Ask Slashdot: Why Is the Power Grid So Crummy In So Many Places?

An anonymous reader writes: I live in a relatively large college town that's within easy driving distance of several major metropolitan centers. In many ways, the infrastructure around here is top-notch. The major exception is the electrical grid. Lightning storm? Power outage. Heavy winds? Power outage. Lots of rain? Power outage. Some areas around town are immune to this — like around the hospital, for obvious reasons. But others seem to lose power at the drop of hat. Why is this? If it were a tiny village or in the middle of nowhere, it would make sense to me. What problems do the utility companies face that they can't keep service steady? Do you deal with a lot of outages where you live? I'm not sure if it's just an investment issue or a technological one. It hasn't gotten better in the decade I've lived here, and I can imagine it will only get worse as the infrastructure ages.

Comments

Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aerial, or underground, that is the question.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is wireless these days, so I guess aerial?

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Z00L00K]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Even more important - realize that each outage costs money for the community. In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Rhetorical question.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Flavianoep]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Even more important - realize that each outage costs money for the community. In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

And what if the place you live in has a lot of trees?
There are some talks in my city about burying the electric grid in the expanded city center; one of the reasons for that is that we have lots of trees whose branches intertwine with the cables. However, most trees have as extensive roots as branches, so I think burying the grid would make things worse.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[JavaBear]

That, and the installed capacity. It seems to me that power companies gamble with projected load, trying to rationalize less expensive cables, at least on new installations. Of course then there is the overall age of the existing grid. IIRC the current US grid is just getting old, designed for a time with a much lower load, and no amount of "smart grid" can magically increase available capacity sufficiently.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[JavaBear]

IIRC underground cabling have another advantage over aerials; They can be made from far cheaper materials/alloys, such as aluminium, rather than just copper.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[fisted]

There are very few underground lines here, it's all aerial, and a lot of them.
The last unexpected/unscheduled power outage was .. uh. I don't even remember. A decade ago?

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some talks in my city about burying the electric grid in the expanded city center; one of the reasons for that is that we have lots of trees whose branches intertwine with the cables. However, most trees have as extensive roots as branches, so I think burying the grid would make things worse.

It's much less common for a tree's roots to be blown over in a storm than its branches.

Sure, sometimes a whole tree gets uprooted, but if you look at the exposed roots, you'll find they're much less extensive than the branches. Uprooting usually happens because the root system has rotted and become weak: when the tree-root interface fails, the roots stay in place and the tree falls. When the tree-branch interface fails, the branch brings down power lines.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[peragrin]

You do realize most aerials are aluminum right?

Not only that but in free air both basically double their current handling loads. So you get situations were a 200amp rated line is being tied into a 200amp line that is half the size coming from the power company.

Once The power companies are allowed to massively over rate the cables compared to what building codes allow. think how much money they save by using cables half the size.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the cost of cooling the cables and making them easily maintainable far outweighs the cable material cost savings.

There is one 3-mile run in northern England that has to be in a trough of running water to stay adequately cool.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[NormalVisual]

Conversely, where I live everything is buried. We lose power for a second or two almost daily, with at least one outage longer than a minute per month.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[thegarbz]

In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

Hahahhaah. That was a laugh. Sorry but no. The cost of digging is astronomical for no reason other than the fact we can't look underground and we're super screwed when we hit something.

About 20 years ago I would have agreed with you hands down, but since then the cost of trenching has increased 10fold for any public works or works conducted in hazardous facilities. Dig a hole in your back yard? No issue. Dig it in the street, you may as well file for bankruptcy.

It's actually quite comical, we broke our lead in phone line on our property when raising a house and the conduit underground was broken so they couldn't easily run a new one. The options were pay $10000 to the telecom company for the cost of trenching + install, or pay some third party $500 to trench, and then pay the telecom company $500 to install the new line.

It's ludicrous.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

Tree roots only cause damage (90%) with sewer lines. That is because the sewer provides a lot of nutrients.

Power lines don't. There are no nutrients to attract the roots.

Now that said, you still have to do it right. You still need a decent water proof culvert. Personally, a 2 foott diameter should be enough, but a 3 foot diameter allows people to move through them if necessary,

It also allows room for other things - like cable and communications.

There ARE areas where burying such cables is NOT a good idea - anywhere prone to flooding or earthquakes for example. Repair in these cases is difficult - and the threat of breakage much higher, and the cost of repair much higher than overhead.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Aerial, or underground, that is the question.

BOTH in the future, but keep in mind that none of these day to day repairs have anything to do with re-tooling the grid, which would will take $ trillions of dollars.

Aerial power lines are the practical rule in many towns and cities because space is tight and there is already ~80 years of infrastructure under ground. Ours has two electric utilities, in some intersections their feeders cross on two upper levels. In new subdivisions electric primaries have been buried in alleys with ground level transformers but in most places it's pole transformers and drop wires.

I routinely dig water and sewer mains in these places and cannot describe the rush of raking a backhoe tooth against a buried primary that was ~2.5' off the mark crossing over our sewer main. No flash-pow, it was just there. When it was laid boring crew did not realize their tool had gone halfway through a customer's sewer tap, not plugging it completely but breaking our main and causing problems for years. Imagine a rotating plumber's snake grinding against a 7kV power line (not in conduit). I still feel that electricity needs to be underground as a rule but in these areas better mapping to the inch would be a plus, and each utility presents its own locating challenge.

Aerial lines suck during ice storms and high winds and there is a constant battle with trees, but the plus is that everything is out of reach of people and floods, and the power company can visually inspect everything right up to your home. Considering the level of danger this is a BIG plus. And when you realize that the cost of putting everything underground in your neighborhood is an incredible capital expense that would not yield a single erg of new energy... well, I say don't hold your breath, live with it.

High voltage pylons between cities are another matter entirely. If a few buildings in your neighborhood go dark it's an inconvenience, but what of when whole cities go dark? There are too few alternate paths in our long haul grid. There is also the need to move to HVDC to couple the grids, to build more redundant overlapping 'loops'. This would improve efficiency and survivability. Here is where State and Federal government could make a real difference.

We have these superhighways you see, and all that is missing is a method to cut-and-drop a channel into them. We should be building electric pipelines in addition to oil pipelines. Robert Faulkner is a lone voice in this HVDC wilderness, and I tell of his quest in this Slashdot post.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
  To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
  To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here.

And those are caused by either the power company switching its source, or above ground power lines falling. As a side note, most of the power failures here happen in the summer, not winter - which is when trees tend to fall due to snow overloading.

One thing that will help with other situations is to have a VERY good ground line for the buildings.

One unexpected power failure for me was when lightning hit the tree beside the house... on the same side that the underground power line came into the house. Didn't hurt the power line, but did nail a loose ground line - which then leaked into the house.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Overrated cables come at the cost of higher loss, I wonder when that starts becoming a factor.
Yes, they can carry twice the amps per cross section in open air because cooling is better, but that's at twice the wattage burned up heating them instead of arriving at the consumer's end. Compensate by raising the voltage even more? Double the voltage = half the current for the same power, = half the loss.

And as you said, overhead cables come in aluminum as well as copper.
In both cases combined with a steel core, otherwise they would break from their own weight at those between-support lengths.
I think high tension lines are always aluminum, with copper used only for local smaller scale distribution.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops. Twice the amps is 4 times the loss (I square R), not 2 times.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the Netherlands all cables are underground, except for the intercity high tension lines or in farmer communities.

For example in the 10 years I live in this neighbourhood in Amsterdam there was only a single power failure somewhere in the middle of the night, which was solved before the next morning.

We also don't worry about lightning strikes no one has surge protectors unless they live on a farm or if they were scammed.

Although I remember form my youth, about 35 years ago in another city we had power failed about once every year, also very short ones. But since 30 years ago we had only power failures every decade or so.

5 years ago I got a notice that they would work on the power substation in our neighbourhood and that there would be failures, however they drove a truck here with a power aggregator and the power didn't even go down for a second (or my clock would have been blinking).

And here in Amsterdam we have many trees on the street, sometimes the roots will push up the pavement, but I never heard about power lines being damaged by them.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[thegarbz]

I think you may have that backwards. Underground people run copper or similar due to the current carrying limitations. Copper is a better conductor than aluminium and when surrounded by insulation and insulating material (dirt) the cable is massively derated.

Up in the air it's a different story. Aerials are run in aluminium because of the weight loading of the cables stressing the supports. You not only recover alloy costs and can run them at far higher currents, but you also reduce the size and cost of the supports for the cable.

For reference here's the current carrying capacity of 35mm^2 cable from AS3008:
Air:
Al 202A - Cu 260A.
Underground:
Al 130A - Cu 170A.

You would need to go up to 120mm^2 with underground aluminium to get an equivalent current capacity of 35mm^2 overhead copper which is an astronomical cost *increase*.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[ThatsNotPudding]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

I can only assume there is never any storm / flood water in these utopian locales, or that it remains so pure as to be incapable of conducting electricity.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[nedlohs]

The costs of the outage is to the community. While the cost of buried lines is to the power company.

Gee, I wonder which the power company will choose?

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ground cables are probably buried too deep for tree roots to interfere. I live in a country where all power cables except the 380kV main power rings, are underground and I have never heard of a power failure due to tree roots intertwining.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Hognoxious]

Do walls provide nutrients? Because I've seen trees undermining them plenty of times.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[currently_awake]

No, it's redundancy. A well designed power grid has multiple redundant feeder lines to run power to the major distribution points. But that costs extra, so a cash strapped (or cheap) utility will eliminate that to save money. And that means any time a line goes down you get a blackout until that line or transformer is replaced.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Around here the community owns the power company, so the power company does what the community wants. And that is to not spend money.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[cdd109]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Even more important - realize that each outage costs money for the community. In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

Underground infrastructure is very costly to maintain compared to Aerial

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[DexterIsADog]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Even more important - realize that each outage costs money for the community. In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

Yeah, burying them removes some causes, and creates others. Put them underground, then ignore maintenance for a while, and you get outages due to flooding that you wouldn't have if the lines were on poles. No matter what you do, it comes down to maintenance - I do much prefer them underground, it makes the neighborhood much more attractive.

With the prospect of another wild winter, I'm getting a whole-house generator before Christmas. I put an addition on my house with an indoor pool, and 4-6 days without power in subfreezing weather could freeze the pipes. Also, it sucks to be without electricity in the winter.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[hjf]

This.
Where I live, both 13.2KV and 220V wires used to hang from the same posts. 13.2KV ones much higher. During a storm with heavy winds, I used to see them swing and arc and boom - power was out. Until the storm ended and then they restored power.

In the 90s they did a massive rebuilding of the distribution grid. All 13.2KV lines were buried and all 220V "naked" wire was replaced with insulated, quadruple, "twisted" cable hanging mostly from house fronts (mostly city houses one right next to another).

This eliminated almost all of the storm problems. No more wind or lightning knocking down power. Sometimes yes, you hear a very loud thunder and power goes out but that's most likely the product of a direct or very nearby hit that makes protections trip.

Unfortunately now we have other problems. Growing pains. Too many new apartment buildings taking a lot of juice and the grid isn't being upgraded. On very hot days power goes out and you have all sorts of brownouts and blackouts. This is sheer corruption: every apartment building, over a certain number of houses, is supposed to have its own 13.2KV->220V transformer but they just pay some power company officials (yes, state-owned company) and they hook em up to 220V. Suddenly you have 60 new houses sucking juice from the already loaded transformer...

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume wrong. Buried lines do exist throughout the world and they do indeed remove a large number of causes for power outages. Of course, it does cost money to bury them in the first place, so its not always the case they they work out cheaper in the end (nor is it always the case that they work out more expensive, which is why buries and aerial power cables are both still widely used).

Be aware that underground power lines are insulated and don't stop working when it rains as you suggest. Also, the ground conducts electricity when it's dry too - that's how earth leakage works.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Phreakiture]

There's a second question that has to be asked as well. In some neighbouhoods, the electrical service is run through the back yards, rather than the front. This was done for obvious aesthetic purposes, but the side-effect is that it is exceptionally difficult to keep those lines maintained.

Then there's a third question: what is the level of the local infrastructure? 2400V? 7200V? 13.2kV? Single-phase or three-phase? While a 2400V single-phase neighbourhood can have more stable power than a 13.2kV three-phase one, the likelihood is the other way around because the 2400V wiring is probably older.

For the record, my neighbourhood is 13.2kV single-phase, above ground. It is not 100% problem free, but I would estimate it to be well over 99%, based on my desktop computer without a UPS rarely being found in a powered-down state.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Ol Olsoc]

Aerial, or underground, that is the question.

Not really. Underground service is subject to all the same issues except for trees falling across the lines.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Ol Olsoc]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Even more important - realize that each outage costs money for the community. In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

Yes it is a question. In our neighborhood, it's a 50/50 mix of underground and aerial. We have the same number of blackouts. People look at underground as some sort of miracle, leading you into a promised land of neverending power service. They can and do have problems.

But in true slashdot fashion, we yip about underground service while not much has been said about the marginal infrastructure.

Re: Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Baltimore MD is going to start a project soon to bury all transmission EHV lines into and out of the city. You can be sure that all costs will be passed on to the consumers.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[sribe]

Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Bury the lines and you will incur 10x the cost per foot, under the best easiest conditions, the absolute minimum, not realistic and only achieved occasionally. More common will be 100x. Difficult, rocky, mountainous area, you'll sometimes see 1000x.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[sribe]

There is one 3-mile run in northern England that has to be in a trough of running water to stay adequately cool.

Sure, and between a power plant in New Jersey & Manhattan, there is actually a super-conducting stretch. Relatively short runs of super high-power lines has nothing at all to do with the economics of distribution to end users.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[sribe]

Underground people run copper or similar due to the current carrying limitations.

Nope. Copper is rare underground as well.

You would need to go up to 120mm^2 with underground aluminium to get an equivalent current capacity of 35mm^2 overhead copper which is an astronomical cost *increase*.

Nope. First off, nobody runs copper overhead. So you need to either compare overhead to overhead with the 2 different materials, or overhead to underground with the same material, or maybe overhead aluminum to underground copper. But overhead copper to underground aluminum makes no sense. So, overhead aluminum to underground aluminum, still a big cost increase, just not quite as massive. Underground aluminum to underground copper, also a big cost increase, because copper is roughly 3x the price of aluminum--thus my first comment about copper being rare underground as well.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Underground service is subject to all the same issues except for trees falling across the lines

Well, falling trees, and lightning, and ice, and traffic accidents. Actually, exactly what reasons for power outages do you think are common between aerial and buried power lines?

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Ol Olsoc]

If you don't have llightning strikes on your underground service, there is something different about your lightning. It can and does"strike" underground.

As usual here, we are pushed into diametrically opposing positions. I don't have anything against underground power, but it is subject to many of the same failure modes as above ground power. And no panacea.

The biggest issue as far as I can tell, is not where we put the wiring, but when. Things age, people pull more power than they used to.

Even tree falls usually make for localized events.

One of the largest power outage causes in my area is from squirrels committing high voltage suicide in one of the local substations. Google "Squirrel power substation" for a bit of macabre reading.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[aaarrrgggh]

Depends on the environment. In Hawaii, underground lines have approximately half the life of aerial cables in general, and one third the life of aerial cables on steel poles. From a cost, reliability, and time-to-repair perspective you can't beat aerial there.

The biggest problem in general with the sub-distribution grid though is over-subscription. You have infrastructure designed pre-air conditioning that is now carrying 2-3x it's design load in many places. Transformers don't get replaced until they fail catastrophically, insulators aren't cleaned, and the right-of-way is not properly protected from trees, cars, etc.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[geekoid]

Well gosh, I guess you solved it. There are any any issues that can happen with buried power lines.
Root never wrap around them, animals never nibble at them. the moisture in the soil is the same every where, as well as the microbe that live in the soil, and the ground never freezes, And street will part so you can just lay the wires underneath them.

I'll rush down stair to tell the engineers you have solved this issue.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[geekoid]

They are squirrels, it's funny not macabre.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[geekoid]

That's not a line buried issue. That sounds like a substation issue.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[geekoid]

That's becasue phone companies don't actually want to trench on peoples property. If they did, it would have been 500 buck. Well, maybe a 1000 since most electric companies actual pay a living wage.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[dgatwood]

By pushing against them. Pushing against a wire usually won't break it. The wire will move a half an inch one way or the other, and then the root goes right past it.

Re: Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Burying cables increases time between faults. However, it increases the repair time, by making the faults more difficult to find and repair.

For very high voltage cables, post installation jointing may not be possible, and replacement of entire lengths of cable between splice points may be required.

Many overhead line faults can be repaired within 12 hours, whereas for underground cables, 24-48 hours would be more realistic with some repairs requiring weeks.

Re: Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aluminium, not aluminum.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I live, things are buried (except for some parts of town I sometimes drive through).
I have power issues, like power going off for 5 seconds or the lights dimming, 0-3 times per year.
An actual multi-minute outage is a rare thing indeed, and actually may turn into a 2-6 hour outage... might get that about every 4 or 5 years on average. (Since the mid-1990s, had maybe 4-6 of those.)
Every issue is like a drop in the bucket. Sigh, ho hum, who cares. One lousy drop in the bottom of a dry bucket. The vast majority of the bottom of the bucket will still be dry. Go ahead and dump that over my head. I won't care. And if you don't, then that bucket bottom will evaporate before another drop hits.
Wasn't that good when I figure moved out here in 1988, but the 21st century's been pretty awesome so far. I've also been fairly unstable since the mid 1990s, in that I've moved multiple times and lived in at least 7 different places in this city alone. Whatever Puget Sound Energy has been doing in Bellingham, WA (USA) has been working well for me. I remember my childhood years of the 1980s and early 1990s, and power wasn't as reliable then. Everytime I think about it, I'm pleased with how well things have improved.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Thelasko]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

My parents live in a neighborhood with buried power lines. Yeah, on average the power goes out less often. However, they've had a recent issue with the buried lines decaying after 30+ years underground. When that happens, it's a much longer, and more expensive repair.

The thing that bothers me is well meaning landowners planting trees near power lines. Personally, I blame schools that hand out saplings to children without proper education. Yeah, they look nice when they are small. They don't stay small.

Re: Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google "copper thieves" then.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Z00L00K]

Just remind them their responsibility to provide telecom service for emergency purposes. It may even be in their contract that they have to ensure a certain level of service that they can't back out from. The price they did put up was just their way of trying to say that they don't want you as a customer but they couldn't cancel your contract.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I lived in Miami, around 79th and Biscayne if anyone knows the town.

From 1991 through 1996ish, power to my house was absolutely rock-solid 24/7-365 - no UPS and my system uptimes were measured in years.

A little hurricane blew through, then the flurry of electrical repair crews from neighboring states got us all up and running again within a couple of days - thanks guys. Whatever they did for the repair job though was crappy design - a little rain and a stiff wind would flicker power off for long enough to take a PC down, and 30+ minute blackouts would come 12+ times a year from then on.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Z00L00K]

Underground infrastructure requires a lot lower maintenance frequency than aerial infrastructure so the total cost in the long run will be a lot lower.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

And now I am suddenly reminded of helping a friend clean the squirrels out of his window unit AC in a 4th story apartment. One of the little bastards got caught in the fan, bounced around inside for a few revolutions and got flung out into the parking lot.I still find that way too funny.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>in free air both basically double their current handling loads

Don't have a clue what you're talking about, do you? Aerial lines are sometimes smaller because they run at lower amperage and higher voltages.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[fustakrakich]

No... Public, or private? That is the question.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked when you bury cabling you put it inside conduit, this is also makes replacing said cable quite straight forward. You have vaults every so often that give you points of access to the cabling. This doesn't strike me as any different than having substations every so often as well.

