing downed lines doesn't take all that long or even cost all that much. The real costs from storm damage, with regard to power, is replacing blown transformers and juctions. These things would still be above ground, and still be blown regardless if the lines were above or below ground.
Here in OKC, they had buried pipes that had fallen off the records. Not too bad, until you want to widen a street. Then, with little townships popping up that didn't exist when the road was laid, but that initiate the construction, and you can begin to see what a nightmare that might be. The afore mentioned road construction was halted for 9 months, while ownership of the pipes, and more importantly, fiscal responsibility was thrashed out between the various agencies. Oh, I almost forgot to mention... While they did the arguing, us poor schmucks got to do the driving... A four lane road at one of the busier intersections on this side of town, and they had it down to two lanes, no progress on construction, and don't complain mind you that the city (BOTH!!!!) added speed limit signs and enforced them at the oddest times, like peek traffic. Talk about from bad to worse. No place to pull off, and the cops didn't care. Ok, Ok, Ok, I'll drop it... But I'm STILL pissed. 8-)
You will not find any above ground power lines or phone lines to individual houses in Germany at all. All this is about inital investments - its just so much cheaper to patch things here and there and let the next generation of managers deal with this when things start to break down because of old age. The loss in these old lines is tremedous.
More than that, when you only look at the last mile, underground utilities are much cheaper even in the medium term. For high tension lines, above ground transmission is probably a lot cheaper both short-term and long-term. They are high enough up that (major storms notwithstanding) they are largely immune to damage, and they stay hot enough that they are largely immune to things like ice forming on the lines.
However, for the last mile, the long term maintenance costs of underground power have to be orders of magnitude lower. You only need to dig if you are adding a house or whatever. Construction accidents aside, they rarely need any real maintenance. I can't remember the last time the local power company dug in my parents' yard in Tennessee. It was when I was about six or seven when the house was still being built. By contrast, with above ground poles, you have ice storms breaking thousands of lines. You have trees shorting out bare lines and shutting down power for your customers. And tree limbs fall and break lines in relatively light storms. In most places, the electric company is responsible for paying for tree trimming around their own lines. Add up the tree trimming costs for thousands of miles of wire for a couple of years and you've covered the extra cost of burying the lines without even considering storm damage.
IMHO, communities should sue companies like PG&E for negligence in maintaining their lines. I can't count how many times I've seen power lines running through the middle of a tree branch... and then people wonder why there are so many power failures in Santa Cruz County.... :-D
Finally, I would add that almost 3% of all traffic fatalities are caused by someone hitting a utility pole. They are not only an eyesore, they are also a very real safety hazard. Forget the whole brain tumor thing. With the exception of things like better lighting and median barriers, breakaway utility poles are considered one of the best bang-for-buck things to do to make our roads safer. Burying the cables would be even better....
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... is freaking lasers beaming the energy all over the place, it would also look cool each time a bird tried to sit down on the beam. Ground units 1 - Air units 0 (or should that be 1 - 1 due to the total pwnage they have had over us so far?)
i live in manhattan where all powerlines are burried underground. i have not had a power outage in 421 days. my linux box has been up 421 days. during a ferocious thunderstorm i sometimes like to look out the window at the skyscrapers, listen to the sound of thunder ricochetting off the concrete and steel, watch the lightning bolts and admire the achievements of mankind. ayn rand would be proud.
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
I used to work for one of the major UK network operators and have done dozens of small to medium underground and cable jobs. Admittedly the UK electricty system is different to the US, but the basic principles are the same.
One of the main issues is the voltage of the line - anything up to 33kV and it is about the same cost as to go overhead as underground. At 132kV and above Overhead gets a lot cheaper
The main reason for going overhead are:
1)Overhead towers and conductor are basically low cost simple material but in a large quantity - cable on the otherhand is very expensive to manufacture (around 3x cost)
2)Installation costs are a lot cheaper to go overhead. Tower spans lengths tend to be around 200-300m (yards)where as cable needs a trench around 1.3m deep and 3m wide excavating from a to b which is very expensive in terms on manpower and equipment needed.