Since the cabling is in conduit these floods waters you mention doesn't really mean much. The vaults are made out of concrete and hold up quite well both in Vermont and here in Arizona where I've encountered them. Both places have reliable power although this summer proved an exception to the rule with some crazy weather here in AZ.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[robkeeney]

Buried cables have enormous costs that you are not accounting for, number one of which is insulation. Look at those power wires hanging on the poles. They have no insulation coating, just bare conductor (if it's insulated, it's a phone line). Imagine how much more the same length of power wire is going to cost when covered with enough insulation to be safely buried. There are untold millions of miles of power line.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? We NEVER lose power. I've never seen my power lost for more than a few minutes in the worst of weather. I live in a development I've lived near my entire life in the north-east. 100,000 people or so in the county I live and I'm in the county seat (ie decent size town, but not a small city by any stretch of the imagination). The development is about as old as I am (30 years). Everything is berried.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it's a substation issue so much as it is substandard cabling/conduit or breakers. I'd bet money the daily blips are from a breaker somewhere tripping and resetting - maybe water is getting into something, or the breaker just isn't sized appropriately. In any event, the power company pleads ignorance of the problem. [shrug] The neighbors are experiencing it too, so I'm pretty sure it's nothing with the house wiring itself.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Pope]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Nope. Lived in a subdivision in the 80s with all buried lines. Power always went out during big summer rain storms. You're not going to find magical waterproof cunduit anywhere that doesn't cost an outrageous sum.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[morgauxo]

I don't think the problem is the roots damaging the wire. As another posted, unlike a wall the wire can move.

How do you get the wire under all the roots? You have to cut the roots. Then the trees get sick and/or die.

Often people do landscaping or other work involving digging and cut roots. they think it's ok because the tree seems fine. It can take even up to a couple of years some time for the damage to become visible. And then the tree dies.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC underground cabling have another advantage over aerials; They can be made from far cheaper materials/alloys, such as aluminium, rather than just copper.

Please please tell me where you know of a place using copper overhead, and I'll be right there with my truck.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[AK Marc]

Ice on the lines, and other things can cause problems that don't happen when the lines are buried. Overall Buried is more reliable and cheaper. But it's pretty close for cost, just not reliability. So some areas buried may be more expensive in the long run, not counting the more frequent outages with above-ground lines.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy to correct. You introduce (by legislation) a system where customers automatically get compensated for power cuts, on their next bill.

Imagine, if you have a power cut lasting more than 30 minutes, you get a $10 rebate on your next power bill. Three hours, $20. 12 hours, $50. And so on.

The money comes directly from your power retailer, so they're the ones who have to argue with the generation, transmission and distribution companies about whose fault it was and therefore who should ultimately pay it. You could even set up an independent tribunal authorised to make that decision, to prevent the companies from burying each other in lawyers.

Politics. Learn it, love it. It's the only way to make the bastards pay for their externalities.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most aerials are aluminium twisted over a steel core. The steel core isn't needed for underground cabling, thus is cheaper.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Askmum]

And what if the place you live in has a lot of trees?

I live in a country where there are virtally no aerial powerlines 10 kV (I would hazard a quess that there are less then 10 km of aerial lines in the whole country). Power outages are very rare. If it happens to you once a year than it is a lot.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[thegarbz]

It is. Actually most are. Very few outages are actually caused by breaking lines. Most of the outages are caused by the network not being able to handle faults or being overloaded.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[thegarbz]

Sorry, you may think so but the phone company is just one example. I work in construction and I have watched the cost of opening up a trench down the street rise over the years. This has nothing to do with "wanting" to do anything and everything to do with a big corporation and public liability. It has to do with permits and paperwork, subcontractors, project managers, construction and digging supervisors. It has to do with OSHA too. I have watched first hand how an entire job got stood down for 4 hours for a safety review because one of the contractors laying the 33kV power cables into the trench dared to put his head below the ground line without being trained in confined spaces, and this was the lead in trench from a directionally dug cable, we were on the utility company's own land inside their own fence. 15 people stood down for 4 hours, not to mention the cost of the HSE supervisor to stand there blabbering.

Something is very wrong with this and several other industries in the western world.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[thegarbz]

They provided us with a mobile base station on loan for $60 / month which plugged into our house wiring.

A telecom company must provide you a service. Nothing says they need to install it, or that they need to do it for free. Heck on some jobs they even charge you for the disconnection.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the cost of the buried lines is also to the community. It is included in the rate base and will be paid for by all.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that the community also pays what the power company deems it has to charge to stay competitive with other power companies (assuming there is any competition). Multiply the costs of a few extra cents per kWH times the number of people in the community over the 99.9% of the time the power is available. That ain't chump change.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Hognoxious]

So it's because wires are tougher, and nothing to do with nutrients at all?

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[Some_Llama]

"By pushing against them. Pushing against a wire usually won't break it. The wire will move a half an inch one way or the other, and then the root goes right past it."

"So it's because wires are tougher, and nothing to do with nutrients at all?"

No by the opposite, because cables resist less and are able to be moved easily, they are better than walls that don't tend to move one inch one way or another very well.

Re:Aerial or underground ?

[kilodelta]

UG cabling has a few benefits that don't come with aerial cabling. The first is that weather beyond potential flooding isn't a problem. Then of course there's the fact that there is still a critter problem if you don't encase in conduit with UG wire inside the conduit.

Hide your cables

[Teun]

So long as you stick poles in the ground and the cables up in the air it won't improve much.

Have a look see in developed nations.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

Undergound service does not work. Utilities cut too many corners when they put in underground services and you pay big time when they fail. The newer subdevisions in my area are consantly having their lawns and driveways ripped out when the underground cables short out or transformers get flooded. Overhead is reliable, robust and requires minimal maintenance when properly installed.
 
/source: electrician

Re: Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like a shill for the company that makes power poles. What a bunch of horseshit.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

Undergound service does not work.

Utilities cut too many corners

Then surely the "fix" is to not cut corners...

It's a good jobs the US doesn't have regulators for things like this, that way the free market prevails.

Re:Hide your cables

[JavaBear]

Underground cables are reliable, robust and requires minimal maintenance when properly installed.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing is the robustness of network topology. My previous home was situated in a network section with only one connection to the larger grid, whereas my new home has two connections. That has noticeably lessen the outage frequency. Whether the cables are hidden is purely an economical issue: if the utility company is not active enough with their tree pruning by helicopters and large machinery, the next storm will cause an outage in the remote areas, where the cables are not hidden even in the developed world.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you have a short circuit. In that case the cable is gone.

Re:Hide your cables

[ai4px]

Ever heard of directional underground boring? No need to rip up driveways. Place wires in a conduit... underground.

Re:Hide your cables

[putaro]

Hmmm...here in Tokyo a lot of the power is coming in through overhead lines. Our building gets fed off a pole and we haven't had an outage in years. That includes during the multiple typhoons that come through every year. They tend to insulate the wires and wrap them with steel cable here, though, so maybe that's a big difference.

Re:Hide your cables

[jellomizer]

All well and good for most countries. However the U.S. has the distinction as being the third most populous country, as well as the third largest in geographical size, but 50th in density.
Which means any infrastructure project is expensive. More so then in other nations.

For the U.S. we need to get off the grid and start using more local energy sources.
Small hydroelectric generators, solar, wind. Especially for the less dense areas.
However there are so many stupid laws saying your power needs to be on the grid.

Re:Hide your cables

[CrimsonAvenger]

Hmm, live in the USA, near a metropolitan area (New Orleans is across the lake).

Had a power interruption here this year. Long enough to reset the clock I'm looking at.

Only power outage I can think of that was long enough to be notable (more than momentary) was Katrina....

Course, the fact that my computers are either laptops or on UPS means I really don't care all that much about power outages.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

In Amsterdam all utilities are build under the side walk which are tiles. So the cheapest way to fix/change something is removing the tiles and dig a trench. When new cables need to cross the street we use the directional underground boring, quite interesting.

Re: Hide your cables

[vtcodger]

> Sounds more like a shill for the company that makes power poles.

The poles are almost invariably wood -- pine trunks. Only God can make a utility pole (currently anyway).

Re:Hide your cables

[ray-auch]

Sounds more like doing a crap job does not work - which is pretty much a universal truth.

The underground cable coming into our property looks to be at least 50yrs old and I doubt the path above it has been lifted in that timescale either, and it definitely hasn't been touched in the 17yrs I've been here. Some of the distribution wiring out in the street has been upgraded in the last ten yrs because we were getting outages every couple of months, now we get zero, I doubt that wiring had been touched for decades and I don't expect the new stuff under the street will be replaced in the next few decades either. Doing this stuff right isn't rocket science and we knew how to do it over 50yrs ago.

Transformers sometimes flood, but new ones shouldn't unless you don't have design standards or don't enforce them - just looked up some here and for consumer substations it's 300mm of concrete above the 100 year flood level. There are problems with older substations built to lower standards or because flooding risks have simply changed - there are places that haven't flooded in over 100yrs and then this century have flooded several times, call it climate change or whatever, it means the 100yr flood line has effectively moved. But that is older infrastructure, if you have new areas where transformers are "constantly" getting flooded then you have poor standards or poor monitoring of standards.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

> Course,
What?

Re:Hide your cables

[podmate]

I live in Little Rock and can only dream about having reliable power.
The area where I grew up in the 70's lost power for > 5 minutes 2-3 times/month.
The area that I now live in loses power for > 1 minute at least monthly.
We get 6+ hour power loss at least quarterly if not more frequently.

We are 500+ miles from the ocean.
During Katrina, we were without power for 8 days and to pile more shit on us, the refugees swarmed us and the crime rate had a massive surge which took years to bring down.
The next tropical storm/Hurricane (I can't remember its name) that came through after Katrina knocked out our power for 10 days.
If it snows, we know we are fucked. Expect a multi-day outage with any snowfall over 4 inches.

What we see here is 1) indifference to the customer (what recourse do you have against a government monopoly?) and 2) unwillingness to spend money for tree clearing and other preventative actions.

Re:Hide your cables

[dkf]

Not if you have a short circuit. In that case the cable is gone.

What's the likelihood of that happening, versus the likelihood of something happening to an above-ground cable? Note that you should be thinking about putting the cable well down so that you're unlikely to hit it by accident, just like with water and sewage infrastructure (though even more like gas, if you're in an area with it piped in). Heat dissipation isn't a big deal with domestic supply; you use reasonably thick cabling and aren't really carrying that much current in the first place in normal service.

Re: Hide your cables

[Lawrence_Bird]

As the head of an hoa that has been debating repaving our roads and parking areas (30+ years old) I can say this is not bullshit. We have "buried" service since the time the place was built. This means "DBC" (direct burial cable) - wire with no conduit. This past year has been exceptionally bad - one home owner has had their driveway ripped up three times to "fix" the problem with service to three neighbors. We had a number of homes running on mobile transformers after either losing service entirely or just one leg. This went on for six months before they arrived with a backhoe. Others had to endure flickering lights for over six months while waiting for the utility to replace "crabs" which split the line from the transformer to a number of homes (and is underground in an access pit that often floods).

We have access pits scattered about the property. Most are in parking spaces or driveways, some in lawns. These are connected to seven or eight transformers scattered around the property. Those lines are completely under the roads as is the line from outside the development that powers the transformers.

It is a regular clusterfuck and it is compounded by the fact that even in the 80s contractors were still using (and allowed to) aluminum dbc. As a result, our roads are a patchwork and the lawns a mess (you don't think the utility really "restores" them to what they were before do you?)

So now we are in a catch-22. The electric (and water for that matter) utility will never replace the entire runs of wiring. They will instead do this bit by bit over how ever many years it takes for everything to fail. We can't put off paving forever, but who wants to spend 500-750K on mill pave and recurb just to have the electric company destroy it?

Unless you plan and oversee the installation of such underground service yourself, assume the absolute worst. Builders do not care that the utility will start ripping up the property 10, 20 or more years down the roads as they will have their money and be long gone.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

That must be why the U.S. with all its overhead power lines has such great power grid reliability compared to northern Europe that has had underground power cables exclusively for several decades...

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

At least with poles, you can see where the wires are. With buried wires, you need to call the utility and have them find them and mark them.

Oh, and how do you bury cables in solid rock?

Re:Hide your cables

[volmtech]

My rural community in north Florida is getting city water. While it stops 2 km from my house the ground well site is there and more power poles and three phase current are being ran to the site. With the upgraded feeder lines my power no longer flickers with every lightning strike. If something is important the power will stay on.

Re:Hide your cables

[Anonymous Coward]

> Course,
What?

Natch.

Re:Hide your cables

[argStyopa]

(I'm going to assume you're either European or referring to Europe by your snark; we'll just set aside definitions of developed as something we might fundamentally disagree on.)

Critically: the US has an overall population density 1/10 that of countries like Germany. If you can't understand the impact of that, you're not paying attention. Further, the US doesn't have draconian commmunity laws that compel people to only build new homes within town limits, as some Euro states do. (Making the effective density of populated Europe much much higher.) If you buy land in the US, you can usually build a house on it, whether you're in a town or not. Ergo, the ability to quickly/cheaply stretch power to remote locations has more value here. It's a tradeoff that people make in their home choices, whether they recognize it or not.

In places like cities, where population density warrants it, yes, the power cables do usually go underground.

If, as the op asserts, it's an ongoing problem regarding the major lines that feed the municipality, then eventually the municipality will address it with their local utility. If the OP has such a problem with it, and is sure everyone else does, I'm sure it will provide a firm point for them to be elected to the city council to fix it. Or wait, was he not actually looking to get off his ass to FIX the problem, just whine about it?

Re:Hide your cables

[dunkelfalke]

Okay, I'll bite. How do you explain that even remote European villages usually have underground power lines?

Re:Hide your cables

[ceoyoyo]

The power in all the previous places I've lived was above ground and rarely went out. If a tree limb grew over the line, someone came and cut it back.

I was visiting a friend in New York just before (and during) hurricane Sandy. There were lines in his neighbourhood with tree branches that had grown around them. Sure enough, a bit of wind and down they came.

Re:Hide your cables

[WalksOnDirt]

However the U.S. has the distinction as being the third most populous country, as well as the third largest in geographical size...

The USA is only the fourth largest country by area (Russia, Canada, China).

Re:Hide your cables

[Teun]

Yes it was a snark, deal with it :)

But even in places like Finland and Sweden where population density is very low cables are underground.

What I observe in N-America is a reluctance to put them away, maybe because zoning laws haven't caught up with modern times?

For all purpose, the majority of Americans, even in rural areas, live in clusters that could easily use buried cables, or do you run your water, gas and sewage on poles too?

Outages happen!

[Notabadguy]

Houston Texas - Lightning Storm? Voltage Sag. Loss of power for long enough for all clocks in the house to go to 0:00, and for computers to turn off. Never longer than for 5-10 seconds.

-Since the electric motors draw more current when they are starting than when they are running at their rated speed, starting an electric motor can be a reason of a voltage sag.
-When a line-to-ground fault occurs, there will be a voltage sag until the protective switch gear operates.
-Some accidents in power lines such as lightning or falling an object can be a cause of line-to-ground fault and a voltage sag as a result.
-Sudden load changes or excessive loads can cause a voltage sag.
-Depending on the transformer connections, transformers energizing could be another reason for happening voltage sags.
-Voltage sags can arrive from the utility but most are caused by in-building equipment.

An actual power outage on the other hand can be caused by ANYTHING.

-Tree branch fell on a power line.
-Someone drove into a utility pole and broke a wire. Again with the Houston Texas example....I work in Oil and Gas, and my shop was out of power for 7 hours because someone ran into a utility pole on the corner of the street that leads to my office.
-Ground short.
-Transformer either on a line or at the utility shorts.
-Everything in between.
-All the way to emergency outage with the base load generator at whomever your power production company is.

Re:Outages happen!

[Notabadguy]

Also, this has useful information, including a Customer Average Frequency Index, which lets you measure your utility against others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Re:Outages happen!

[thue]

Here in Denmark, power is reliable enough to run a Linux server directly off a wall socket, and still get an uptime measured in years.

Re:Outages happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

Netherlands here. Same thing.

I've lived here for 40 years.
3 large outages in total that I can recall.
- In 1986 the entire city went off-line for 25 minutes because of a major fire with explosions in an oil storage right next to the power-distribution facility.
  It took the utilities-company 25 minutes to get power rerouted to the city via the backup feed.
- In 2007 5 blocks, including mine, went down because a truck ran into the transformer station. Took 5 minutes to re-route power through the backup-feed.
- Last year, my next-door neighbor managed to drill through his own home-feed, taking out the entire street (16 homes). This took 3.5 hours because the utility-company needed to dig up and replace the last 10 meters of wire to his home. It was a bit fried...

We have on average 1 voltage-dip (not even a full outage) per 18 months, which doesn't last for more than 3 to 10 seconds.

Re:Outages happen!

[jiriw]

Here in the Netherlands, years is stretching it a bit. But -a- year should be easily doable. This year I know of one occasion I had to re-set my alarm clock due to a power outage not of my making (as a hobby electronic / radio amateur I do trigger the automatic circuit breakers sometimes). Regional power outages lasting longer than a couple of minutes make the national 8 o'clock news as major news items - they are that rare but they do happen a few times each year.
Last time we had a major power outage in a region near me (a few larger villages had no power for a couple of days somewhere in december 2007) was when an Apache helicopter flew into a set of HVAC lines (50KV, I think). It was on one of the very few places in our power grid there is no loop in the network, which is why it took a few days to restore the power for those villages, instead of seconds.
The thing I noticed when the accident happened (it was a Wednesday evening and already dark) were the lights flickering for a couple of seconds and I made a remark to my dad about something big probably shorting out. My dad, now retired, worked for KEMA at that time which, amongst other things, tests high voltage equipment for power grids, which might explain my interest in the subject as well. Later that evening, when I got home I heard about the helicopter accident on the re-run of the national 10 o'clock news.
The helicopter made an emergency landing and luckily nobody was harmed.

Re: Outages happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget load shedding. During these scenarios, power must be maintained at priority locations (eg emergency services) so small fluctuations tend to have a larger impact on the rest of the grid when there are many priority locations in the city.

Re:Outages happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

Utility pole? In a city?

Not here...

[Anonymous Coward]

All power lines are buried here, so no matter what weather conditions, no problems at all. I did not have a power outage in the last 10 year.
Only long distance power lines are sometimes above the ground, but they are very robust.

Re:Not here...

[Anonymous Coward]

All power lines are buried here, so no matter what weather conditions, no problems at all. I did not have a power outage in the last 10 year.
Only long distance power lines are sometimes above the ground, but they are very robust.

Hey thanks for the info! I can really use that for my future planning.
By "here" did you mean all of the planet Earth?

Super-capitalism

[RenHoek]

For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.

Also, the US enjoys a form of super-capitalism, where the almighty dollar stands above things like quality of service and stability. So companies do the bare minimum of maintenance, also worsening outages.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

>For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.

Again and again this fallacy! When it's about espionnage everything is cost effective, distance does not matter. But when it's about basic and primary need local infrastructure, it's always too expensive. What is wrong with you guys?

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with you guys?

I think he covered that in his second paragraph.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Underground cables of any significant distance at distribution voltages or higher consume huge amounts of current - regardless of load. This compounds the capital cost, requiring heavier conductor or additional equipment for compensation.

Above ground lines can be constructed to meet reliability goals. Unfortunately, many legacy power lines were built with inadequate clearance, inadequate strength, or inadequate capacity. Replacing these lines is a fairly expensive task, so it's often wrapped into replacement programs when the existing line is no longer viable.

Re:Super-capitalism

[RenHoek]

1) Espionage is anything but cost-effective. But cost isn't the primary (or even secondary) concern there for those who want to do the spying. (It's (technical) feasibility)

2) Running cable above ground is _always_ more cost-effective then running cable underground. So if you:
- don't give a shit about your customers
- don't have a lot of competition because you can gain a monopoly by buying senators
- and if you do a bare minimum of maintenance because you want more money (more so if you _do_ run cables underground)
then even in a city, local power stability is going to be shit.

Re:Super-capitalism

[ray-auch]

For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.

That is not the problem - most of our long distance high voltage stuff is above ground here, but that is usually redundant (hence "grid"). The weird thing about the US is the way the last-mile low voltage stuff, which is more vulnerable and typically _not_ redundant, is above ground too. Many people are convinced that is why your power is more flaky - it is not actually the grid (although the US high voltage grid does not have a good reputation either).

So, how's our grid ? Well, a few years ago we started to get more power outages - by which I mean one every couple of months for a few minutes to a couple of hours. The distribution cable from the substation was either degraded or handling too much new load, anyway that was enough for them to dig up all the roads a year or so ago and replace / add new cables. Haven't had a single noticeable power outage since then.

Re:Super-capitalism

[rrohbeck]

The metropolitan areas of the US have the same population density as Europe.

Re:Super-capitalism

[gtall]

Yes, but power companies have local monopolies, so there is no super capitalism there unless you equate super capitalism with monopolies. In this person's case, it is probably that his power company is an REMC, Rural Electric Membership Cooperative, they are state chartered and receive federal subsidies. They are also run by people who cut their teeth in electric power about 50 years ago. Being a cooperative and rural, they do not have the ability to raise rates very easily. They compensate by stiffing care and upkeep. So they do not go around cutting down trees near their line except if absolutely necessary. Also being rural, they have a lot of ground to cover and a lot of trees to clear. The easy consequence is that storms frequently topple trees onto their lines. Ice storms really kill them because they have so much ground to cover and now all the lines on that ground stand to receive ice and tree damage.

Comparing the U.S. the little toy countries in Europe is silly. They are about the size of one of our states. It is much easier given their pop. density to keep their little toy grids up and running. It is also easier to run the lines underground because there is much less distance to cross. The pop. density also makes it easier to spread the cost which is much greater than running lines above ground. It is impossible for the U.S. to run its rural lines underground given the cost.
 

Re:Super-capitalism

[gtall]

We have a sense of perspective and don't pull facts out of our ass.

Re:Super-capitalism

[tburkhol]

For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.

This argument is only valid for long-distance transmission lines, and failure of those lines contributes to very few outages (the 2003 NE US blackout comes to mind). Customer-perceived blackouts are almost all due to failure of metropolitan and suburban distribution networks. Areas where population density is as high as any other developed nation.

Re:Super-capitalism

[AmiMoJo]

there is no super capitalism there unless you equate super capitalism with monopolies.

That's the goal in super capitalism - become a monopoly with a guaranteed income.

Re:Super-capitalism

[coofercat]

The US also lacks them darn hippie commies regulating the industry in the consumer's favour from time to time.

Your domestic supply doesn't have an SLA, or penalties if there are outages. In truth, none of us will probably ever see such a thing. Instead though, get a regulator who penalises supply companies when they screw up. If it's force majeur, then you might let them off a fine, but warn them to toughen up their infrastructure because next time you will fine them. If it's just that they're scrimping on delivering, then fine them to 'motivate' them to spend the money when the consumers need it.

Contrary to popular belief, an awful lot of European power is run over ground. If there's an area prone to problems, then they either end up routing around it, adding more capacity to cope with outages or in extreme circumstances, go underground. I don't believe the US is unique in any important ways with regards to the logistics of power delivery - all of its problems have a solution, if you're motivated to find it. USians probably laugh at us Europeans who generally pay more for almost everything than they do, but at least our shit works most of the time.

Re:Super-capitalism

[wienerschnizzel]

I lived in Central Finland for a while - population density of 36 people per square mile. No power outages experienced.

I think the problem is the capitalism thing - you can't pretend you'll get this kind of service out of a free market situation. It's a natural monopoly that needs close public oversight unless you enjoy the kind of crappy and overpriced service you are getting right now over there.

Re:Super-capitalism

[wvmarle]

Even China has a far more reliable power supply than the USA. Virtually no outages due to normal storms or lightning or so; occasional outage after a particularly destructive typhoon (hurricane on your side of the Pacific) or a massive earthquake.

Can't really call China a small country.

It's just the sad truth that the richest country in the world has one of the most unreliable power supplies.

Re:Super-capitalism

[dywolf]

Not cost effective.....Wrong. That's a misconception that needs to go away.

It would actually be more cost effective for the US. Europe as a whole is pretty much the same size as the US. And its by and large powered by buried cables. But rather than a single government, there's about 50. Which increases the costs in comparison with what a single government could accomplish thanks to economies of scale and better leveraging power in negotiating the work.

The short version is that nearly every "but the US is special" excuse for not doing something is total utter garbage.

Re:Super-capitalism

[dave420]

In most European places I've seen, the long-distance lines are above ground (which constitutes the "grid"), and in cities and towns the cables are below ground. The size of the US doesn't matter, as we are talking about cities. As others have pointed out, the grid is redundant, but the cabling in towns and cities is not. No-one is talking about running rural lines underground, just those in cities, where it makes sense and provides a first-world power supply. Trotting out the "but we so biiiig!" argument when someone points out that the US's infrastructure is sometimes laughable only perpetuates the issues, and ensures that they will never be fixed.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not talking about long-distance transmission, we're talking about "a relatively large college town". Europe has suburbs too, you know, and they don't suffer the power infrastructure problems we have here in the USA.

The problem is a form of corruption, ensconced in US law, that puts the interests of shareholders ahead of the interests of the public. This is super-capitalism, more frequently referred to as corporatism.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Kjella]

Comparing the U.S. the little toy countries in Europe is silly. They are about the size of one of our states. It is much easier given their pop. density to keep their little toy grids up and running.

The countries with lower population density in Europe has more stable power supplies. The countries with higher population density also have more stable power supplies. Those "toy" networks put together supply more than twice the US population wtih power. At least with ISPs the Chewbacca defense could say the US has more long haul domestic traffic, when it comes to the power grid....what? Snip all the interstate lines then and one state will be the size of one EU country and supply its own population and US power supply will be great. That's what you're saying, because you built one big network it must be crap. And it has to be crap, because...?

Re:Super-capitalism

[jimbolauski]

You couldn't be more wrong, the electric companies or at least the companies that own the power lines are monopolies, they are regulated by the state. How much they spend cutting back trees is set by the state.

Re:Super-capitalism

[jimbolauski]

I don't know where you get your sources but China has power outage problems.

Blackouts appear to be the worst in smaller towns like Yiyang here in Hunan, one of Chinaâ(TM)s largest and most populous provinces. The power shortages are threatening to curb the explosive growth the province has experienced since the opening in late 2009 of a high-speed electric train link to prosperous Guangdong province to the south, which helped companies tap Hunanâ(TM)s cheaper land and labor force.â

Energy shortages have forced factories to cut production and ration their energy supplies. In some cases factories operate only a night when demand for energy is low. In other cases they have been forced to shut down completely for more than two weeks. The shortages were particularly hard on industries that need a lot of energy like aluminum, steel and cement and ones with furnaces that need a constant supply f energy or they break.

Factories in Guangdong were told that their power would be cut one day a week, then two days a week, then five days a week, during peak hours. Under these conditions the factories switched production to the night and on weekends of bought their own diesel generators, which increased manufacturing costs by around 5 percent.

In Shanghai there have been runs on power generators and power has been cut to factories while neon lights were allowed to keep blinking on the Bund; decorative lights on skyscrapers are kept on late into the night; and air conditioning is kept on the fancy shopping malls so that everything seems to hunky dory to visitors ib Shanghai.

Power outages have been a boon for makers of diesel generators of all sizes. General Electric, Siemens and Mitsubishi heavy Industries have won large contracts supplying turbines and other technology for Chinaâ(TM)s power-generating plants.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground.

Oh wow! Ok. I'll bite. Got proof of that? Cost-effective for whom exactly? The power company that maintains contracts with pole makers, wire companies, and unions to make sure workers have certain amounts of work to do year round after infrastructure damage? Is that the 'cost-effective' you were referring to? Because, if they buried a lot of electrical infrastructure, it wouldn't have the option of being damaged by mother nature as often as it hanging out, up in the air.

Now, in some places, it is difficult to bury elec. lines. Try the rocky mountains of Colorado for one. Oh, wait! No. They bury their elec. lines there as well, despite the granite rock houses are built on. They prefer a nicer view.

No, the only thing keeping electrical lines from being buried is will, and money. Will, because one day, this nice subdivision might need to be a strip mall, and money, because some people stand to lose money once electrical lines are in the ground.

Permanent infrastructure is a black mark for a lot of companies because it will negatively impact long term profits. And that apparently, can't be happening!

Re:Super-capitalism

[wvmarle]

There are scheduled outages caused by energy shortage, and they work hard on solving that. However unscheduled outages through events like the weather are very rare.

Re:Super-capitalism

[LordLimecat]

I dont think you know what a fallacy is, both because you misused the term and because you committed one yourself.

Re:Super-capitalism

[_Sharp'r_]

Why do people keep conflating complete government control of an industry, to the point where the government outright decides who your local power company is and exactly how much they charge you, with capitalism? You could make a good case for calling that model socialism, or communism, or even fascism, but it's the exact opposite of any sort of market-based capitalism...

Sure, when the people in government decide to take complete control of an industry, the people in the industry become reduced to working their government masters for their own benefit, but the issue there isn't a lack of government power.

Ever heard of a public utilities commission? They're the ones who approve rates, expansion, rules for how the power company functions, etc...

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but they were never bombed so we never had the opportunity to rebuild everything to better standards. It's hard to argue an expensive upgrade to existing systems when it's relatively super cheap to keep them running in their current state.

More and more new housing developments in USA are getting underground cables. The older and poorer areas still have them above ground.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Ichijo]

For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground.

You're close. It's not that the USA is big, it's that much of it is urban sprawl. Sprawl makes all infrastructure expensive on a per capita basis, which is why the suburbs are subsidized by downtown areas. "Big" only matters between cities, but intercity electric lines are high voltage wires that don't get buried.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.

WRONG! This is the US, land of corruption. It's not cost effective to upgrade infrastructure because the CEO wants to take that $25 million in capitol as a personal bonus at the end of the year for being so awesome at purchasing politicians.

Re:Super-capitalism

[CaptainLard]

Even China has a far more reliable power supply than the USA. Virtually no outages due to normal storms or lightning or so;

Maybe because half of their housing developments are completely vacant! BaBam!

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the US enjoys a form of quasi-socialism, it's just less socialistic than some other comparable countries. The power industry is one of the most heavily regulated ones in the country, and to make matters worse it's regulated at every level of government. The Feds are involved in the national grid, your State is involved in the regional grid. Your county/parish/town/city is involved in the local grid. The prices, methods of billing, methods of generation, and methods of distribution are heavily regulated every step of the way. Becoming a "power company" is effectively like becoming a small branch of several different government offices more than it's like becoming a normal business.

The almighty dollar actually does bring things like quality of service and stability. When a significant chunk of a free market values quality and stability, businesses will compete each other to do death trying to deliver it for an extra buck. Problem solved. What we have in the power industry is the exact opposite of a free market. It's a perfect example of the kind of shoddy service, lack of innovation, and high prices one can expect with such heavy, multi-layered government interference in a market.

You know what I can get around here with way higher reliability and quality than my electrical power? Pizza delivered to my door anytime day or night in well under 30 minutes. Packages of virtually-anything in under 24h from the time of order. Both of those things are ubiquitous, reliable, and high quality thanks to free-market forces. I have 5 pizza delivery vendors in my area, and you bet if one slips up on delivery time, friendliness, or pizza quality, the others will drive him into the ground over it, and he knows it. Fedex, UPS, and now even the remnants of the quasi-governmental USPS compete to ship packages to me reliably and on-time without breaking them. Amazon competes with thousands of other retailers to make me spend my dollar on their inventory/warehouse system's ability to get packages to the carriers faster.

Who's my local, regional, or national -level electric grid competing with for my dollar? Exactly nobody. If they do a shitty job, people bitch (hence this article), but they can't do shit. Me and my pals that have an idea how electric grids work and want to fund a startup to shake up the industry and deliver higher-quality power even cheaper? Can't happen. It'll die in governmental red-tape-hell long before it makes the yawning government-supported incumbents even look over at us from their slumber to yawn lazily. The funny thing is the government has *mandated* a competitive environment now for electric resellers. I have like 50 options for who sends me my bill and for how much, but none of that changes a thing about my infrastructure or reliability. They're all paper-pushing offices reselling the same regulated shit being maintained by the singular government-backed monopoly on my infrastructure.

Yes, I get that it would suck to have 20 different companies all running their own ugly unreliable power poles through every neighborhood; this is the standard justification for the need for utility infrastructure regulation, but that's *not* what would actually happen with open competition! Someone should actually try it once and find out :p

Re:Super-capitalism

[Ksevio]

I live in one of the few US towns with municipal power and we have great reliability because they do all the maintenance needed. The only time in the past 5 years we lost power was during a hurricane when something took out the substation (and it was fixed in hours, unlike the surrounding areas that were still out the next day). A lot of lines are underground, but I think the maintenance with cutting back trees and replacing bad sections also has a big part to play.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

When it's about espionnage everything is cost effective, distance does not matter. But when it's about basic and primary need local infrastructure, it's always too expensive. What is wrong with you guys?

Espionage costs scale with the number of people, infrastructure scales with the area of land? As population density changes, priorities do too?

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

super capitalism? Get real - in many ways our economy is more controlled, more sclerotic than Europe.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

State capitalism does not equal capitalism (at least not if you associate free market with capitalism). Here's a f**king newsflash for you, Lenin was wrong, Monopolies are not the goal or the end in capitalism. Try reading von Mises to get a counter to the nonsense that capitalism = monopoly = imperialism.

Re:Super-capitalism

[GLMDesigns]

Knowledge does not equal power. It equals potential power.

Re:Super-capitalism

[jimbolauski]

Their outages are not just due to energy shortages, after a snow storm one city lost power for 3 weeks in 2008. As long as you have above ground power you will be susceptible to storms causing power outages, the only difference is that China keeps a tight lid on negative information.

Re:Super-capitalism

[HeckRuler]

Your complaint isn't warranted. AmiMoJo pointed out that the goal in capitalism is to win your market. He said nothing about government control or any of your -isms.

You seem to be assuming that "monopoly" instantly means "government control". Which makes sense, really. Once companies win their market, then there's usually abuse. You know, otherwise known as "making money". With that abuse comes the cries of the consumers, and since we live in a self-balancing democracy, down comes the regulation that tries to keep the abuse to a minimum.

And honestly, the above post:

Yes, but power companies have local monopolies, so there is no super capitalism there unless you equate super capitalism with monopolies

That's not warranted either. Even with a monopoly (and no competition driving cost down) you'll still find companies skimping on maintenance because that makes them more money in the short term.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, cut the crap and admit it! US companies ARE CHEAP BASTARDS that will s***w you for a penny. They do not give a deamn for your problems, they just care about their (preferably weekly) profit. How much will the customer pay for reliable electrical grid - same as for not reliable grid.

Re:Super-capitalism

[xaxa]

Comparing the U.S. the little toy countries in Europe is silly. They are about the size of one of our states. It is much easier given their pop. density to keep their little toy grids up and running.

The European countries have connections between them -- mine (UK) imports/exports power from Ireland, France and the Netherlands. There are plans to connect to Norway and Iceland (not in the EU).

http://rrc-energy.com/electric... shows most other countries have many more connections (since they're not going across water).

Re:Super-capitalism

[xaxa]

In Britain, if your house is connected by an above-ground electricity cable I'd estimate less than 20 families live in the settlement.

(No evidence for that, but it's only tiny places that have above ground electricity. Above-ground telephone is more common, that could be small or old.)

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Texas IS a state isolated from the larger grids. And it IS a reliable independent grid.

Re:Super-capitalism

[_Sharp'r_]

Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government and you might be able to start to make a point here.

The reality is that power company monopolies exist most everywhere in the U.S. today because the government legally requires things to be that way.

Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly without the government making laws giving them a monopoly. Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.

You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?

Re:Super-capitalism

[Darinbob]

We've had outages because people have dug up power lines by mistake, same with phone lines.
Most of the outages from falling trees are minor, they don't affect many people (but annoying when it's you). However outages that hit substations affect lots of people and aren't mitigated by putting them underground.

A big problem is that so much is not automated. Utilities don't even know when there's an outage, there's no light that starts blinking in the office to alert anyone. Usually it takes 3 phone calls before the utility treats it as a real outage; they can't send out a team for a single phone call because those are almost always a blown fuse in the basement. When they do have to fix something they have to send out trucks, checking manually which is the transformer that's blown.

Seriously, we have paranoid people scared of smart grids, but most of the US effectively has 50s era local and distribution grids (though the transmission grid is much better).

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

O RLY?

But can you show me a European country that has exactly the same population density as the US, to the third decimal? Then we would have a fair comparison.

Re:Super-capitalism

[HeckRuler]

Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government

Sure, I want to play the top of the line computer games. AAA titles. Because let's say I'm a gamer.

Now which operating system do I have to buy? Do I really have any choices?

Diamonds. Debeers had a global diamond monopoly that extended to the USA. Huh, this has apparently gotten better in the last few years.

Monsanto has the seed market. But oh, let me guess. Because the US government enforces IP laws, that means that the big bad evil guy is actually da gobermint.

Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly

...Other than market dominance. And all the things they can do to keep competitors out of their market. Remember "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Come on dude, your'e on slashdot, are you just going to pretend companies don't do things like this?

You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?

Yeah, some natural monopolies, like the power grid and the cables connecting my house to the grid.
Your question is backwards. They don't have laws keeping out competition (pft, hell with all the regulatory capture, they probably do, but hey, I'm talking about in general here) they have laws regulating HOW that natural monopoly is used. Someone wants to buy a section of the power grid? Go for it, but the regulation applies to them just the same.

The "natural monopoly" of the power grid is that there's just the one. Alright? I don't have the choice to connect my house power to a number of competing grids.

Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.

"Even"? "EVEN!?" That by itself is some pretty bad mojo. No competition means shitty service, no price competition, and the consumer can suffer the entire cost of the barrier to entry, every year. If anyone tries to enter the market, the monopoly holder drops the price down to unsustainable until the new guy is dead and gone.
And in case this concept is entirely foreign to you, companies strive to increase the barrier to entry for their market. You're absolutely right that one of the ways they do this is by getting the government to pass regulation that is difficult to meet. And when those regulations dance to the monopolies tune, that's regulatory capture, and it's a terrible thing. But don't pretend that the government is the root of all evil, or companies are all saints, or the market will cure all ills. It doesn't always work everywhere. Like essential utilities with natural monopolies.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Case study: Sweden.

Half the population density of the US. Never bombed.

Must have much worse infrastructure than the US? Or?

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.

Also, the US enjoys a form of super-capitalism, where the almighty dollar stands above things like quality of service and stability. So companies do the bare minimum of maintenance, also worsening outages.

Super-Capitalism is not at work here.
Most utilities in the USA are heavily regulated by (often elected) public service commissions. They are given a good, but not great guaranteed rate of return and generally the utilities have to refund excess earnings to the customers if profits exceed the guaranteed rate.

In some areas the PSC values re-election and (either) party politics over managing the utilities correctly and consequently the infrastructure suffered in those areas.