3) finding faults and inspecting the towers is easy to do with helicpoter fly-by's
The main reason for going underground are
1) practicalilty - running an overhead line through a town center is geenrally considered bad planning practice and inccurs complaints from local residents
2) security - the main cause of fault on an electrical network are due to things touching or damaging overhead lines - trees falling down, geese flying into them, ice storms, hurricanes etc.. - underground cables generally don't get damaged (unless some idiot puts a JCB bucket through them)
as a final thought there is some evidence starting to emerge that HV transmission lines *are* responsibl;e for childhood lukemia. There is no medical evidence as to why but there is a very high correlation between instances of lukemia and children who lived within 200m of a 275kV or 400kV line. This area is stil very uncelar though
With regard to using DC systems the main reason is cost. DC systems let you use fewer and smaller cables *but* you need large AC/DC DC/AC convertor stations at each end which are hugely expensive. DC systems are fairly popular in places like Norway and Sweden which has a big expanse of area and long distances between power stations and cities. Also i think china is preparing to invest a lot of money in HVDC.
ABB is currently the leader in this market, check out
http://www.abb.com/hvdc
I've had about 4 or 5 power outages in the last couple of years. All the powerlines within a couple miles are underground and all new developments are required to do the same. I'm also only about 1/4 mile from the local power sub-station. So I imagine they get my area up first and then the wires are already in good shape.
Transformer blowouts were the cause of the 2 last outages, and both were right at the beginning of summer when demand starts to really peak and they're having to deal with high temperatures for the first time in a year.
Here's one article about a mole robot for digging conduit tunnels.
And another about a robot for laying conduit in sewers.
And those are just the first two hits on a google search for "underground conduit robot."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In Germany, the real power grid is not underground either. (From my backyard, I can see dozens of big power grid poles (> 10m high, that's ca. 30ft), since I live in the neighbourhood of a power distribution center.) What is underground, is just the distribution grid within a town -- and, yes, that is difference to many US towns that I have been at.
What actually seems to be different is the stability of the power grid. A power outage is a very rare occasion here in Germany. I live near Frankfurt, and we had perhaps one in the last three years, and that lasted for just five minutes. My USV didn't even needed to shut down the servers. My US friends tell me much more often about power outages. But maybe this is different from region to region as well. There are many regions in US with much harsher weather than we've got usually in Germany -- when the weather really gets bad, nothing will prevent power outages.
And while your opinion about our organizing efficieny is flattering, the reality is different. The streets are digged up all the time, for gas, water, electricity, phone lines, by the different utility companies, without any coordination to speak of. When the water company has just closed the street again, the gas company starts to dig in again. Actually, the missing coordination is an often-heard complaint of people who have to endure the construction noise.
Joachim
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Isn't this issue really about the asthetics of power lines strung from pole to pole? Utility poles with all sorts of wires and transformers and such hanging off of them look ugly, which is why cities and some rich towns make the utility companies bury the lines, at least in downtown areas and near parks and such where people want to feel good about their surroundings. This whole economic argument seems a bit silly. It is more expensive, but it looks that much nicer. Besides that, sure there are some benefits, but they seem to be balanced by some dowsides. Overall I would say it is just a matter of how much more expensive it is, but that is likely to vary over the life of the installation considering the varying costs for different materials and types of labor.
But in terms of asthetics, burying utility lines is the obviously better choice.
Powerline transmission in the US covers vastly more distance per end user than in most of the world. At the same time, the pace of change and growth in virtually every town in city in the country is so very rapid that underground placement would require much more frequent changes and retrenching. Above ground transmission is better suited to this environment.
As a firefighter, I have had on many occasions to stand by near broken transmission lines or transformers to wait for power company repair trucks. While it seems to the person sitting at home to take a very long time, let me assure you it seems longer for the poor bastard standing in the rain or snow waiting. That said, when there is a problem that is isolated they usually show up within minutes. During a storm, they make every effort to prioritize based first on danger, second on the number of outages that can be fixed in a single repair, and dead last based on cost. When we have a reported fire, they drop everything to get to where we are as quickly as possible to disconnect service to the location -- so that we can be able to do our work more safely.
I've never met a single careless or lazy power company lineman. I suppose any that start out as such are soon quit or dead.
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Here in San Jose, CA, we have CONTINUOUS blackouts. Just the other day, power was off for more than two hours, from 6 PM to past 8 PM, with great inconvenience.