Re:Super-capitalism

[_Sharp'r_]

Operating systems for gaming computers? I suppose your Playstation and your Wii and your Steam Machine run windows and WINE doesn't exist? Dude, don't confuse a monopoly with having a big market share.

De Beers managed to get to 85-90% of the world market for diamonds, not quite an actual monopoly... but as the diamondmarket is international, couldn't get all the governments to protect their market position by granting an actual monopoly and requiring their customers to purchase only their products. Guess what their market % is now? 40%? Lower? I guess they didn't have a natural monopoly after all.... market forces and all that.

Monsanto? No need to even go there in terms of IP. There are hundreds of seed companies farmers can buy from. Yeah, Monsanto is one of the biggest (at around 35% of the corn and soybean market share, just below DuPont) because many of their customers like their product combinations (pest control + seeds that resist it), but if another company came along tomorrow offering a better deal, how long would their market share last? One season, two? You're reading too much anti-GM propaganda and not looking at the actual facts.

Re:Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

most of China's gear is brand new. Opening a plant a week they were, mostly coal. Now they have air pollution, mega strength. China is not a role model for much.
Now we are toying with rechargeable cars. Going to take a redesign of the whole grid to accommodate that.

Easy:

[Anonymous Coward]

Because your infrastructure is above ground instead of in the ground.

Can not remeber last outage

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in Sweden, not far from Stockholm.. I rember when I was a kid, we had an outage and my parents lit candels and we had a nice dark evening in the middle of the winter, with snow outside the windows.

Ah great memories,

cause they are memories.. Im sure there has been outages after that, and Im sure I been pissed that I could not use my computer, but I can not remeber them.
So apparently no problem with electricity where I live.

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[RenHoek]

It's true that renewable power levels like wind-power rise and fall, but once you look at a larger area then it pretty much evens out.

Of course you can back it up with other types of renewable that have a more stable output like hydro-electric of geothermal.

Market forces don't work on essential utilities.

[BeCre8iv]

You already pay for it - so how is it in their interests to invest in improvement? Nobody is going to build a better grid to compete on price or quality.

Have a look at getting your own power source

[Barsteward]

You could take care of some of the daytime failures with solar (and evening if you get some batteries).

Re:Have a look at getting your own power source

[johnw]

You could take care of some of the daytime failures with solar (and evening if you get some batteries).

Be aware that for a solar installation feeding power into the grid, you are generally required to have a control system which immediately shuts down your solar generation if the power grid fails. This is for safety reasons (chaps working on the line don't want to find there are still unexpected volts there after they've shut off the supply) and because your system will start to go blue in the face very quickly if it tries to power your entire neighbourhood.

You could have a more sophisticated control system which merely disconnected you from the grid and powered your local devices, but that would of course require some storage of power as well because your load would practically never match your generation. The vast majority of small solar installations do not do this.

Re:Have a look at getting your own power source

[Lumpy]

Grid intertie systems are available that failover to local battery storage.

Re:Have a look at getting your own power source

[Anonymous Coward]

Be aware that for a solar installation feeding power into the grid, you are generally required to have a control system which immediately shuts down your solar generation if the power grid fails.

Any UL approved grid-tie inverter automatically shuts down when the grid power goes out. It part of the approval requirement.

More sophisticated grid-tie inverters automatically disconnect from the grid while still feeding your house. Kind of like a whole house UPS.

In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

The utility companies need to pay to the customers for power outages, and also can be held liable for damages, for example spoiled food in fridge, freezer. The ordinary payment is 10 % of yearly transfer fees for 12 hours...

Thanks to the underground cabling, in Finland the last time I witnessed personally witnessed a power outage was in 2006 in thunderstorm, lasting for 2 minutes.

Re:In Finland

[Z00L00K]

Similar in Sweden, where I live there have been maybe 5 outages the last 15 years, none of them long enough to create any problems aside from having to set the clock radio again.

And we have underground wiring. Areas with above ground wiring sees more outages.

This is also what annoys me whenever I have been visiting the US - the air is filled with wires high and low, which definitely destroys the scenery of the otherwise picturesque towns that are common in New England among other places.

Re:In Finland

[theVarangian]

Similar in Sweden, where I live there have been maybe 5 outages the last 15 years, none of them long enough to create any problems aside from having to set the clock radio again.

And we have underground wiring. Areas with above ground wiring sees more outages.

This is also what annoys me whenever I have been visiting the US - the air is filled with wires high and low, which definitely destroys the scenery of the otherwise picturesque towns that are common in New England among other places.

This is one thing I have never quite understood about the USA. Even in places where hurricanes and earthquakes are common they put electric lines on wooden poles with the result that when an earthquake occurs or a hurricane blows through the streets are literally covered with downed power lines. I live in an earthquake prone region where we almost exclusively use underground wiring. We've never had an outage because of an earthquake. Come to think of it we've never had more than minor damage to buildings as result of even the biggest storms the N-Atlantic has thrown at us while the power grid didn't even notice the storms. This brings me to my curiosity over why Americans keep building houses out of wood in these regions? In California for example much of the earthquake damage seems to be wooden houses although they have noticeably strengthened building codes Californians are still stuck with a whole lot of vulnerable older houses. I was watching a documentary on the reconstruction of areas around New Orleans and along the Mississippi and I was surprised to see that these houses that had been destroyed were simply being rebuilt as they had been before without any attempt to adapt the architecture such that the habitable areas of houses are not at ground level. I have travelled in South East Asia where they have similar flooding problems as the Americans have around the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi river and most of the houses there are built on stilts with the habitable area upstairs while the area under the house is used for storage. It takes a pretty massive flood to reach the upper floors of houses that are built like that. There are companies that specialise in house liftings in the US, I'm surprised the practice is not more wides spread than it seems to be. I suppose it's just to expensive?

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but Finland is social democratic, in which the state ensures profit for the power companies and in return the power companies are required to provide a certain level of service.

Mainland European countries have learned that this social welfare as a conduit to corporate welfare is really a precursor to neoliberalism, so what you're experiencing is temporary.

Also, Finland is small.

Re:In Finland

[Shadow99_1]

I personally get a lot of brown outs, power surges, and flickering. I've had multiple pieces of electronics go even on surge protectors as they get a charge higher than they are rated for... And full home UPS is out of my price range, but seems to be my only solution.

Re:In Finland

[dheltzel]

This is exactly right! Why do I never have mod points when I need them . . .

I have long felt this way too. As others have pointed out, the US is all about capitalism, so take away some of the shareholder dividends by making the power company rebate money paid for service when the service fails and the problem will solve itself in an efficient manner. Gradually increase the penalties on a fixed schedule so the companies can plan for long term upgrades where the infrastructure is at the highest risk (rather than where the the PUC officials live - which is, I suspect, a large part of the equation now). Mandating improvements on a monopoly only results in government fines that the company officials use in the cost benefit analysis about infrastructure improvements. Give the money back to the customer and that will reduce the "sting" of a power failure.

Imagine if you got 1 day of free electric service for every hour of downtime? I'd be very happy with that and easily convinced that the power company was doing their very best to restore service quickly because it was hitting them squarely in the pocketbook.

Re:In Finland

[gewalker]

And the US is primarily serviced by either public utilities (usually owned by the city) or by regulated utilities that regulate the utilities including the profit margin, approval of capital projects, and other things. I.e., not any real reason for their to be a different between US and Finland in this regard.

I guess the real difference is a combination of the following:

1) general philosophy of, good enough, great is not required
2) Electric infrastructure is a little older on the average in the US
3) The regulation that exist probably more optimal for cost than service in the US in comparison.

Of course, cost is the reason why overhead lines are used. Contrary to what several posters have mentioned, maintenance cost on underground lines is actually usually higher on underground lines to overhead, but this factor is relatively minor in comparison to the significantly higher capital costs.

Re:In Finland

[berberine]

I have not been along the Gulf Coast, but when I lived in North Carolina and visited the Outer Banks there were many houses that were up on stilts.

As for wooden houses, wood is cheaper than concrete. Often when you buy a house in America, the house is already built and you're just purchasing it. I live in a town of 10,000 and I only know two people who built their own houses and they were wood. Most of the middle class cannot afford anything but a house built of wood.

In Florida, there are concrete block stone houses, but they are more expensive. IIRC, they also have some steel framing. I think a lot of it comes down to cost. I could not afford any of the brick homes in my town. They are simply far out of my price range and I suspect this is a large reason why most builders don't build with concrete.

Re:In Finland

[Michael Woodhams]

Wooden houses as opposed to what? I don't think a well built wooden house is at all a problem in an earthquake zone. It is better than brick, probably worse than reinforced concrete or steel, but who builds single dwellings from reinforced concrete or steel?

I'm from New Zealand, where we have quite high earthquake hazard, and an overwhelming majority of our houses are wooden. Fatalities in the Christchurch earthquake were (mostly? entirely?) not due to wooden buildings but to poor quality 1980s high-rise and ~100 year old brick low-rise commercial buildings. People did die in wooden houses, but in the cases I am aware of this was due to boulders or cliffs falling on them, which no reasonable house would withstand, or heavy furniture falling on them, again independent of house construction.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

It's expensive to have an underground line for physical reasons.
Long lines at high voltages behave almost as a pure capacitor (C).
The underground C line/Km >> air C line/Km.
This means the reactive power (VAR) is greater in undergriund cables/Km
There are two options with underground lines. Use short lines (in cities) or use a many phase shift inductors (expensive).
There is also another aspect to consider. After a short circuit the underground line is gone, while the air line has a bigger resistence (since its air) and it will stiil work.
In short
Its all about the money money money ta ta ta aah tata tah ah ah.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Finland is small.

There are not that many people compared to the top countries, but still plenty. In area Finland is in top ten of european countries and compared to US states it's also in the top ten, Finland is almost the size of germany. Also populationwise Finland is above the middle in both compared to European countries and USA states. Population is spread out, so "not so much people" in this case is not small, because the power needs to be spread through out regardless of the number of people.

Re:In Finland

[jones_supa]

Thanks to the underground cabling, in Finland the last time I witnessed personally witnessed a power outage was in 2006 in thunderstorm, lasting for 2 minutes.

I can confirm this. In Finland you get premium electricity in most places. On the other hand, the amount of "sick" buildings is cropping up: there's moisture in structures, improperly configured ventilation, poor heating, and whatnot. :( But hey, you get proper power to read Slashdot.

Re:In Finland

[ibwolf]

... but who builds single dwellings from reinforced concrete or steel?

Just about everyone in Iceland. There are some houses built here out of wood, but the VAST majority are built using reinforced concrete (sometimes with a wooden roof though).

Re:In Finland

[CrimsonAvenger]

Of course the trees in Iceland are four inches (one decimeter) tall, so wood isn't really an option. ;-)

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah. Here in Florida there are aerial lines all over the place. 10 years ago we go a trio of hurricanes and after the first one nearly 2 million people were without power. Where I lived, we were without for a week. Where my girlfriend (now wife) lived, their cables were buried and they never lost power. She lived 8 miles away from me.

Most of the downed cables came from trees falling over, branches falling, etc. To me it's a public safety issue and it is worth spending money on. I also think the aerial cables are an eyesore. My personal feeling is that it is worth the money to both beautify and provide for increased public safety. I live in an historic area with lots of brick streets. Every decade or two each street gets ripped up and the bricks re-laid. It would be the perfect time to run buried lines, street by street.

Re:In Finland

[Mr D from 63]

I think you oversimplify things. There is also great incentive with power companies to keep the power running and minimize the high cost of repairs, but there are always areas where there is an older infrastructure that causes problems, or distribution network areas that rely on a small number of feeders, etc. There will always be some balance between what they pay to improve and how much continual maintenance cost they are willing to incur, and the price charged the customer. If you want paybacks for outages, then your normal bill will go up.

Even for regulated companies, when its time to ask for a rate increase, it helps when the customers are happier. Some companies do a much better job than others. I bet you could probably show that those companies that operate the most reliable transmission and distribution networks have higher profit margins.

Re: In Finland

[unami]

it's probably also because here in europe, electicity networks are often state owned (or at least have been installed by the state prior to some privatization-waves over the last 20 years). the last time i can remember a short power outage here in rural austria must have been in the 90ies. there have been some major outages in some other areas, but they are few and far between (and usually mended within minutes to a few hours).

Re:In Finland

[vtcodger]

In California for example much of the earthquake damage seems to be wooden houses although they have noticeably strengthened building codes Californians are still stuck with a whole lot of vulnerable older houses.

Backwards. Wooden structures do much better in earthquakes than more rigid structures -- which is why California's building codes allow wood, but ban unreinforced masonry (i.e. bricks) and lightly reinforced concrete. Wooden buildings aren't always as straight or safe after a major earthquake as they were before. But the vast majority of fatalities and serious injuries in quakes since 1933 have been from the collapse of concrete structures -- buildings and roads. see http://timelines.latimes.com/l...

Wiring? I live in a mostly rural area, and it's mostly a matter of cost I think. My neighborhood has underground utilities that are quite reliable. But most of the region has overhead wiring that is vulnerable to rain, ice, lightning and vehicles amputating the utility poles. Reason: If there are only a handful of customers per kilometer, the costs of burying the wiring are too high for the customer base to fund.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

I was chocked to learn what concrete means in the U.S.A. I saw a website about making a bunker against hurricanes by using hollow concrete blocks then putting steal in them and puring cement (yes not even concrete) in the holes. And they called it reinforced concrete.

A house in the netherlands are build like this. First they put many poles in the ground 15m to 35m in length. These poles are actual reinforced concret by pooring concrete around a steal mesh box. The tops are then removed so the mesh box is exposed.

Now we use wood panels to build a form to pour concrete in, but not before adding more mesh steal and intertwine the with the exposes meshes from the poles.

Now the walls go up, again using wood to build a form, add a steel mesh and pour concrete. Same for all the floors.

This is the skeleton of most Dutch houses, then a second outside wall from brick is made, you are not allowed to put brick-wall-like-cladding on the outside, you have to build a separate fully bricked wall. You fill the space between the concrete and the brick wall with insulation.

Now I live in a building made in 1929 in Amsterdam, there most of the skelleton is made from wood, but the outside wall is brick. There are also steal I-beams and a center steal column to build the floors on.

Modern houses are all build using reinforced concrete. Some are build like above, by pouring on site, others use prefab reinforced concrete slaps that are just put together.

Re:In Finland

[retroworks]

As an American married to a European, I've often been asked by puzzled Europeans as to why Americans build houses from wood. Alexis de Tocqueville probably said it best (Democracy in America Vol II, Chapter VIII):

"I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years. In these words, which fell accidentally and on a particular subject from a man of rude attainments, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people directs all its concerns."

Americans regularly get second mortgages and put additions and improvements to their homes, expanding and adapting them. The less this is true (inner cities) the less likely the home is made of wood. And that may turn out to be true of many high-line wires. I'm not sure about power lines, but would assume we'd pay for telephone cables to be buried at the same time, and that seems incredibly wasteful. If the USA paid to put all the telephone cables underground, how will it pay off if everyone goes wireless, as has happened in most rapidly emerging market cities? When I had my home rewired in 1998, I thought it would be wise to pay for double phone lines, put in for DSL cable. I wish I could get that money back and put it into a savings bond.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like how my parents house in Surinam is built.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Wooden houses as opposed to what? I don't think a well built wooden house is at all a problem in an earthquake zone. It is better than brick, probably worse than reinforced concrete or steel, but who builds single dwellings from reinforced concrete or steel?

Over 90% of the houses in The Netherlands (not a particulary earthquake-prone region) are built from reinforced concrete. Typically, the foundation, inner walls and floors are reinforced concrete, the outer walls are cemented bricks and the roof is wooden structure that is held by the concrete walls and covered by roof tiles. Between the inner and outer walls and below the roof structure is an insulation layer, usually with glass wool or rock wool. Underneath the roof isolation layer and the conrete floors is typically a gyproc ceiling.

Very old houses are often built with brick walls and a wooden frame. Wooden walls are very rare for houses, but they are used sometimes for sheds on farms and in gardens.

Re:In Finland

[drinkypoo]

Wooden houses as opposed to what? I don't think a well built wooden house is at all a problem in an earthquake zone.

No, it's just a problem in a fire zone, which in the USA tend to correspond closely with earthquake zones. Building flammable houses on a grassland or in woods is daft.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Areas with above ground wiring sees more outages.

It's a trade-off. Underground wiring has fewer outages, but the cost and time to repair when there is damage is much higher. Many areas have overhead power more because of tradition* than anything else. Even those where the decision was made on cost analysis, there are more factors involved than "is this an earthquake zone" when deciding if underground wiring will be more reliable in the long run.

*Early in the AC vs. DC wars, DC cables were put under the roads and AC cables were strung up on poles. The high current DC cables had a tendency to charge water on the roads during and after a rain, so horses would get an electric shock. Edison saw this as merely a cost of progress, Westinghouse put their cables in the air to minimize installation cost and show that they didn't like electrocuting horses.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually a fire code thing. They used to use wood. Then there was a big fire (early 1900s). After that, all houses are brick/concrete.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

New England is one big swamp with rocks sticking out of it in some places. Aboveground wires are easier to install because of this. How is it done in Sweden and Finland in areas of similar geology?

Re:In Finland

[tburkhol]

A "brick" home in the US is almost always a wood framed house with a brick facade. It's harder for the wind to tear off bricks than to tear off aluminum siding, but it doesn't really change the structural stability of the house much.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that underground wiring is great... until it floods.

Re:In Finland

[dhaen]

I go once got lost in an Icelandic forest, but then I stood up.

Re:In Finland

[pscottdv]

That sounds great, but I'll tell you what, a wood-frame house sure is nice when you want to make changes to the floor plan.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

What a marvelous story!

I know another one: The Three Little American.

Katrina:
Little American, little fatty, let me come in.
No, no, not by the hair on my chinny chin chin.
Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

There is some cost trade-off, too. The US puts up with a few more outages, but electricity is 1/3 to about 1/2 the cost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
For that savings, you could easily have a large UPS, backup generator, or whatever, if electricity was that critical to you. Then you'd have even fewer outages.

In dense cities/suburbs or nicer areas, burying makes sense. When houses are more than a mile apart, not so much.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

In Florida, I had Florida Power and Light (FPL) also known as Fleece Plunder and Loot. They'd been pulling money out the top as profit and buying up other power companies outside FL for a long time, and then they took money from bills specified as for "green" energy and spent it all advertising how "green" they were without investing a penny in actual "green" technology, then they got BITTEN in 2004 and 2005 when their outdated and overloaded infrastructure got PUMMELED two hurricane seasons in a row. Amazing how completely unready they were.

Then in 2006 we got an expensive media campaign to tell us how they'd rebuilt and were all ready for the next hurricanes!

Gee, wow, I sure felt better!

But the surges, sags, dropouts, and 7000 VAC lines burning through and dropping onto my apartment building (4 times) kept right on!

FPL - just buy a generator and some solar panels and disconnect completely.

Re:In Finland

[jeff4747]

Even in places where hurricanes and earthquakes are common they put electric lines on wooden poles with the result that when an earthquake occurs or a hurricane blows through the streets are literally covered with downed power lines. I live in an earthquake prone region where we almost exclusively use underground wiring. We've never had an outage because of an earthquake.

And I lived in Los Angeles and never had an outage because of an earthquake. Had many earthquakes, including some pretty big ones that destroyed a lot of buildings near the epicenter. I now live in a place that sees a major hurricane every 20 years or so, and got to experience that firsthand.

Anyway, we put the wires on wooden poles for three reasons:

1. 1- We have a shitload of wood. That makes the poles very cheap.
2. 2- They're pretty fast and inexpensive to repair.
3. 3- We've got a lot more distance to cover. So we've got a lot more power lines and burying all of them costs a lot more.

The power lines usually have enough slack to deal with the earthquake itself. Something falling on the power line can obviously cause a problem, but that's not likely to happen unless you're very close to the epicenter and it's a big earthquake.

In hurricane prone areas, new construction usually requires the bottom floor to not be living space, and it's usually built in a way to resist flooding. For example, the building is actually on pilings and the bottom floor's walls are built to break away. However, that's new construction. We've got many decades of old buildings still out there. When you've got places that regularly go 60+ years between storms, it's going to take a long time for the old buildings to be "forcefully upgraded".

As for wood construction, that remains popular because we have a shitload of wood. Building out of concrete is vastly more expensive. And when it comes to earthquakes, wood buildings tend to do better. Wood can flex, versus a concrete building cracking under the strain. The main problem becomes sufficiently anchoring the wood to the foundation, and a tough enough foundation to withstand the shaking.

As for your comments about New Orleans reconstruction, many of the areas are so far below sea level that a single "flood safe" level isn't enough. The house would have to be built very high to keep it above all potential flooding, which costs way too much for an event that is unlikely to repeat for a few decades. And in theory the levees are supposed to prevent flooding to begin with.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

If the USA paid to put all the telephone cables underground, how will it pay off if everyone goes wireless, as has happened in most rapidly emerging market cities?

Don't compare oranges to bananas. We are nowhere close to sending power without a wire. With regards to the wifi, where would your wifi router be plugged to? Maybe a cable? Houses are made of wood because it is cheaper to make and people suck at forecasting.

Re:In Finland

[Solandri]

This brings me to my curiosity over why Americans keep building houses out of wood in these regions? In California for example much of the earthquake damage seems to be wooden houses although they have noticeably strengthened building codes Californians are still stuck with a whole lot of vulnerable older houses

Structural engineer here. Wooden structures survive earthquakes best because they flex. Contrary to the story of the three little pigs, stone masonry is the worst because it has no lateral strength. They're fine in static loading when all the forces are pointing straight down; but the moment the force vector tilts a bit sideways they collapse. The huge death tolls you hear about from earthquakes in developing countries is almost always from collapsed masonry or concrete structures. Mud huts simply don't have the mass to kill residents, and wood homes survive most earthquakes relatively intact. In the 1933 Long Beach earthquake most of the brick schoolbuildings collapsed. Fortunately the earthquake happened in the evening when the kids were home from school, or it could've been a disaster rivaling the 1906 San Francisco quake. But that's the quake which made California realize brick buildings in earthquake country were just plain stupid. If you drive around Los Angeles or San Francisco and look at the older brick buildings, you'll often see a regular pattern of square metal plates on the outside. These are the end ties for steel rods which retrofitted to masonry buildings. They run through the entire length of the building and connect all four sides together into a rigid box. Without them the walls simply fall over in an earthquake.

Metal would be better, but is much more expensive. And its strength is not needed for static loads in smaller structures. Static loading is the reason skyscrapers are made of metal, not because it's more resistant to earthquakes. Skyscrapers are naturally resistant to earthquakes because their height gives them a much lower natural resonance frequency than most earthquakes, and they just kind of shimmy in place during a quake. The highest-risk structures are about 3 stories tall - that's where your resonance frequency matches that of a typical earthquake. If you look at the buildings which collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake and the Northridge quake, the vast majority were 3 stories. Both were relatively moderate quakes so give you an idea which buildings are the first to collapse, unlike larger quakes which destroy a larger variety of buildings.

In earthquake country like California, the two places I would never live in are masonry buildings, and 3 story tall buildings.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it matters much; for both types that would be a very serious operation requiring building new foundations, removing (part of) walls, etc. Not something people typically do very often.

Re:In Finland

[Solandri]

And we have underground wiring. Areas with above ground wiring sees more outages.

This is also what annoys me whenever I have been visiting the US - the air is filled with wires high and low, which definitely destroys the scenery of the otherwise picturesque towns that are common in New England among other places.

It boils down to average population density and cost. It's worth paying to put wires underground if they're going to be servicing a thousand homes on one block. But it's not worth it if you're going to be servicing just a few dozen homes spread out over a square mile. That's why the cities tend to have underground wiring, and suburban and rural areas tend to have above ground wiring. Europe tends to have more of the former, the U.S. more of the latter.

As for home building materials, that again boils down to cost. The U.S. and Canada had (still have) vast tracts of forests and lumber is relatively cheap. Europeans cut down most of their forests centuries ago, so brick and stone tend to be cheaper.

Re:In Finland

[nanoflower]

Do you live in California? That seems to be an area that regularly gets brown outs. It seems like they don't have the proper infrastructure in place to support the population when ever the need for electricity goes outside the norms.

So since Los Angeles stays comfortable most of the year the grid doesn't seem to handle the load well when temperatures head higher than 90F. I don't know if that's a problem with the grid itself or the amount of power available. Either way it looks like the normal choice has been made to design a system for normal usage which may fail under unusual conditions.

Re:In Finland

[Z00L00K]

I live in Europe and lumber is the most common building material around here.

Even at a dozen houses per square mile it's still paying off to have the services underground. When you go below one household per square mile then it may be a point in not burying the lines.

Especially since the service lifetime for buried lines is averaging 50 years.

Re:In Finland

[angel'o'sphere]

Unfortunately the resonance frequency of buildings is not affected by hight but by the length and the width of the building.

Re:In Finland

[swillden]

Unfortunately the resonance frequency of buildings is not affected by hight but by the length and the width of the building.

Not for side-to-side movements.

Re:In Finland

[PCTRS80]

I live in Arizona since we do not suffer from extreme forms of weather like floods/heavy rains, hurricanes, tornadoes (normally), earth quakes and extreme high winds it makes little to no sense to bury the power lines. Maybe we have 1 outages every few years and that normally do to just routine maintenance. People need to take in to account all the weather conditions that exists in an area before you say "just bury the lines it will be better, it works in some other place that is completely different it works there" Placing lines underground in a seismically active area like California would be less than ideal. Placing lines underground were you have highly acidic soil with high perspiration would mean your going to have to replace your entire infrastructure every decade or two. Other things that people don't take in to account is the local utilities that run your local power grid may not have invested in to the redundancy that is necessary for the reliability that you expect. They are required to meed certain regulatory standards however one of those standards only requires vary minor redundancy in the local grids. It was said earlier but keep in mind that above ground power-lines are less prone to fault grounding if a cracks develops in the protective casein, this will happen regardless to being above or below ground.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument is crazy, and I'm crazier for responding, but what the hell, your post is rated 5 for no reason, so I accost you for this!....Inner city doesn't have sprawling space to expand their dwellings, they can't build additions. Wood is no good for more than three or four floors tall, they can't use it to renovate. Housing people is a wholly different function than transporting electrons, and I am hard pressed to find something more than an analogy common between the two. How people build ships because of people telling others what to do has no relevance on your argument, nor does Mr. Tocqueville's well articulated, but still incorrect generalization have any weight either. The Sailor was indeed right as well, Sea worthy vessels started to be built from metal not *too* long after these two had their conversation, the whole Iron Clad thing really caught on, so the Investor's decision to build a lighter framed wooden boat was probably the better decision for the investor, his crew and his clients by saving them all money and increasing efficiencies. But now I'm making generalizations which is dangerous. What's not a generalization is this, and calculate it yourself if you wish: Using the IEA's World Energy Quantity rating for 2012, and assuming only Fossil Fuel is inspected, calculating the raw energy demand ends up being a full 17% of the Earth's total EMF radiation from the sun (1361.0 w/m^2). Global warming is an excess of 0.6 w/m^2. Distributing the World Energy Fossil Demand using regular Direct Normal Insolation (DNI), we find that nearly 100% of the planet's landmass is needed to replace *only* the fossil fuel demand, as of 2012. From where I'm seeing things, and the things I've been taught, I'm guessing worrying about power lines and line stability is very insignificant when there is no way to use them.

Re:In Finland

[angel'o'sphere]

Especially for side to side movements.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

> Americans regularly get second mortgages and put additions and improvements to their homes, expanding and adapting them.

That's pretty normal in Europe too.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.Height and resonant frequency are directly related. Width and length don't matter. There's even a table.

Re:In Finland

[jandar]

Wooden houses as opposed to what?

Wooden houses are an anomaly in my country, there are TV-documentaries abort this curiosity. There are not many companies with expertise to build houses from other materials as brick or concrete.

Anytime I see in the news about an american huricane the splintered houses, I wonder why would anyone build such cheap houses?

Re:In Finland

[jandar]

And to answer the original question: 3 short power-outages within 24 years.

Re:In Finland

[swillden]

Especially for side to side movements.

The AC gave the more authoritative answer, but for a more intuitive one spend some time playing with blocks of jello.

Re:In Finland

[sconeu]

Follow up to parent.

DISCLAIMER: IANA Structural Engineer.

I live in Los Angeles. The point of the building codes here is NOT that the structure be undamaged by a quake, but rather that the struct not collapse during a quake. It can be as severely damaged as all get out, but if it doesn't collapse, then the occupants have a much better chance of survival.

I always tell people, the safest place to be during a major earthquake is "somewhere else", but if you can't be somewhere else, then you want to be in Southern California. We *know* that the quake is coming, and we build to survive it. For example, where would you rather be during a 7.5 quake: Los Angeles, or St. Louis? STL is sitting on the New Madrid fault, which cut loose with an 8+ quake in the early 1800s.

Re:In Finland

[sound vision]

In New Orleans specifically, the problem was with the levee system, not housing construction. Some of those levees had lasted 200 years and through two wars, so citizens and home builders had a reasonable expectation that the city would not be underwater. Full blame goes to the government agency which did not maintain and upgrade the levees as they should have.
Elsewhere on the Gulf Coast, houses are built raised up. These are typically waterfront properties, which are more expensive to start with

Re:In Finland

[jandjmh]

Wood frame single family houses built to most recent building codes are quite safe in an earthquake. Most of the house damage in the Marina district in the 1989 quake in the SF Bay area happened because:
1) The houses had large gaps in the lower story of a two or three story structure (for car garage.) This made the sheer strength low
2) These same house were built on filled in bay on water saturated fill that liquefied when shaken
3) They did not have foundation structure that went deep down through the soft fill to bedrock.
Very few other wooden houses outside that specific area were damaged. My two story wood frame house, just 15 miles in a straight line from the epicenter of the quake did not even have any cracks in plaster or windows.
Brick buildings on the other hand collapse to piles of rubble.
In some parts of America brick is considered a superior or premium type of construction. In California wood framing is the most suitable and used even in the most expensive homes.
Foundations are concrete, and how they are made depends on the geology of the land the house is on. Minimum on very stable compacted soil is steel rod reinforced concrete beam, shape like an upside down T, with the horizontal part of the T 18" wide and 10" thick, and the stem of the T is 10" wide and 18" tall. This is mostly buried, with about 6" of the stem sticking above ground. If the ground is less stable round holes about 12" in diameter are drilled down to bedrock. That might be 30 feet of more. Assemblies of steel rebar are lowered into the hole and then concrete is poured in. These piers are spaced about 10 feet apart around the perimeter of the house, and are connected together at the top by a steel reinforced concrete beam that is, as with the simple foundation, is about 10"x18" Chances are you know our stupid "English" measurement system, but for reference, 1 foot (12 inches) is about 30 cm.
Wood frame is strongly bolted to the foundation beam, and the outside of the wood frame is sheathed in plywood sheer wall with strict rules about thickness of the plywood and spacing of nails that fasten the sheet to the vertical boards. In the lower stories of a multiple story building the size and spacing of any opening that interrupt the sheer wall are limited. If a big opening is need it has to be framed with substantial steel beams.
Built to these standards, a wood frame building is MUCH safer in an earthquake than a brick building, and just as safe or safer than a building made of all reinforced concrete.

Re:In Finland

[toddestan]

Well, part of the problem is that people don't expect to live in one place for a long time. This changes how they think about houses they build. If something won't pay off in the 7 years that they expect that they'll own the house, they won't do it unless perhaps they think it might help the resale value. Because of this, I see all kinds of short term thinking. They'll put the 15 year roof on instead of the 50 year rood because they'll be gone by the time it needs replacing, and so on.

Another reason is bank financing. Banks generally don't like to finance non-traditional homes because the house is collateral, and they want something that they can sell easily should the borrower default on their mortgage. Be prepared to front the money to build the house yourself.

Building codes are another problem, as they heavily favor the traditional way of building a house. They can be pretty inflexible if you want to step outside those bounds. Zoning and other restrictions can also cause problems.

Re:In Finland

[rastos1]

The parent post should not have mentioned earthquake. For earthquake prone zone you want wooden houses because they are more flexible. But I don't often see earthquake reports from US. On the other hand I see tornado reports from US several times a year. The houses are turned into a pile of debris every single time. Also the victims don't usually wander around saying - "Ah, it's cheap to re-build a wooden house". More likely they say "I've lost everything; I can't afford to build a new house". I don't say that a concrete/brick building will not suffer any damage. But surely it will be in better shape compared to a wooden house.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, where would you rather be during a 7.5 quake: Los Angeles, or St. Louis?

On a different continent.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, stone houses survive floods, wooden houses are statistically so likely to be blown down that the greater cost of stone pays for itself in insurance value. Got it.

Re:In Finland

[retroworks]

Valid points. But generally, the cost of entrenching is a bet against innovation. Maybe you're right and it's a good bet to bury several billion dollars of copper. I wasn't thinking the innovation would eliminate cable, the analogy to DSL in the home walls was that I'd paid to entrench what turned out to be the wrong kind of cable.

Re:In Finland

[retroworks]

It isn't "crazy" to suppose, as de Tocqueville does, that the free market (like the fisherman of 'rude attainments') may have thought of something we didn't think of. Of course you are right about buildings being several stories tall and not expandable are made of stone. Therefore... the free market makes city buildings out of stone, even in the ignorant USA. Big city buildings are stone, big ocean ships are metal, small homes in countrysides are wood, and small small boats are still made of wood, even in the USA. The broader point is that someone as intelligent as Alexis dT could be surprised, for all his education, that the free market had made a rational decision. The original post is the equivalent of saying that small fishing boats should be made of metal. The argument is whether building codes and other social engineering will outperform the free market. The question is especially dangerous when the code developer has a quasi-religious approach, a moral certitude. It would be an environmental waste to make small boats out of metal boats. They'd be sturdier, but the amount of carbon and fossil fuels wasted by mining and refining ores to make heavy, slow, small metal boats would be a waste (though probably supported by the metal mining industry). USA has other problems with its wooden structure model, such as "urban sprawl"... I don't think the free market is perfect, but "command and control" scares me, especially when it's promoted by factoids and math that dazzle non-engineers, and are used to support a pompous argument over homebuilding material. Your math of finite resources is exactly on point... But you are using the math on finite resources to promote the theory that European command and control will protect those resources better than the free market. That's the argument central to TFA... Was the free market stupid, or would "solving" it just as likely lead to stone buildings in the countryside and small metal boats?

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. And in my experience, people who participate in suburbanization (sprawl) in Europe are more open minded about wooden houses, though the cost of materials is quite different.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why the cities tend to have underground wiring, and suburban and rural areas tend to have above ground wiring. Europe tends to have more of the former, the U.S. more of the latter.

In many European countries, suburban and rural areas have underground wiring too. It is mostly a matter of choice. Underground is more expensive to build, but it is more reliable an it requires less maintenance.

Europeans cut down most of their forests centuries ago, so brick and stone tend to be cheaper.

Brick and stone are most definitely not cheaper than lumber in Europe. However, wood is not considered a suitable building material over here, partly due to tradition and partly due to building standards. It is not considered safe and durable enough to build homes. It is probably also harder to isolate properly.

The popularity of wood as a building material in the U.S. is probably mostly due to cheaper ground (many one-storey buildings) and cheaper labour (houses don't need to last forever).

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would underground wiring stop being better when it floods? There were many floodings in The Netherlands in the 1990s and I am not aware of any problems caused by the underground cables.

Re:In Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you don't understand FREEDOM. Typical apologist for the Swedish socialist dystopia.

Re:In Finland

[LinuxIsGarbage]

That sounds great, but I'll tell you what, a wood-frame house sure is nice when you want to make changes to the floor plan.

One thing concrete has going for it is fire resistance as well. A Concrete structure with mineral wool insulation won't burn. Take a wood structure with EPS (styrofoam), and vinyl siding and it will go up in flames.

I also don't understand the resistance to sprinkler systems. The number I saw was the cost of a residential sprinkler system was 1-1.5% the cost of new construction. To prevent a catastrophic fire in your house (and possible catch other houses on fire). Yes water damage is a mess, but I'd rather lose the kitchen and the rec room underneath than lose everything (especially including loved ones or myself).

Re:In Finland

[angel'o'sphere]

Point is: to pick up the vibrations from the quake, the size in length and width is relevant.

If the thing is vibrating already then the hight might be right. However our parent claimed that the higher the more stable. Playing with jello or jelly implies: the higher the less stable a structure is, if set into vibration.

Low tech

[aglider]

The power grid is considered by many (investors) low tech. If you check carefully, a lot of energy related stuff is relying on low-tech or old-tech: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... For these reasons, probably, there is not much attention (or even competences) in planning, research and design. Also technicians tend to underestimate technology impact in those areas.

Re:Low tech

[Anonymous Coward]

did you ever consider that the reason the US power grid runs off vaxen, is because they simple work? they have massive clusters of these dinosaurs, running something that is relatively simple. the only reason you need the large clusters of vaxen is to make the redundancy at the control level essentially bomb-proof. One, maybe more vaxen go down, the cluster works around it. Services like google and others have similarly high total uptimes. But they also have massively larger infrastructure computationally. It is more cost effective to keep the redundant vaxen, and the attendant costs of maintaining the vax clusters, than to modernize, considering that part of the point of the actual control systems is that it is simple, it works, and it rarely if ever fucks up. They cannot talk to modern computers, partially by design at this point. it puts them ahead, as far as cyberwarfare resilience goes, even if it makes it hell to extend intelligent functions outward. so as it is, the grid itself is relatively dumb, and staying that way, despite the smartgrid efforts to modernize it. It is the last mile systems that will become smarter, higher tech, and more able to work with the loads and sources. Smart meters connected to appliances, storage cells, and solar installations will work. making the huge steel towers and hundreds of miles of HV cable smart, won't. the best place for intelligence is at the consumer and substation level.

As for if there is intelligence, or competence going into, well, try reading IEEE's reports on said, or perhaps some other industrial digests. I have. by god, the amount of effort going into effective power correction and load matching by researchers is amazing. The level of energy and size involved in modernizing the whole grid though, means those improvements take forever to make a large impact. China for example, modernized the meters on houses in the extreme short term. still took several years, and when it winds down in another year, will leave several million installers out of work, and leave many factories without demand for their product. It'll be a notable bump for them, economically.

Although, with the way the grid is set up, regulation wise, it's easy to see why we suck. In California for example, it is illegal or against regulations to perform any type of work on the poles or wires, because one group forbids climbing them, another forbids bucket trucks or other ladders near the lines, and yet a third forbids helicopter or drone work. You must at this point, break regulations in some cases to deliver power at all. I'm not surprised a nuclear facility is keeping a working, but old system, because the costs of testing replacements are huge, and the approval to use them is a massive roadblock.

Never happens in europe...

[Anonymous Coward]

I life in a small town in The Netherlands. Been to many places in Europe and except one rual area in south France where lights blinked when there was a strom. I never seen long or any power outages...
And as it seems in 2010 an average dutch home had only 36 minutes of power outage.