I have lived in Zurich, Switzerland, for 11 years and the only outage I can remember was a single 10 minutes one.
Someone may say that the two aren't directly correlated (I think they are), but putting power lines underground is the way to go, also for esthetic reasons. No excuses.
Cupertino, CA (home of Apple Computer, not far from San Jose) has buried phone and power lines for almost evey major street (for almost purely aesthetic reasons). The city counsil is very conscious about keeping up the land value so buring the lines, in some perverted way, actually retains land values better - which in turn pay for city services.
Mind you, most residential streets still have overhead lines, but the large arteries are the ones that are buried. Interestingly enough, this setup prevents weather from shutting down the arteries (under all but freak-accident circumstances), but does nothing to prevent building contractors from digging into the line and killing power delivery to Cupertino all the surrounding cities (as happened about two years ago).
One other factor in underground lines: earthquakes. In areas where earthquakes are a concern, underground lines can be hell to repair. Granted, big earthquakes don't have mercy on any utility... and I imagine overhead lines falling is a worse concern.
Just my $0.02
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That would imply that with each power outage customers switch to other more reliable power providers. How many people actually do that. Usually we brave out blackouts and pay our bill when it comes. It wont make any fiscal sense for power companies to transfer the existing grid underground. Maybe future grids but not existing ones. At least for residential use.
Here in the north-east of lower austria, we have most of our wiring systems underground (power grid, phone/isdn/dsl, etc.), and we are quite happy about that. Probably, the only disadvantage is the higher installation and maintenance costs, which includes additional cost for patching streets after installation of cables that cross streets or run parallel to streets and similar things.
However, our general experience is, that underground power lines are extremely reliable compared to overhead power lines. For example, they also never get torn down and never get hit by lightning strokes...
do the people at ATC come off like real assholes. This is what they sound like "Wah Wah, it costs more. We won't do anything unless the utility commission tells us we have to. We will even ignore your local ordinances. Who cares about planning for the future. We care about profit in the here and now!"
... you get land movement as amounts of water change which can break the cable.
Speaking of land movement, consider what happens if you make a practice of burying power cables in seismically active regions:
Come the quake, you've got a bunch of shear lines, and a cable fault wherever a buried cable crosses one. Meanwhile, air cables might sometimes break a segment, but can easily survive a foot or more of displacement betwen poles.
Now you've got line breaks and outages all over the area. A crew can fix a break in an air line in hours. A break in a buried cable takes weeks.
Net result: The more of your power infrastructure that's buried, the longer it takes to restore it in a quake.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've lived in Columbia, MD for the last 35 years - where the power grid IS burried - and can count the total number power outages I've experienced there on my fingers. Not only does the lack of visible wires-in-the-sky nicer on the eyes, but even after the foot or more of rain we've gotten in the past few days... The lights are all still on.
Columbia IS a unique city in that it was designed from the ground up in the early 60's. Planning for burried power and other utilities is much easier in that case than as a retrofit for an existing city.
But personally, I count burried wires among the many perks of living here.
We in calgary alberta have an underground power system because of the temperature extremes here.
In Germany, all local power cables are underground. Are they stupid there? Not sure, but you get a power outage once in several years, not once in several weeks like here.
With fuel cell technology, we could have a noise-free generator in the basement. A furnace sized fuel cell running on the natural gas lines already installed could power the entire house. No need to use any power lines outside the house at all.
The only drawback to this is the fact that natural gas seems to cost more in the winter lately, due to low quantities purchased by the natural gas co. If the demand increased, the price per would drop too though.
The only thing better than this is if you could generate your own hydrogen using solar, wind, or water generators, storing the hydrogen in the tank the fuel cell uses, and never have to pay the natural gas co anything either.
Well, ok, being able to convert brownian motion to electricity, or ZPE even, would be better than anything else.
Andrew points out two important factors -- distance per customer and the need for ongoing network changes due to regional growth. These make the U.S. power situation different from many other countries. There are other issues as well.
Finally, Andrew's comment about the caliber of power company field people matches my own experience. I have constantly been amazed at how dedicated and public-spirited these people prove to be. When there's a bad storm or other emergency, nobody in the company sleeps, and everybody sweats the details. Having worked with clients in many different industries, I was quite surprised to find that most electric and gas utilities are full of conscientious people striving to make the right decisions. (This was very different from my experience with telecommunications vendors, for example, where many are good but many are appalling.)