Because infrastructure "doesn't matter"

[MikeRT]

Because our elected officials love to talk about public infrastructure, but as long as the decline isn't so bad that it's killing people left and right and causing a riot as a result, they don't care. Witness the complete lack of interest in Newt Gingrich's SHIELD Act which would have spent $100B on anti-EMP measures. EMP bursts could kill more people than a nuclear blast due to starvation and exposure in winter. Did anyone care? Nope.

Re:Because infrastructure "doesn't matter"

[dywolf]

To be fair, its The Newt.
Nobody sane pays any attention to The Newt.

For example: EMPs as a weapon are STILL not a credible threat. The chief and primary way to even create an EMP of sufficient power to pose a threat is a nuclear device....which means you have bigger problems. Experimental and protoype EMPs such as may be carried by a cruise missle, or other non-nuclear delivery vehicle, are too small to pose any threat, and only sufficient for a very localized effect. IE, no starvation.

In short: The Newt's EMP bill was just more of his typical trademarked political silliness.

Re:Because infrastructure "doesn't matter"

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, you're A Moron.

EMP is a credible threat - we narrowly missed one recently - due to solar flares like the Carrington Event. Unfortunately, your response is the common one.

Re:Because infrastructure "doesn't matter"

[angel'o'sphere]

EMPs can only be caused by nuke explosions in very high altitudes.
So, whom do you fear who has such a capability?

Re:Because infrastructure "doesn't matter"

[dywolf]

To be fair, you're A Moron.

That is a compelling argument. I yeild to your obviously superior rhetorical skills that oh so obviously counter actual knowledge of military EMP devices.

But seriously. You should really stop listening to to Alex Jones and Infowars (yes, Im aware of who fear mongers over solar super storms and specifically name drops the Carrington Event). Satellite would suffer damage. It would blow some of the main grid transformers, maybe. We wouldnt have lights or A/C for a week, maybe two, in regions of the country...maybe. But it definitely wouldnt be the dark ages. People wouldnt starve. Civilization wouldnt collapse. Its even unlikely that people would die in hospitals.

Unfortunately, my response isnt the common one: yours is. IE, the response informed by bad hollywood movies, bad science, the "History" Channel, and crackpots like Alex Jones.

Further reading for the ignorant such as yourself: http://www.realclearscience.co...
It even addresses The Newt's bill specifically.

Re:Because infrastructure "doesn't matter"

[sound vision]

We wouldnt have lights or A/C for a week, maybe two, in regions of the country...maybe.

You may underestimate the time it would take to repair an entire country's electrical system. After Hurricane Ike blew through, I was without power for nearly two weeks. This is in the middle of the suburbs, not some far-flung rural location. This is with electricians from across the country being brought in to repair just the damage path of one hurricane. An EMP strike(s) that affects more area than a hurricane would easily overwhelm both the manpower and equipment we have on hand to deal with it. Yes, we could rebuild - but not in a couple of weeks.

Re:Because infrastructure "doesn't matter"

[Anonymous Coward]

That article is no better than reverse fearmongering. There is no analysis from science, studies, or experience just "This is an overhyped idea." Your response is similar.

Here is a writeup that tries to do a much better job than the link you gave
http://www.futurescience.com/emp/vehicles.html

I think that giving a billion $ to doing some real EMP research would be in order. It would certainly be a much better use than spending as much on our military as the next 10 countries combined.

We don't know what a strong solar ejection event hitting earth would mean exactly, but it did wipe out a lot of telegraph lines and machines. It did happen in the 1800s and it will again -- we just don't know when.

The advantage of pouring a ton of money into the electrical infrastructure for EMP also allows us to upgrade a host of the electrical grid to make it more secure at the same time. And if we made EMP testing part of the battery of tests a car goes through and published on a year-make-model basis, our vehicular infrastructure would improve.

paying share holders too much

[zaax]

This is because the power co's have been paying their share holders too much money, and not renewing the hardware.

Re: Storage

[taiwanjohn]

Either way, storage is the "next big thing" for the electric grid. For one thing, it's essential for integrating intermittent sources like most renewables. But it will also help to make the entire grid more "islandable" -- diverse and distributed -- and thus more robust.

That's unchecked capitalism for you

[GroeFaZ]

Generally, a public company will invest only if there is an expectation of an acceptable return, or if they are forced to by actual regulation. Businesses like power, water, public transportation, telecommunication, and others require huge investments to get into the market, where possible at all, so there is no real competition either.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[nadaou]

Simply put: money * greed + lack of political will to do anything about the money * greed situation.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[reboot246]

And in many places they are limited by regulation as to how much profit can be made. They have the cost of generating the power, the cost of labor (usually union), the cost of maintaining a fleet of vehicles, and so on. There's not a lot of incentive placed on maintenance, especially upgrading the distribution system to underground. The newer subdivisions generally have power lines underground, but it's expensive to go back and do that in the older parts of the system.

Where I live the power company is a corporation, and they own the power generation facilities and the distribution system. Where I'm working right now the power distribution is owned by the city, and the power comes from TVA. Both have problems with power outages about equally.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[Lumpy]

Then the answer is having a couple of military in full battle dress holding guns to the heads of the CEO.

Yes I said heads. One gun pressed into the forehead, the other a shotgun jammed into his junk. The marines must YELL at full volume all the time at him.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[calexontheroad66]

Not only that, investing in the electrical grid it is always expensive in any western country. Zoning, environmental, licensing, technical regulations, and the nimby effect, all will add up to the cost. Even if it is just upgrading existing infrastructure it is not easy peasy, and building new grid infrastructure can be hampered by local sensibilities.

From the technical standpoint adding new grid capacity adds also more nonlinearities in the grid system that need to be managed. And, high power electrical systems are difficult beasts to control, it is not like in star trek that one can freely route power through any circuit without regard for transitory effects that can shutdown parts or all of the grid.

From the business standpoint, I think it depends on the business culture. In Europe, non-english speaking countries will invest on its grid infrastructure more regularly ,France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, etc... invested recently or are investing in their grid systems. In the UK and Ireland, it is mostly anecdotal evidence, but it seems they are quite happy to not invest in infrastructure as long it still works.

And, another thing, competition doesn't work on grid systems cause they are a natural monopoly. You cannot have two different grid providers, duplicating that type of infrastructure it is very expensive and difficult to justify. Plus, technically having to manage two grids into a local grid, and have power plants outputting for separate power circuits seems a recipe for more problems.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[Carewolf]

Then the answer is having a couple of military in full battle dress holding guns to the heads of the CEO.

Yes I said heads. One gun pressed into the forehead, the other a shotgun jammed into his junk. The marines must YELL at full volume all the time at him.

I hate to say ths, but that is no way to treat a private business. If you want to command them around, maybe you should buy/nationalize them instead of threating them.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[argStyopa]

You apparently forget that utilities are state-sponsored and validated monopolies.
I'm not sure blaming capitalist mechanisms here makes a ton of sense.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely False! Whatever your opinion is on the merits of Capitalism vs Socialism, you (and so many other commenters here!) are missing out on the facts of the situation here and twisting reality to match your preconceived notions. It's almost like your whole thought flow this morning went: "Electric Grid Bad. Capitalism Bad. Therefore Electric Grid == Capitalism."

The electrical infrastructure system is one of the most heavily government-regulated industries in the country by far. The outcomes in the electrical infrastructure "market" are a far better example of what goes wrong in non-free markets than what goes wrong in free markets. The Electric Grid is not a capitalist free market!

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[PPH]

buy/nationalize them

We have that option where I live, in the form of a public utility district law. Voters can elect to buy out the private business. And a few, in rural areas, have done so. But the capital price (which the public would have to raise through bond issues and taxes) is huge.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Remove "public transportation" and "telecommunication" from your list and you are spot on. There is always competition to public transporation and that is NOT a utility with a local monopoly. There are private cars and taxis that compete daily to move people from one place to another. There are no alternatives for power and water. There are at least two alternatives for telecommunication now that cable companies are also doing voice services, so as long as there is a choice of more than one there's no monopoly.

Re:That's unchecked capitalism for you

[Anonymous Coward]

So why do we as a nation turn all our vital infrastructure over to capitalist? The purpose of government is to provide for the good of the populace when capitalistic methods would or are inadequate. Why is the supply of vital infrastructure done for profit, for you anti governments out there this amounts to a tax by omission. we pay more, suffer far worse service for something that would be best provided by the government. there was a time when AT&T was a monopoly that it acted like an arm of the government. whatever was best was done and cost covered by everyone's monthly bill. it cost more but it worked. not so after they were split up. I know the arguments, government can't do anything right cost too much etc. If the electric grid and supply was government owned the air would be cleaner and changes would have already started on the system as a whole. What incentive does a company have to own excess capacity in high tension lines, where is the profit in an unused asset? where is the profit in distributed generation, clean air etc.
No vital infrastructure should be driven or sustained by the profit motive. Profit is money exiting the system generating it, money that should be used to improve the system, not buy another lake house for someone.

Does your state have a Public Service Commission?

[Nutria]

Have you complained to them about the power reliability?

I live in a conservative suburb of a southern city. The state is "blue", hates taxes, and lets the power, telephone and cable companies run their lines on poles. (Part of the justification is that the water table is pretty high, and it rains a lot.) But... my house went more than a year without a clock-resetting power flicker, and that one lasted only a few seconds.
One thing that I do know that the power company does is make an annual drive through each neighborhood looking for tree branches that hang too close to the lines, and then cuts them off. Presumably, they perform other sorts of behind the scenes maintenance, in order to keep reliability so high.

Try living in RSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously... try it... (That's South Africa btw).

Living in the our biggest and most productive city we have a nice saying that goes along with the lights going out. "I've been Eskomed (They're our utilities supplier - supposedly)" this occurs at least 3 times a week.

Q. Is the infrastructure really that bad?
A. No - but you have to wonder what they're doing when you have coal silo's collapsing, oh and coal getting rained on... Really?

Q. Are there other influencing factors in power outages?
A. Yes, we have a notorious problem with cable theft.

Q. What are authorities doing about it?
A. Nobody knows...

Q. What does our government have to say?
A. Well that's a touchy subject but they may or may not be striking nuclear deals with the Russians.

Meanwhile our president cannot account for roughly 20million dollars worth of tax payers money spent on upgrades to his personal home...

All in all you think you've got problems. Try being us. But i do hope you get some decent input on your matter.

Re:Try living in RSA

[Anonymous Coward]

http://goingsolar.co.za

Fsck Eksdom.

Re:Try living in RSA

[beuges]

I am closely related to someone who works at Eskom. His "insider's view" is that the power cuts and load shedding are not due to pressure on the supply, but just to create the impression that there is pressure on the supply, to justify their price increases to pay for the new power stations (and of course sponsoring The New Age breakfasts). He had a good laugh at the 'wet coal' excuse for the problems earlier in the year (conveniently around the time that NERSA was reviewing their tariff increase application) because all the coal arriving at the power plants gets sprayed down with water as soon as it arrives anyways, because coal dust is extremely flammable. We have two new power stations under construction, both coal-fired... when South African engineers are designing safe nuclear power stations that are being used by other countries but not our own. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...)

That's always an expensive option

[evanh]

It requires a decent battery, and an inverter with the ability to run off-grid. Lead acids are cheap but short lived. Lithium phosphates are still expensive. The inverter/charger combo is much higher priced than plain grid-tying.

It only makes sense if you aren't already on the grid, since paying for a new line to the property has it's own hefty price tag.

Re:That's always an expensive option

[Lumpy]

Short lived for lead acid? last time I had a solar setup my lead acid batteries lasted 10 years.

And this was 15 years ago, today the newer lead acid tech is even better.

Power outages in my region

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in an urban area in The Netherlands. Power outages happen approximately on average once every five years here. The last time was about three years ago. I was at work when it happened, but I read about it in the news. It was quite serious: an area with more than 100 000 people was affected and it lasted over two hours.

Also, underground has it's own problems

[evanh]

Earthquakes are just mean. They'll completely null the entire area. Expect to rip up the entire network and start afresh.

Re:Also, underground has it's own problems

[Anonymous Coward]

As stated implicitly in my first post (Aerial, or underground, that is the question), there ain't no such thing as one fit all. This is about risk management, measuring the impact of the occurrence of an event. Green and yellow area on seismic hazard maps are good place for underground network. Red areas may also get increased level availability with some part of the network underground (protecting against rain, wind, thunderstorms, ...) and others aerial (protecting from earthquake).

The Internet answer

[Thanshin]

As with internet providers, just change to a different energy provider. One that puts their cables underground.

The free market is the solution to every problem.

Re:The Internet answer

[zwitscherhirsch]

So you think the solution to this problem is to have both kind of providers? The ones that put their cables underground and the ones that put their cables above ground? Here are some reasons why this is a bad solution:

- most people will use the provider with cables above ground as he's much cheaper
- the one that puts cables under ground is much more expensive compared to other countries that have only the kind of provider putting their cable under ground
- you still have these ugly cables above ground
- and still most people will suffer power outages as they're using the cables above ground

Sometimes the free market does not lead to the best solution, especially when it comes to public infrastructure.

Re:The Internet answer

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how the electrical market works where you live. Where I live, one company ( Oncor ) owns all the lines. Regardless of who you have as your energy provider, Oncor owns the lines. If the power goes out, your energy provider doesn't come out, Oncor comes out to fix the problem.

You're delusional if you think that I can change providers and they will bury all the above ground lines on my street and on the streets that are the source of my power.

Re:The Internet answer

[Anonymous Coward]

$ man irony
Irony (from Ancient Greek (eirneía), meaning "dissimulation, feigned ignorance"[1]), in its broadest sense, is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or event characterized by an incongruity, or contrast, between what the expectations of a situation are and what is really the case, with a third element, that defines that what is really the case is ironic because of the situation that led to it.

Re:The Internet answer

[dywolf]

whooosh!
also: Poe's Law

Re:The Internet answer

[Anonymous Coward]

http://cdn.mlkshk.com/r/2KNX

Re:The Internet answer

[QuantumPion]

The reason why no one switches energy providers whom put their cables underground because if such a utility did exist, its electric prices would be much higher and almost everyone would chose the cheaper, slightly less reliable option and drive them out of business. The problem isn't capitalism. The problem is people like low prices and our current system is good enough not to warrant voluntarily paying more.

Re:The Internet answer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised nobody gave you a *whoosh*.

Re:The Internet answer

[GWBasic]

The irony is that, with solar panel and battery costs plummeting; this will be a viable option in 5-10 years.

Re:The Internet answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Whooosh! x 2

Re:The Internet answer

[Anonymous Coward]

In both cases (internet and electric grid providers) there [b]is no free market[/b], which is why they [b]both[/b] suck so bad.

Here's a fun exercise for all of you "Capitalism is Horrible" cave-trolls to help enlighten you a little. Make a list of every service or item you consume in this world that matters to you. Put them in a list. It will take a while, there's a lot of them. Rank them on a scale of 1-5 on how happy you are with how each works out for you in your life. Next, go research how heavily regulated the market for that thing is and come up with a representative number system something like "5 = total lockdown government-backed monopoly", "4 = heavily heavily regulated, no real competition in decades or more", "3 = normally regulated, occasionally new competitors appear ~once a decade with great difficulty when someone pays off the right official", "2 = mostly unregulated. rampant competition between several competing sources for this product/service", "1 = completely unregulated and basically beneath the radar of government".

I think you'll be pretty shocked at how strongly the list correlates those two number scales in the direction of "Capitalism Wins".

Re:The Internet answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear that sound? That's a MEGA-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

European power grids

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one thing that has really impressed me about the move to Germany. We used to live in Regina Canada, a town of about 200k people. A few times per year we would have a power outage for a few minutes, usually do to a storm.

We moved to Germany 4 years ago, first living in a suburb of a city of 200k, and within the year moving to a city of 1.5M; Since moving here we have not had a single power outage or brownout ... and I'm not aware of any power outages at friends places who aren't living in the large city.

I think the reason in North America is the fact that power needs to travel for such a distance before it is delivered to the customer; In Canada, our power came from the BDPS Power station, which was 200Km away via above ground lines. In Germany, our city is surrounded by large generating facilities. Within a 200Km area, there are 10s of Millions of people living (not exactly sure on this number), so power needs to travel less further, and all lines in the cities are buried underground.

Its a conspiracy by power utes

[rojash]

It is obviously a plot by power companies to keep us at their mercy. Not only do we have huge power fluctuations at the slightest breeze, I also feel they do it on purpose so we sign up for their power protection plans. Let's just wait for Google to power us up, yeah right - waiting forever for Fiber :(

Uh

[Anonymous Coward]

God

Modern Infrastructure

[gk20]

I live in a village of 700 inhabitants in the middle of nowhere in Germany and have not experienced a single power outage in 9 years. We have no overhead wires and if your are going to do any excavating you have to contact the power company to make sure you're not going to cut through an underground cable.

European power grids

[Anonymous Coward]

Saskatchewan had much of it's infrastructure installed in the 50s and 60s. Faults can occur all along the chain of delivery. It's not strictly the distance which is a problem, but the number of week points in the system.

Simple answer.

[Lumpy]

Why is the power grid so crummy?

Simple. Pure unadulterated greed. The power company does not want to spend the money making it not crappy.

Re:Simple answer.

[towermac]

Why would they? Companies exist to make profit. Their greed is the same as your greed when you cash your paycheck, or whatever it is you do for your profit. Adulterated or no.

They are doing only what they are supposed to do. And the part where they generate and sell power for a profit is wonderful. There's no real limit to the number of power generators that could compete in a 'free market'.

But that ain't the grid. How is it that the public doesn't own the grid in the same way they own the interstates? There's no freedom; there's no market; there's only the one freaking grid.

There is no way a private for profit company can be financially responsible for the grid in any satisfactory way. The problem is political, and completely our fault.

Re:Simple answer.

[Aighearach]

I guess that is why I don't have power outages, and when people in my city do, they get fixed very quickly. We have a public utility that isn't controlled by the City or other government, with a directly elected board that the community fills with engineers.

We have some of the lowest rates in the world, too.

Companies exist to make profit. Public utilities exist to bring utility service to the community, in communities willing to elect engineers anyways.

Re:Simple answer.

[towermac]

Yep. I've lived in two places like that, and both were wonderful, cheap, good service... One was city owned, the other was a rural co-op. The co-op was dirt cheap; the city was not so cheap, just reasonable, but had excellent and instant service. The mayor saw to it personally. :)

Now I have Duke; I reset my clocks one or more times a month, and it's the most expensive power I've ever had.

Re:Simple answer.

[_Sharp'r_]

When you have government price controls (see for example, your local public utility commission), the natural result is that the company they've setup as a monopoly has only an incentive to deliver the worst possible service they can get away with, spending the least possible on everything, and pocket the rest.

It works that way in every industry it's been tried, so there shouldn't be a big surprise it works that way in the local electricity market. The real question is why do we keep having our government set things like this up... oh, that's right, most people are ignorant of basic economics and public choice theory.

"if the west can be debased, it can be conquered"

[Anonymous Coward]

http://arbornet.org/~flamoot/telepathic-critterdrug.html
-LRH

Reasons for outages

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent several years working customer service for a large electric utility in the US, and spent a great deal of time dealing with outage calls. The vast majority of outages that last longer than 30 minutes are due to various issues that arise from lines being above ground. This is not necessarily the utility companies fault, as they always preferred to build underground, and would do it for free for new installations in most cases. But in existing areas where it was already built up with overhead lines years ago, it would be a massive and expensive project to go through and redo everything, unless there was some major reconstruction going on. And in rural areas, where homes or businesses are relatively far apart, running underground may just not be feasible.

Now when the lines are above ground, just about anything can cause outages. A common issue was squirrels or other small creatures getting into the transformer or something on the poles. Another issue can be vehicles hitting poles, which is something I saw quite often. Hell, one time there was a train derailment that took out some major transmission lines. Trees are probably the single most common cause of outages though. And it simply defies all my understanding as to why these idiots put trees at the end of their yard near the power lines. And then when we want to go through and trim the trees in order to maintain the stability of the grid, these jackasses get all pissed off about it. Of course, when ice or a major storm comes through and the limbs come down onto the lines, those same jackasses are the first to call in and cuss me out because their power went out.

Help quitting the editor

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=biota+podcast+%22eric+burton%22
http://arbornet.org/~flamoot/telepathic-critterdrug.html

.
.
*
!q

One of the reasons for underground cabling in Germ

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that Germany and other countries in Europe mostly have underground cabling for electricity is that everything got nicely flattened during WW2. Kinda made it easy to deploy once the rebuilding activities started.

VAT fixes everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical tax on sales is 25% in EU countries (15 to 27 percent depending on). Even non-EU countries have socialistic-high rates. Compare with 4 to 8 percent US. Fuel tax is extremely low in US. Obscenely low. Feature film tickets are obscenely high for sticky seats and floors, no wonder netflix rules.

Elec. rates are typically $0.10/kwH. Lower some places, higher others, but a dime a 1000 watt-hours is typical. This is not subsidized. This is the price. It's cheap.

Gasoline is nearing $2.5 a gallon. Oddly, diesel is almost always more expensive.

EU-i-fy this and there would be riots in Ferguson ... more riots in Ferguson. Better a bridge fail than pay even 10 cents more for a gallon of petrol.

Speaking of fuel, Europa is Putin's lapdog. They will never upset the bear in the east lest they freeze next winter, and grind to a halt soon after.

Meanwhile, the US is get gas and oil out of land long thought useless. More gas and oil than Saudi Arabia and little Kuwait (you are welcome) and the rest combined.

Cars are looking too-asian if you ask me. American cars. I saw a VW that looked like it was going backwards when it was going forward. A very, very strange sense of humor those Germans have. Ha-ha Lammert.

The French. Don't get me started with the French. Besides, my dog farted and I have to get out of here.

Re:VAT fixes everything

[towermac]

You win the internet today.

Lack of Investment

[Anonymous Coward]

Above ground hydro lines can work very well and have in our area for as long as I can recall up to perhaps 10 years ago. We almost never had a power failure, but did have an occasional brownout for seconds. We didn't have any weather related power concerns. Now when the weather is bad I worry that the power stays on. It's reported as 'power failure due to weather'.
I think it's to do with investment issues primarily. Power line wires are bare, so can be easily shorted. If you drive around the area it isn't hard to find trees growing up between the wires in spots. If it there is rain and wind together, that seems to be the recipe for lines shorting out. My neighbour tells me he's seen sparks. They have self resetting breakers, so they mostly come on again in seconds. Not always. This year there were many contractors cleaning up and doing tree trimming after the bad ice storm we had last year. So I'm hopeful that things have improved.

Power

[Anonymous Coward]

It really comes down to investment by the power company.

If they invest to keep power lines clear of trees and other hazards, power can be very reliable. I live in the Northeast US, with above-ground lines, and have never had an outage. And we can have some pretty major storms in the winter.

In contrast, I lived in another community for about 15 years, in another state, and power would go out frequently - perhaps on the order of magnitude of once every two months.

Given the differences in state regulations and their enforcement, some power companies work harder to bring quality to avoid fines, while others know that they can skip out on maintenance and save money.

Because All your money are belong to us: ARMY.

[Anonymous Coward]

Army and military-industrial cliche. That's why you have slowest yet most expensive internet access, that's why your bridges are literally collapsing, that's why your electrical grid resembles those of India, Thailand, Cambodia...

Its Urban Trees

[brunes69]

The more urban trees you have around the more problems you will see with the grid. Trees are the source of all kinds of grid problems

- When the weather causes damage to power lines, it is rarely direct damage but indirect damage caused by a nearby tree. Wind can blow branches into lines and transformers, shorting them out. And ice and snow can build up on tree branches causing them to bend into lines or snap.

- Trees attract squirrels and birds, who like to play around and nest in transformers and on poles and short them out. I have a squirrel related power outage at least once a year.

Ironically, at least in the north-east, the nicer the area you live in the more likely it is to have lots of urban trees. It's the price you pay. The only better system would be to bury all the lines but the cost for that is immense.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[Aighearach]

We have trees lining every street in the city, even in commercial and industrial zones. It is only a problem if your utility is lazy. Our temperate climate is squirrel heaven, and they're not even a real problem for transformers. Your utility company might be ignoring maintenance and blaming squirrels, and you might have fallen for it. We have almost 100% overhead lines, too. Squirrels use them as roads. No problem.

My advice to communities... have a public utility that isn't controlled by the city or other general-purpose politicians, and elect engineers to the board. It works really well.

That is why in the Pacific Northwest where trees grow faster than any other part of the US, and cities are full of trees, there is reliable power almost everywhere.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[brunes69]

I have seen the dead squirrels. They nest inside the transformers themselves. Outside some totally new design for how these are constructed I find it hard to blame the utility.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[sunking2]

This is 100% true and is the reason the Halloween storm a few years ago was so devastating. The 35 years of growth since I was a kid is the reason we seem to have so many new outages compared to growing up. During the housing buildup of the post war the trees were leveled to make way for streets and new neighborhoods. Now they've grown back and have been left unchecked for the most part. Many towns have taken it as a wake up call and are still having full time crews cutting back the trees.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[angel'o'sphere]

If there is dead squirrel in a transformator, it certainly died not on shortening some power ...
Must be very difficult anyhow to make transformators sqirrel proof.
Who showed them how to get inside? What tools do they use?
Or are they simply smarter than the european ones?

Re:Its Urban Trees

[FrnkMit]

Weather is also a factor. Our power has gone out sporadically (usually preceded by the loud pop of something getting fried), and it usually comes back within an hour or two of my calling. Except during the Great Dallas Ice Storm which happens *every year* and which *nobody* seems to plan for. The last two years the power has been out for days, which is especially fun with an elderly invalid. The fact that the city/county response to ice is to toss some sand and ice on it, compounded with Dallasites inability to drive even during good weather, prolongs response times even further. But I still blame Oncor.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[DerekLyons]

My advice to communities... have a public utility that isn't controlled by the city or other general-purpose politicians, and elect engineers to the board. It works really well.

That is why in the Pacific Northwest where trees grow faster than any other part of the US, and cities are full of trees, there is reliable power almost everywhere.

Except for when snow causes a tree to sag on the lines. Or a windstorm causes a tree to fall on the lines. Or very heavy rain causes a tree to sag onto the lines.

All things, right here in the Pacific Northwest, that have caused power outages at my house. And my utility is a public traded company, which covers the entire Puget Sound Basin. You may have a perfect idyllic power utility and reliable power that never has problems with trees - but you aren't the whole of the Pacific Northwest.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[Anonymous Coward]

If a squirrel can get in, it was just built badly. That should never be possible.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[PPH]

All things, right here in the Pacific Northwest, that have caused power outages at my house. And my utility is a public traded company,

Really? Which company would that be? The only "investor-owned" electric utility in this region that I'm familiar with failed miserably in the stock market and was taken private years ago to keep them limping along. They are no longer capable of running their own maintenance crews (its all contracted out) due to worker safety issues, or do their own engineering.

To their credit, the contractors have done a pretty good job of catching up with the maintenance that the utility shirked for years. As a result, outages have become less frequent. But that raises the question of where all the maintenance money (charged to rate payers) went when the utility was running the show themselves.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, at least in the north-east, the nicer the area you live in the more likely it is to have lots of urban trees. It's the price you pay. The only better system would be to bury all the lines but the cost for that is immense.

1. A little forethought and the trenches and conduits needed for power and telecommunication lines could be buried when roads are built. Kind of like what they do for water and sewer service

2. When I saw "urban trees" I assumed you were being funny and you were referring to telephone poles. If you had, you'd have had a better argument

3. TCO...it's better to bury the lines over time to save recurring costs so no, it's not immensely expensive if things are done in a proactive and reasonable manner

Re:Its Urban Trees

[DerekLyons]

All things, right here in the Pacific Northwest, that have caused power outages at my house. And my utility is a public traded company

Really? Which company would that be? The only "investor-owned" electric utility in this region that I'm familiar with failed miserably in the stock market and was taken private years ago to keep them limping along.

My mistake, but that's irrelevant - because they still aren't the public utility you cited.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[Aighearach]

You're the exception that proves it. Most of the region has great uptime, and also lots of trees, urban and rural both. When there are outages from snow or ice, they get fixed very rapidly. There are agencies that track the response times, they are frequently published. It isn't just my one utility, it is dozens of public utilities in the region that are all awesome. Even the rural ones without a single real city manage to maintain good uptime.

Heavy rain doesn't impact the lines at all. If your lines are affected by rain, wow, your commercial utility is pillaging you hard. Wind and ice are the only reasons power should ever go out in this region. Things like "heavy rain" and "squirrels" are excuses only commercial utilities try. They don't have transparency, nobody can FOIA their service logs, so I guess some of their customers will believe them...

Re:Its Urban Trees

[Aighearach]

There is literally no opening for a squirrel to get inside. It would need to be able to use hand tools, and it would need to be at least 3' tall just to get leverage on the wrench.

I'm not from a rich State, but I doubt a transformer with the sort of openings that would let a squirrel in would be approved by the State PUC.

Even something much smaller like a European Starling can't get inside a transformer to nest.

And there is no technological reason for a transformer to have such openings. If you know how they work it is absurd to have that as a problem. Metal cooling fins don't need to pass air at all, much less have giant squirrel holes. If you do a google image search on pole-mount transformers you'll see what I mean; vertical fins that are bolted or riveted into place with no air passage between inside and outside the case.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[DerekLyons]

You're the exception that proves it. Most of the region has great uptime, and also lots of trees, urban and rural both.

You're assuming something I didn't say - because I said nothing about uptime at all. (And for good reason, it's irrelevant to the your nonsensical claim that there is no impact from trees, and because it's not an issue... I've only lost power in the heaviest of storms.) The rest of the message is just more of the same - claiming I'm being "pillaged" not based on facts but on assumptions you've pulled out of thin air
 

Heavy rain doesn't impact the lines at all.

Except for when it does of course. If you lived in this area, you'd know it's very hilly and pieces of it do slide and trees do fall over when the ground gets saturated (in many places the topsoil is fairly thin with hardpan relatively close to the surface). Wherever you are isn't the whole of the Northwest, stop assuming that what hold true there holds true here.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[sconeu]

I have squirrel related cable outages. Apparently the little buggers love to gnaw at the insulation, and TWC refuses to put mesh jacketed cable up.

Maybe it's time to switch, now that I have to get converters for my kids old analog TVs.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[Aighearach]

Very few trees fall over from heavy rain. The vast majority of the treefall is wind and ice. That is just something obvious if you've been involved in the industry, or even read the numbers of customers affected by outages. It is just not the normal end that a tree has, and so it doesn't happen to a lot of customers. It shouldn't be more than one street for a couple blocks, and their power will be restored within a couple hours. And there are so few of those happening, that the response time will stay low.

Whereas wind and ice will cause more widespread outages that will strain response time, and that represents the vast majority of total downtime anywhere in the NW.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[DerekLyons]

Very few trees fall over from heavy rain.

But it _does_ happen.
 

It is just not the normal end that a tree has

No shit Sherlock. And nobody claimed it was.
 

Whereas wind and ice will cause more widespread outages that will strain response time, and that represents the vast majority of total downtime anywhere in the NW.

I never claimed otherwise.

Your claim that trees do not represent a problem is bullshit.

And given your constantly shifting story and constantly pulling irrelevant assumptions out of your ass - I'm done here.

Re:Its Urban Trees

[MooseMiester]

You are 100% correct. A large racoon with wet feet can short out a transformer under very rare conditions, but all that happens is the fusible link blows....

the poles

[svalery]

the power in my area is reasonably reliable. and yes i am on the same sub station as a hospital. but the times the power has gone out. is mainly to 2 events. 1: drunk drivers for some reason are attracted to telephone/ power poles and of course other things that should not be hit with a car... 2: animals... a squirrel or raccoon get into the electrical equipment and tries to have a lunch. i remember seeing one lighting up the sky for miles as 100,000 volts went through him.

Redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of years ago a showboat Apache pilot crashed into a high voltage power line here in the Netherlands. This was news worthy not because of fringed hair, nor for the Mc Guyvered attempt at creating the first E-Apache. No it was news because it caused a power outage. See I'm in my forties and I cannot remember ever having experienced a power outage that lasted more than minutes or at a frequency that exceeded that of once every 10 years.

The main electrical grid in the Netherlands is setup in interlocking rings. The idea is that any point gets power from two sides of the same ring. If an Apache happens to sever one link there is still the 'other side of the ring'. Unfortunately the other side was down for maintenance at the time, so hence the newsworthiness. Locally everything is buried. The biggest danger there is created by showboat digger operators.

tl;dr; Rings, rings everywhere. Beware of showboats.

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.epb.net

Smart investments by your local utility can result in highly reliable power, increased profits (TV, phone, and internet sales), and the fastest internet in the U.S. right to your home.

not to defend the utilities, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in New England where a couple of years ago the "October Snowstorm" left my town without power for 10 days. Power was briefly restored to go out again immediately with a loud bang in the distance. A utility worker from out of state said the grid was a mess here and he was surprised our town ever had power. As sections were restored you could see a bizarre patchwork pattern to the different segments. Is this due to the way circuits are added as new areas are developed? Developments are added with no master plan and the utilities have to supply power from somewhere. Think scope creep and changing requirements.

Re:not to defend the utilities, but...

[Lawrence_Bird]

Well I think the AC has hit on at least part of the problem with above ground wiring. These electric networks are very old. Many were probably put up with no idea about using a topology that would be more fault tolerant. And then came explosive growth in suburbia forcing add ons to an already suspect network. A few failures in the grid can really cause chaos.

However, even taking your 10 day outage and doubling it, over 10 years that is still 99.45% uptime per year on average.

Re:Does your state have a Public Service Commissio

[Anonymous Coward]

If OP is anything like where I live (in a suburban, house development area, two storm seasons a year, fall and spring, located in tornado alley) talking to them may not do anything. My side of the street uses above ground power lines(i.e. power poles), across the street(which is about the distance of 3 car lanes) is underground power lines. If a storm comes through and our power goes out, you can look out the window and see across the street still has power most of the time. Above ground lines are more exposed so there is a higher chance of something happening to them, such as lightning strikes. The power company won't put the lines underground because of the cost, sometimes you just have to deal with the hand you're dealt. Sometimes shit happens that we have no control over and people need to learn to deal with it and not freak out like it is the end of the world. If OP doesn't own the property then they always have the option to move.

OP sounds like they just want to complain, I've lived in the exact conditions OP is describing for 20+ years (to date) and the situation is manageable, nothing to get your panties in a bunch about. If OP completely freaks out each time they are unplugged then it seems like they should get out in the wilderness more often so they can realize it isn't the end of the world.

WW2

[gatkinso]

American infrastructure was untouched during WW2, hence we still have draped lines on sticks in many places. Cutting edge tech... from the 1880's.

Re:WW2

[dave420]

So America still uses the same cables and poles? Your argument doesn't hold water. Not all German cities were bombed into oblivion, and those have underground cabling...

Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: Greed. This is why it works in "socialist" countries like Finland, Sweden and Germany whereas in the UK houses tend to fall apart and there are those power outages in the US.

If you can afford it, get a whole house generator

[The Real Dr John]

We lose power all the time, sometimes for days. We put in a whole house generator and transfer switch, and hooked them to a sizable underground LPG tank. It was an investment, but it was worth it. The setup has saved our butts many times, including the dead of winter. Our power never goes out for more than a minute now, as we wait for the transfer switch to change us over to generator power. At 20KW, it powers everything as long as we don't go crazy turning everything on.

Case In Point: Maui Electric

[cmholm]

A few years back, Maui Electric upgraded their power distribution system by replacing wooden poles with steel towers. The claim was that the towers are much more typhoon-resistant, and I'm sure they are. However, given the aerodynamics of round cable, it's a given that the lines will still part in a gale. Why not bury the line? Because for most parts of the island, you hit blue rock (solid lava) within a few feet, and it's expensive to trench through. On the flip side, you only need to trench once, but Maui Electric decided to play the odds and go cheap.

Re:Case In Point: Maui Electric

[Anonymous Coward]

On Kauai when they would fire up the TPS-X radar (now known as FBX-T) out at PMRF half the island would brown out. Hawaiian infrastructure, FTW!

Re:Case In Point: Maui Electric

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years back, Maui Electric upgraded their power distribution system by replacing wooden poles with steel towers. The claim was that the towers are much more typhoon-resistant, and I'm sure they are. However, given the aerodynamics of round cable, it's a given that the lines will still part in a gale. Why not bury the line? Because for most parts of the island, you hit blue rock (solid lava) within a few feet, and it's expensive to trench through. On the flip side, you only need to trench once, but Maui Electric decided to play the odds and go cheap.

The ironic part is, over time, they didn't play the odds and go cheap. They went with something that would continuously be damaged and cost the consumer more, thereby insuring repair crew jobs and creating more revenue opportunities as they jack up rates to "cover repair costs". You've been duped.

Re:Case In Point: Maui Electric

[angel'o'sphere]

Cankes don't rip because of wind ... even the strongest storms are to weak for that. Before the cable rips the wind will blow away the tower.

8X cost increase up front

[sjbe]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.

In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

That isn't so clear in a lot of places. Repairs on above ground wires are more common but cheaper when they occur. Roll a truck, look up and get busy. Repairs on buried cable is just the opposite. Even finding the problem is harder and many repairs involve a lot of digging. There are places near where I live (semi-rural 20 miles from a major metro area) where it might make economic sense to bury the cable but also quite a few where it most likely doesn't. You can do a LOT of repairs before you even break even on the buried cable despite its general higher reliability. Plus you are replacing infrastructure that already exists and lots of it so any sort of economically rational replacement program would take decades. Every place that truly needs reliable power has a backup generator anyway so it's not like you are gaining much in practical terms by burying the cables for quite a few customers.

Don't get me wrong, I think a lot more cables should be buried than currently are but it's not as simple an equation as buried = more reliable = cheaper.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[Mr D from 63]

That pretty much sums it up. Its a wrap.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[quetwo]

Just to dive into this a bit more. I just got quotes to connect three of the farms on our campus.

  $3.50/ft over the distance of about 15 miles for ariel. That includes sinking new poles, putting up the wire, purchasing right-of-way, etc.

> $900/ft over the distance of about 15 miles for buried. That includes concrete encasement, conduit, purchasing right-of-way, road construction and the engineering. We would also need power vaults every few miles for transformers and equipment to load the line properly.

So, in places where space is a premium and it's nearly impossible to have ariel (think of a downtown area like Chicago, NYC or LA), it makes perfect sense to bury. For other times the cost really is prohibitive. In a small downtown area with a very dense area there is justification to do it. You do gain some reliability, particularly from wind/snow/ice/car/hunter damage, but you lose some reliability if your undergrounds flood/overheat/catch fire. The chances of the undergrounds misbehaving are a lot less, but they still exist.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[Anonymous Coward]

In some places, it is not easy.
Using a ditch witch to trench and bury is not hard. Drilling charge holes and blasting granite, basalt, or other not so shovel ready areas is expensive. Added to the expense is fill material that is not boulders of hard rock which will damage the cable. The Mississippi valley and farmland is relatively easy digging. The continental divide, not so much.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[gclef]

I've often wondered about the possibility of not re-burying the trench: make the trench shallower, cover it with a walkable grate, and just leave it that way. Sure, the grate will get covered by leaves, and the trench will fill with water (have to have a way to drain that), but those seem like minor problems. The cable would be shielded from the vast majority of problems (falling branches, cars hitting poles, squirrels). And since it's just a grate covering, it's just as easy to find problems & service as if they were on a pole. I'm sure I'm missing some reason why this isn't feasible, though...