Bottom line: This is an important topic, but I don't believe it is a no-brainer.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
It goes out all the time. Much more so then when I lived in town. I think this theory underground electric lines are better is nothing but a theory with no real proof. I even doubt the claims it's less prone to electric strike. The wire is burried in ground can be damaged by flooding, digging and lighting strikes. It's much harder to find problems in the burried lines than with pole lines and ungrading the lines would be much more expensive.
I think the only real argument is that telphone poles rot over time, while unground lines don't need supports.
Georgetown's power outages happen not because the lines are underground, but because the lines that were put underground in decades past are now overloaded ...
Burying cables makes them harder and more expensive to upgrade, so it brings a risk of inadequate capacity planning.
Exactly, so indirectly the parent to your post is in fact correct. If Georgetown did not bury its transmission lines they could've afforded to upgrade them as peak demand increased. Now, these people face the prospect of digging a very large trench and causing a very long, very intrusive disruption to the area where the cable is buried...or they could just build another (overhead) transmission line.
It must be full of morons. Any significant company has a number of accountants and engineers who crunch countless numbers and options. A company that tried to maximize "profit today" at the expense of "profit tomorrow" would soon be out of business. Any capital expenditure is analyzed for ITS ENTIRE LIFETIME.
Please let me know what company you work at, so I can keep sure that I have no money invested in it. Honestly, it is more likely you simply have no idea how things work in the corporate world.
...NOT Distribution lines. There is a HUGE difference.
Part of the thing *not* discussed here is that there are huge amounts of the power distro system in DC which *is* underground
That is because the *distribution* systems are not even part of this discussion. Transmission lines present a whole different set of challenges. Firstly, they are longer, second they are MUCH higher voltage--hundreds of kV, and third a transmission line serves a much larger area than distribution lines.
In most scenarios, they actually wait for the equipment to fail (eg. ignite and/or blow up) before they can do anything because the alternative is that they take down multiple city blocks for hours...
Thus these problems are magnified orders of magnitude for transmission lines. Working with live transmission lines requires very specialised safety equipment--expensive and bulky. With lower voltage distribution lines it is merely cumbersome to open a manhole and crawl into a confined space--with transmission lines the practical constraints as well as the increased danger make it basically impossible to repair or upgrade without digging out a big pit. In any case not much could be done live so they'd have to disconnect the line...and when you suddenly disconnect a transmission line you don't take down city blocks...you yould take out *cities*.
I think there are a few people with experience in transmission that appreciate what is involved in the installation and maintenance of high-tension lines, however I don't think the general public really has a grasp of it--they aren't the same as telephone or the power lines coming into your house. Very high power, high current electricity behaves very strangely sometimes.
The unfortunate residents of South Florida (myself included) are stuck with what is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the WORST power company on Earth. Thanks to the bastards at FPL, who've historically done everything in their power to fight any and all attempts by communities to bury power lines, South Florida has the power grid of a rural village in a poor third-world country. We're talking about a company that sucks so badly, even middle-aged British housewives in small towns know who "FPL" is and why they suck (not to demean such housewives, but simply to point out an illustrative demographic group that has absolutely no reason to know or care who south Florida's power company is... but actually DOES know because it's been on the news so much).
FPL's historical attitude can be accurately summed up as, "We hate underground lines with a passion, but if you solve all of our problems, even the ones we currently tolerate, and make our lives absolutely perfect at ${inflated_unholy_cost}, we'll think about letting you have your lines buried." When they came up with their post-Wilma $100 billion+ estimate, they didn't mention that the lion's share of the cost was for easement acquisition. See, they won't bury lines in the 10 foot wide backyard easement they already have... they want the city to give them a brand new one, adjacent to a road, because it makes their jobs easier.
My heart bleeds for them. Not.
It's a fact -- for the past few years prior to Wilma, FPL did basically NO preventative maintenance. None. Nada. Zip. See, it cut their operating costs, boosted their stock price, and made their shareholders happy. Their customers? We don't matter. It's not like we can take our business elsewhere.
Last year, I lost my power at THREE PM IN THE AFTERNOON the day Katrina hit (the eye reached Dade County a little before midnight). Judging from the clock on the wall, about a half hour before I even got home from work and last-minute shopping. I'll give partial credit to FPL for having it fixed two days later... then take it right back for the fact that my power never even should have gone off before 10pm at the absolute earliest. Wilma? Shudder. I had no power for FIFTEEN DAYS -- the first 12 of which passed without seeing a FPL truck ANYWHERE. And I don't live out in the swamp... I live practically right in the middle of urban Dade County (northwest Coral Gables). Bastards. The best part is that I actually HAD DSL throughout the entire post-hurricane aftermath, not counting ~5 hours or so two days AFTER Wilma when my ISP temporarily ran out of diesel for THEIR generator.
IMHO, FPL should be fined liquidated damages for each day beyond some threshold that some number of customers (say, 100,000 or 25% of a county) remain without power, with those fines used to subsidize the undergrounding of power lines in the affected area. If FPL ended up forfeiting most/all of their shareholder dividends for 2 or 3 years in a row, I suspect their stock price would tank, and line burial would suddenly become a very, VERY high corporate priority for them.
And don't even get me *started* on FPL's DAILY power outages during the summer. At my office (in Doral... the area west of the airport), we literally have to have UPSes for everything, because the power goes out long enough to reboot anything NOT protected by one AT LEAST a half-dozen times over any two-week period. And during really bad weeks (like the past one), it's flickered so many times I've lost count. I even have to have my ****ing LAPTOP (well, its docking station) on a UPS now (a few days ago, Windows crashed after informing me that the docking station was improperly disconnected following a ~3 second power outage. Grrrrrrrr....). At home? Same story. Anything with a timer has a UPS (the $29.99 ones OfficeMax and Office Depot were selling like mad a few years ago). Before I opened them up and cut the wires to their piezo alarms, they used to wake me up in the middle of the night at least once or twice a week (you guessed it... due to FPL's infamo
I think it shouldn't be to hard to design those tunnels in a way where you can use robots like in the sewage systems.
Robots...? You spend too much time watching sci-fi channel or something. For some maintenance tasks remote controlled machinery can be sent down manholes, but actual robots? Never heard of that. Besides, actual people go down there to do repairs, and if it anything more than minor the city digs a big hole to replace a section of line. We all know how disruptive that can be...now double that to include power transmission lines.
Anything i don't see?
Lots...like almost everything:
* Transmission lines are very long--we are talking inter-city distances here, not a few blocks. Designing a tunnel that could accomodate "maintenance robots" would be an enormous expense.
* Robots to do maintenance? Those would be very expensive robots...especially if they were designed to work on live lines
* Transmission lines carry hundres of thousands of volts at a pretty high current. If there is a fault way up high in a tower it is out of reach of people--the only time it presents a danger is if a huge storm brings a line down to the ground. Underground lines are IN the ground, so it is possible for someone to be standing RIGHT ON TOP of a fault. If whatever insulating protection is compromised and there is a ground fault in a line surrounded by damp soil for example, the high voltage line could create an electric potential gradient in the soil--where the line charges up the surrounding ground to create a voltage that decreases with distance from the point the line contacts the earth. I'm not sure exactly what would happen in an underground line but on the rare occasion where a high-tension wire comes down it has been known to cause a voltage gradient of several hundred volts between the left and right feet of nearby victims--they could be electrocuted to death merely standing too close to the line much less touching it.
In any case, knowing how dangerous/sensitive transmission lines are I'd really not like to have one buried beneath my feet--unless it was buried as deep as those big towers are high...and that would be VERY expensive indeed.
Hah! I'll try not to get going to far off topic, but I had to add to this :-). I'm in OKC also. I constantly see them
take months and years to complete similar road construction
jobs that I saw completed in days to weeks when I lived in
Colorado. Just about everybody I know thinks the city
managers/planners here are morons. One friend of mine said
that, years ago, her dad, who was in construction, completed
a section of road himself because the city tore up the road
in front of his business and then would never come out to
finish the job. The road being blocked off was about to run
him out of business.
So far as the power lines. One of the problems in Oklahoma City is that they were to stupid to run ground lines along the top. This is why just about every damn 20 mile away lightening strike makes the power flicker and it goes clear out so often during rain storms. When I lived in Colorado, they did have ground lines at the top of the poles and our power rarely ever went out or flickered. The only time I remember it going out for several hours in Boulder (over about a 5 year span) was when a heavy snow storm broke tree limbs off and brought some lines down.
Here in OKC, they have known about the problem for many years and have not corrected it. Hell, they hardly ever will even come out and trim the trees in the neighborhood that keep shorting the lines and making our power go out. Even without lightening, from 06/22/2005 to 11/28/2005 over a span of 5 months, our power went out 9 times ranging from 45 minutes to 3 hours, all in good weather except for a couple of moderately windy days. And that does not count all the flickers.
I am sure they would never consider any additional up front expense such as putting in underground lines. Hell, they are even to cheap to put sidewalks in this city and the roads are all so narrow that there is never even any shoulder to ride a bicycle. It is a totally different world than Boulder and Denver.
>>With storms getting worse and worse
People always tend to overdramatize current events. How many storms of the century did we have during the last century?
More than one, I think
Wow, lots of insightful comments here. You've pretty much made the case for the status quo. I can only add two comments: 1) Even if you ran the lines underground, at some point they still have to come above ground to enter your average house, at least here in the Northeast. Here in Hoboken, NJ, for example, where there are rows of four story houses butted up against each other, the power lines run about 3 stories above the street and link to the buildings (usually, a conduit runs down the side of the building into the basement). If you run the lines below ground parallel to the houses, you then have to run a small tunnel perpenticular to each house, then run the line up the side of the house to its original connection point (even if that pount is on the ground floor, you still have to bring the line up from underground). You can't bring it underground all the way into the house, because then you have to tear up the inside of each house to get to that connection point. I mean, forget it. The whole thing is way to complex to consider mainly for the sake of aesthetics. 2) Given, then, that we will never run lines (at least, existing lines) underground, how about focusing on how to consolidate power cables? New materials and techniques might allow more power to come through fewer cables. That means less clutter, and fewer things to break down (although I suppose if a cable carries more juice and it does break down, more people are deprived). This is probably the course of action we should be considering regarding reducing the tangle of power lines we depend upon.
Another consideration is that reparing downed lines doesn't take all that long or even cost all that much. The real costs from storm damage, with regard to power, is replacing blown transformers and juctions. These things would still be above ground, and still be blown regardless if the lines were above or below ground.
The primary cause for blown transformers and junctions is abnormal load conditions on the power grid, and the primary cause for abnormal loads would be the problems created when exposed overhead wiring is grounded or shorted unexpectedly due to contact with foreign objects. Like blowing trees, falling branches, and similar problems which are much less likely to affect buried lines. The transformers may still be above ground level, but when properly installed, they should not be as vulnerable as exposed power lines.
When combined, problems can propagate outward as local load conditions cause failure on the local circuits, in turn causing abnormal load on nearby circuits and leading to a cascade effect from a large number of otherwise-local problems with last-mile lines.
The bottom line is that buried power lines are massively less susceptible to storm damage, despite the inherent difficulties of underground installation. It's not even close to being comparable.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
that sort of stuff annoys the residents of the city though.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Stumbled onto this google video while I was "working" one day.
6 746104671
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=446895798
Well supplied with the pro's and con's of the visible grid, there is the factor of why most power outages occur. Check out the tree clearance close to you. I know that few property owners wish to have their trees trimmed for power line clearance, in fact they never do tend to there trees in any way, until they have to try to hire the tree crews trimming the lines to sneak a "private job" to remove those trees when they die from lack of attention. It was revealed in a nasty way several years ago when the entire northeast grid went down by automatic shutdown when the lack of tree clearance amounted to more energy consumption than the transmission lines could handle. It's a known fact amongst those low wage tree crews that the cost of proper line clearance, fifteen feet either side of the primary lines, is more than the utility customers wish to pay. Since the days of Sam Insull, prodigy of Thomas Edison, the cost effectiveness of exposed power lines has been proved time and again. More pro's than con's are evident even in this discussion. The current technique of handling tree clearance, is to wait until a catastrophic storm occurs, and FEMA declares a disaster area, so that the huge tree removal companies are called into storm work, which includes routine trimming to the effected area, so that the utilities are reimbursed for the line clearance by the federal government. At that point in time, the federal mandate of at least ten feet both sides is the rule. No matter what the property owners want, the wholesale removal of trees and brush rule. and all the reluctant and difficult property owners, are always last in line to get their power turned back on.
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
http://www.newpath4.com/millenialdawnpowe randlightsecure21.htm
I used to live in Frankfurt as well.
The overall German grid is somewhat centrally hubbed from Hessen. Particularly around that Nuke Plant that no body aknowledges that exists just outside of Frankfurt.
I concure that the streets are often disrupted by being dug up, but I don't recall it taking as long go dig them up and get them fixed as my perception is here in the USA.
Germany achieves a higher degree of redundance. I expect this is afforded by the fact that the density of customers and junction points is smaller than in the USA and there are fewer utility companies in the mix. There once was a time not too long ago that the USA had many utilities per state. When you mix in so many different companies, the connection points suffer.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
An uncle who works for Hong Kong Electric once told me that power cables are hung in the air for cooling as much as anything else.
The flikering power probably has more to do with grounding practices at your local transformer, where your power feed comes from, how close you are to protected loops, and so on and so forth. In other words, these conditions can result from lots of things which may have nothing to do with whether the lines are underground, or strung up on poles.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Also, I lived in Colorado Springs for 6 months. The lines were all underground there in our area. We had no power outages or flickers the whole time we were there, even though we had lots of lightening storms. We never even used a UPS for our computers. We would be lucky to get by for more than a day or two down here in OKC without a UPS.
And the California comment is completely off base, considering the truth behind those "outtages".
Yes, a botched attempt at deregulation and corporate skullduggery were causes. But there is another cause that's easy to overlook because we take it for granted: you have to buy electricty near where it is generated. The real underlying problem in the CA situation is the assumption that power is a commodity that you can buy from a market with endless, interchangeable producers. It is until you qualify it as "power generated close where I use it". Then it becomes something a single producer or small cartel can gain strategic control over.
If you read my original post carefully, you will see I am arguing for a power grid with advanced technologies for long distance power transmission. The technology exists to link the continent with a network of very long distance superconducting cables. In that scenario, a local energy shortage is not possible.
The same cables, which have to be supercooled, can carry liquid hydrogen as well, to provide for hydrogen vehicles and eventually to be distributed directly to households in a manner similar to natural gas. Given this hybrid distribution system, some power generators will be able to generate a continuously adjustable mix of electricity (easy to use, hard to store) and liquid hydrogen (hard to use, easy to store). With a reasonable number of hydrogen powered vehicles, off peak production can be shifted to hydrogen and peak can be shifted to electricity. This would allow generator investors to recoup more from their installations by running them at peak 7x24, which in turn would mean we need less overall generation capabilities, both of which will make the price of power drop. It would also improve the utility of renewable energy sources such as tidal and wind power.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And it matters.
Local distribution done over undergrounds is fairly common in suburban North America -- has been since the 70s when PVC/ABS conduit became widely available and cheap. Works well in new "master planned" suburbs.
TFA talks about TRANSMISSION lines -- this is not the last mile, these are the ones that run on steel pylons. The "storm damage" is only rarely to the lines/pylons -- ie: only in ice storms/hurricanes/tornados. The poster is upset because breakers at substations are flipping during lighting events.
If you bury a transmission line (it's done all the time) you really only need to worry about two things, how you're going to get to it for the inevitable repair and how you're going to keep it cool. Until we've got widespread installation of superconducting transmission lines, they're still going to heat up when you push power through them, and while the pylons are un-pretty, air cooling is alot easier and cheaper than oil cooling an underground link.
The roads are lit enough. We don't need any more light pollution, thank you.
You would appear to be more intelligent if you used proper capitalization and punctuation.
how about abandoning coal powered electrical grids as they deteriorate and implementing more enviro friendly soltuions in areas where it makes sense. wind power in windy areas, solar in southern states, hydroelectric along major rivers, etc.
no nuclear. with costs, both environmental and storage, it is not a sustainable solution.
then rebuilding old power grids and protecting them becomes a little less of a problem, at least with the solar solution. and what about running conduit in the sewers? easy to get to.
This is something I haven't quite understood. As electricity generally takes the quickest path to ground, when a shovel/vehicle impacts the lines underground, would the majority of the electricity not travel out of the line, through the metal shovel, and then into the ground?