Re:8X cost increase up front

[sjbe]

So, in places where space is a premium and it's nearly impossible to have ariel (think of a downtown area like Chicago, NYC or LA), it makes perfect sense to bury.

Absolutely. Otherwise you get what what the guys at the phone company term a "manhole in the sky". (Put down the dirty joke and step away. Just step away.) When I visited Shanghai you'll see a rats nest of wires almost everywhere because wires that should be in the ground aren't. It's a huge mess. Most people have no idea just how much buried cable they have around them in a big city.

It also makes sense for areas where there are existing easements, or private property. I have a buried wire from the drop near my house to my home and the cost wasn't outrageous. A little trenching and some conduit and we were good to go. It's a pretty short run though and there are no special property issues to deal with or engineering or roads involved. Of course that still didn't prevent our power from going out when a squirrel fried itself and tripped the fuse on our transformer. It's when you have to get into engineering and easements and the like that the cost skyrockets. The actual physical work is normally nothing too outrageous but it's the legal issues that take time and cost cubic dollars.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you sound like you might know...
When they bury cables, do they at least have the good sense to be surrounding these cables in pipes?
I imagine so, so that the cables aren't touching rock/nature.

I just imagine that if people dig trenches to lay cables, it would make sense to have them lay a pipe. Then have the pipe be broken up into segments; especially segment off electrical power because it will be higher voltage. Then when the phone company wants to lay down some wires, they don't need to do any digging. They just push wire through one end of the existing pipe, and out it comes the other end.

If the wire wants to curl up, so it doesn't want to go straight through the pipe, then fine: just attach the wire to a battery-powered toy car, and drive it through the pipe.

I know this must sound comical because it has the complexity of what a 5 year old would imagine; in practice there would be much more technologically sophisticated solutions. The pipes wouldn't actually be big enough to drive a toy car through, but making them big enough to allow room for thicker wires (for future technologies) and to send an industrial specialized crawler (which might be able to pull, push, see, and measure to determine if the wire works at a certain point). The main idea here is: dig once, share costs between multiple companies, and then don't re-dig.

You said,

Repairs on buried cable is just the opposite. Even finding the problem is harder and many repairs involve a lot of digging.

Why not just stand at one end of a pipe, pull out the old cable, and replace it with a good cable? Then bring the cable to a building where you can comfortably inspect it, indoors, to see if any of it is salvageable.

I can't believe I'm the first person to think of this, and it would be a lot cheaper maintenance (and any upgrades needed) than what you're describing.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[xaxa]

Something like a railway cable trough, typically concrete, is common in Britain at the side of most railway track.

But it's a criminal offence to trespass on the railway.

Better example: buried cables along canals in London. Only pedestrians and cyclists (and horses) can use that path, could it stand up to cars and lorries?

(I'm pretty sure the electricity company will use boats and barges to maintain the cables, which is probably a lot easier than having to divert road traffic etc, and earns them eco-points.)

Re:8X cost increase up front

[jbengt]

If you're using a ditch witch (like they did to bury the line from my house to my garage) you are not burying the power company's grid, you a burying a low-voltage line to the end-user.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[tlambert]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.

In the U.S. Virgin Islands, every hurricane season, the U.S. federal government provides funds to bury the power lines that were knocked down, so it doesn't happen again. And every year, the local government official put 7/8 of the $ in their pockets, and balance the wires back up on the poles again in preparation for the same payday the next year. Locally it's a really well known scam.

Practically speaking, we should have utility tunnels under the roadways, to solve the problem, once and for all. The major cost in burying is digging and repair, which you can deal with exactly once, and not have to dig ever again, if you have room in the tunnels for the next water main, gas main, or sewer line you want to run, and an access in the tunnel side through a shunt to get longer replacement/new pipes down there. That's just a big hole adjacent to a small section of the tunnel, with access doors up top. The costs for burying then drastically drop.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[dj245]

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.

In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.

That isn't so clear in a lot of places. Repairs on above ground wires are more common but cheaper when they occur. Roll a truck, look up and get busy. Repairs on buried cable is just the opposite. Even finding the problem is harder and many repairs involve a lot of digging. There are places near where I live (semi-rural 20 miles from a major metro area) where it might make economic sense to bury the cable but also quite a few where it most likely doesn't. You can do a LOT of repairs before you even break even on the buried cable despite its general higher reliability. Plus you are replacing infrastructure that already exists and lots of it so any sort of economically rational replacement program would take decades. Every place that truly needs reliable power has a backup generator anyway so it's not like you are gaining much in practical terms by burying the cables for quite a few customers.

Don't get me wrong, I think a lot more cables should be buried than currently are but it's not as simple an equation as buried = more reliable = cheaper.

All good points, and here is another small one-
The line carrying capacity of a cable on a pole is higher than the capacity of a cable in the ground (according to the codes). So if you decide to bury a power cable, often a larger cable is needed for the same capacity.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[mjpaci]

It's worse now that the other USVI Golden Goose (HOVENSA) has shut down. I've seen up-close-and-personal the graft that exists on St Croix...

Re:8X cost increase up front

[AK Marc]

Repairs on buried cable is just the opposite. Even finding the problem is harder and many repairs involve a lot of digging.

Conveniently, most of the time there's an underground power cable fault, someone has already done the digging for you. Often with some guys in orange vests updating their CVs pointing at the exact location of the fault in the ground and blaming the other guys, who just left.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[tlambert]

It's worse now that the other USVI Golden Goose (HOVENSA) has shut down. I've seen up-close-and-personal the graft that exists on St Croix...

Yes, that was a big factor; 90% of the USVI fuel came out of HOVENSA, which was the 10th largest crude oil refinery in the world, and most of the energy production is still diesel. So is most of the desalination infrastructure, from which the USVI derives most of its potable and non-potable fresh water (the rest is from rain from the cisterns, which occasionally have to be refilled).

Not to mention they lost most of their higher paying jobs, and $100M in tax revenue in the closure.

Part of the problem is the sunsetting on the Federal Economic Development District status, making it much harder to get an EDC registration, which bumped the tax rate in the area considerably. This mostly has to do with the necessity of working in the context of the university in order to obtain status these days, since the federal government is really wanting to get their hands on Ocwen (William C. Erby's company) and other companies monies, despite previous federal approval.

Practically speaking, I don't know how to reasonably deal with the corruption there (or , any more than I do with the corruption present in Mexico), short of them electing statehood. I think that would only help some, look at the education system in California, and the parks department hiding money trying to pretend it needed more or would shut down the parks, etc., for examples where states have similar problems, despite being under the statehood umbrella.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[hackertourist]

but you lose some reliability if your undergrounds flood/overheat/catch fire.

That's why over here usually, only the cables are underground. Equipment ends up in an above-ground cabinet. Power cables usually aren't in conduits so they're cooled by the surrounding soil and not prone to overheating.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[Anonymous Coward]

I've often wondered about the possibility of not re-burying the trench: make the trench shallower, cover it with a walkable grate, and just leave it that way. Sure, the grate will get covered by leaves, and the trench will fill with water (have to have a way to drain that), but those seem like minor problems. The cable would be shielded from the vast majority of problems (falling branches, cars hitting poles, squirrels). And since it's just a grate covering, it's just as easy to find problems & service as if they were on a pole. I'm sure I'm missing some reason why this isn't feasible, though...

2kv is the lowest distribution and they usually go in steps 10x after that. The liability for high potentials in close proximity prevents this. buried lines are buried against vandalism as well. Imagine a backhoe penetrating a line, on poles you can see the wires.

Re:8X cost increase up front

[Anonymous Coward]

What is omitted in this thread is the point of Total Life Cycle Cost .
Burying cables might be expensive (e.g. capital investment) but considering a life cycle of say 30 -40 years for underground power cabling with very little maintenance during that period , the overall cost (including maintenance) will highly likely be less ...........and with satisfied customers.

In the USA most if not all new housing developments( I have seen) have buried power supply cabling .

Here in Scotland s rural areas ,overhead power lines at the 11kV level are not inspected regularly ,so attention is only paid when there is a interruption due to wind, ice/snow and birds hitting the lines during the migration seasons . Although in some areas the latter cause has decreased since some overhead lines have been insulated with the result that short term interruptions also known as brown-outs have decreased.
Without insulated wires birds hitting these get fried causing a brief short whereafter (with the lines cleared) an automatic system enables power resumption after 8 seconds.
Thats why I still use a battery backed UPS for my PCs.

Frank in northern Scotland

US-infrastructure is p1ss-p00r

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the reason, in one 4chan sentence.

Serioulsy, power outage is rare in Europe and Japan, but because of some crazy disfunctional "freedom" doctrine, the
US must OCD-style neglect its infrastructure.

Hence.

Public safety and hospitals immune to outages

[Anonymous Coward]

Critical infrastructure facilities such as hospitals, police stations, etc are connected to multiple power substations just as data centers are. This is a huge cost for installation of infrastructure to private enterprises such as data centers, but public safety locations get it free.

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[AmiMoJo]

You could compete with the power company yourself. Install solar or maybe a wind turbine if there is room, large battery pack for backup. Will pay for itself in 10 years anyway and no more outages.

Maximizing profit

[Theovon]

Although they are regulated to death, power companies want to maximize profit, and there are no rules that say they have to invest in improving infrastructure "as long as everything is working fine." They have no motivation at all to seek out aging sections of their power grid and replace them during normal operation. Rather, they are entirely reactive. When power goes out, they fix it on demand. Nothing more. Moreover, whenever there are major storms that take out massive swaths of their network, they cry for help from the government to pay for the repairs becuase they "can't afford it." The only reason they do anything at all when power does go out is because they'd be slapped by regulators if they didn't. Otherwise they'd be perfectly happy to leave paying customers without power the way Comcast leaves paying customers without internet service.

Just imagine if power delivery were government-run. It would be even worse, because there would be no profit incentive.

Re:Maximizing profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine if power delivery were government-run. It would be even worse, because there would be no profit incentive.

I'm sure they'd install massive resistor banks all around the system to make power less incentivized to move to your house.

Re:Maximizing profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise they'd be perfectly happy to leave paying customers without power the way Comcast leaves paying customers without internet service.

Your analogy is incorrect. Other than a small monthly service charge, a customer only pays for the energy they use. If the power is out, the customer isn't paying anything. Thus, the utility has a great incentive to keep the power on, otherwise they get no revenue.

No easy fix?

[Richard Kirk]

I live in a large village or small town. I get a lot of power outages. Some of these last for hours. Most of the rest of the village does not get these - just a small clump of houses around the church. Our cable comes underground from Hemel Hempstead. The rest of the village gets power from the pylons that run alongside the M1. We can claim back money for the power outages.

I would imagine our group of houses has problems because (a) we are at the end of a spur (b) we got electricity before anyone else, and before the M1 was built, so our lines are particularly old, and (c) the power distribution network has probably shifted, and our little bit has not been altered to reflect the changes. If you live out in the sticks, you become more vulnerable: I remember a house where the power used to trip out when the transport cafe about a mile away turned off their grills last thing at night. One of the downsides of generating your own power may be that the network only has to fill in when we have a number of dull, still days. The US equivalent is probably hot days where everyone turns up the airconditioning.

It is not because (a) our lines are overhead, or (b) our corner of the village is particularly greedy, or (c) that the power company does not have to pay when services are disconnected. Beware of people suggesting 'obvious solutions' without evidence.

.

Re:The Internet answer -- Raid 4 power

[bitflusher]

The internet answer is to always have redundancy. have one shitty solution (like hard drives that fail often) then N+1 this solution. So implement RAID 4 Power, deploy shitty aboveground power cables, just do many of them!

It's a political issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Your local distribution grid (which gets the power from the substation to your house), is most likely owned by a regulated investor owned utility. Every dime they spend on reliability has to be authorized and scrutinized by your state public utility commission. They almost certainly have targets for customer average interruption duration index (how long the power is out on an average customer basis when it goes out), and customer average interruption frequency index (how often customers experience an outage). As you said you are near to several metropolitan centers, it's likely that on an average basis, the utilties customers in the metro areas outweigh those in the college town, and so their average metrics may be fine even if your town experiences frequent outages. It's not popular for politically-based appointees serving on the public utility commission to be in favor of increased electric rates that would come from the additional investments required.

Storm-related outages typically tend to occur in areas and neighborhoods with overhead distribution lines, especially where there is overhead service to the home. Burying these wires is fairly expensive (10x installation cost relative to overhead wires), and there is little to no appetite politically to spend the capital up front and in increased electric rates in order to achieve better reliability metrics. Some areas are seeing increases in reliability due to increased pro-active tree trimming efforts, but that varies widely from location to location.

Technologically, these are solved problems (cut trees from rights-of-way, bury cables in high-failure areas), but that does not mean the investments are going to happen.

Nikola Tesla probably did the wiring

[Anonymous Coward]

It's that old.
Public Service Commissions are in the Utility Company's pocket, nothing gets enforced.
If it starts to rain or snow in Michigan, it means time to do the dishes, NOW.
Otherwise no power for 3 days till the non-union crews from Alabama get up here.

New Initiatives or Preventive Maintenance does not exist.
DTE will just go crying to the PSC for more money for new
infastructure, service initiatives have been gutted.

They spend that money threatening us with consumption graphs rather
than projecting and investing in future requirements.

Their plans are to leave us shivering in the dark before spending a (copper) penny.

It only took 20 years of bitching to get my 'stub' connected to the 'grid'.

Reddy Kilowatt is a cartoon now.

jr

Re:Nikola Tesla probably did the wiring

[Anonymous Coward]

the next plan is to suck up all the new Natural Gas for generation
rather than build new reactors that they know we need.
That will leave us Natural Gas customers shivering in the dark again
and force gas prices to be unreasonable.

It's OUR gas and we should force it to be used HERE, not the
export plans (and plants) they are putting in place for that.

Not that I'm really looking forward to DTE getting Fermi III.

At least that flag waver Cisler is out of the picture now and
the next one might not blow up so easily.

(especially If they put an employee day care center in the containment building)

jr

Cost. Pure and simple

[thegarbz]

The USA is in many ways like Australia was with electricity. Installation was done as cheap as possible. Maintenance was done as little as possible. Capacity is setup as close to the limits as possible.

A lot of people here are talking about overhead vs underground cables, this is really the very tip of the big mess of transmission. A lightning strike should at most cause a powerdip or a very small localised outage. Falling trees should not be able to hit powerlines according to the regulated maintenance requirements.

The reality is the USA now is running like Australia used to, everything is at the limits. We changed. We have seen massive infrastructure upgrades throughout all states in interstate transmission. We've setup many more transmission networks. Our localised providers have been mandated to install N+1 capacity on transformers so they can withstand an outage without losing power. The 110kV network has more redundancy still. Poles were replaced. Transformers were upgraded. Ring-main-units were improved and setup in actual rings to provide more network redundancy.

And...

Our electricity price has gone up by 200-350% depending which state you're in.

While you are complaining about power outages, we're complaining about the cost of those damn companies which "gold plated" our electricity network.

Re:Cost. Pure and simple

[towermac]

Heh. So no easy answers. I advocate a middle ground...

Re:Cost. Pure and simple

[dbIII]

Our electricity price has gone up by 200-350% depending which state you're in.

I suggest you also look up how much the dividend payout to the owners (almost all State Governments that get to write their own rules) has gone up by. The dividend to the Queensland Government for instance is enormous and all the pockets of electricity consumers. You may hear more about that with elections coming up, however the previous Government did something similar but with a lesser amount.
Cost increases are not a great deal more than profit increases, and with decreasing demand in some areas some of the infrastructure the actually is driving a slight rise is very hard to justify.
I used to work for QEC before the artificial market with only one real supplier started. We seemed to be expanding the network more then for less money and certainly had a lot more staff doing it. What you see now is a lot more padding for profitability.

Re:Cost. Pure and simple

[thegarbz]

There was a very good report by EY commissioned last year looking into the prices. You're right there is padding going on but it only accounts for about 1/5th of the increase, about 3/5th of it was network transmission upgrades and infrastructure costs, and the last 1/5th was loss of efficiency (company efficiency, reads middle managers adding sweet f-a value to the process).

Interestingly after spending the past 5-10 years hugely inflating staff, suddenly both Powerlink and Energex are a major liability and will be "leased" to private investors. I'm putting my bets on Jemena buying Powerlink and suddenly making a stupid amount of money from this "liability" and that governments ... as always are lying about the state of affairs so they can line the pockets of friends.

A lot of different things.

[toonces33]

Yes, underground lines are less likely to be knocked out, but going underground is quite expensive, and someone has to pay for it. And the cost to the end user for things like spoiled food and so forth aren't borne by the power companies - their only cost is the cost of the electricity that they don't sell and the cost of the repairs. That being said, in our area, they are in the process of burying a subset of the lines that are considered to be the most problematic (the ones that are knocked out most frequently and affect a lot of customers).

That being said, for overhead wires you *must* keep the tree branches away from the wires, and the way to do this is with tree trimming. It used to be that power companies had an annual budget for tree trimming to minimize problems, but my understanding is that to maximize profits they have cut way back on this and just deal with the outages as they occur.

Network structure might also play a role

[m.shenhav]

While certain it is likely that - as other commenters note - above ground lines are more prone to failure, I would like to point out another possible factor: the structure of the network itself. Certain network structures which have more redundency in links between nodes are more robust, so that a failure of one line would result in less damage. Conversely, certain places might be located in particularly vulnurable sections of the network (for example, areas serviced by a single line as opposed to several).

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[QuantumPion]

On the contrary, market forces work fine. The problem is simply a case of the leaky roof problem. You can't fix the roof it when it's raining, and when it's not raining there is no need to fix it because it isn't raining. When people's lights are on and working it's hard to convince them to voluntarily pay more to upgrade transmission systems.

Simple

[willy everlearn]

No one wants to pay for it.

Georgia Tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you live near Georgia Tech. The power is constantly going out there and I don't know why either. Crummy company with poor maintenance or lack of multiple/redundant feed lines? I haven't been to any other Metro areas in the states where power outages seemed to be the norm like that. We get quite a few short outages by my home, but I live in the country with a single electrical path, so a down tree causes an outage, but they use automated reporting from the substations and meters and usually have it fixed within a few minutes or at worst a couple hours.

Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Netherlands we put the power lines under ground only inside cities and towns. Most of the cabling between cities are high tension above ground cables, but this network is highly redundant, so it is rare that a city won't get power. It is actually a major news story if a small town somewhere in the Netherlands didn't have power for a few hours. This only happens once every 5 years, maybe even less.

Line losses

[Anonymous Coward]

The line losses are too high to bury the lines. Air is a really good insulator and damp earth is a really poor one, so the energy lost during transmission is much much higher on buried lines. That's a price you and the environment pay every day whether the weather is bad or not.

Ridiculous Interrelations

[Anonymous Coward]

The apartment I live in is three blocks from a power substation, but that substation is apparently NOT the one that serves my neighborhood. No, that substation is a mile away and it seems like someone sneezing next to it can knock it out of operation. When it goes, it takes out a narrow band of buildings about two blocks, which includes the building my apartment is in, without affecting those buildings on either side of that band.

I've checked during power outages and that band goes laser straight direct to that substation a mile away.

Then power enters the complex through two large transformers, about three blocks apart (big complex) but each transformer represents only one leg of the three-phase current serving the complex. Within a week after each power failure, one or the other transformer explodes, causing every apartment in my building to lose power to half the apartment -- north or south depending on which transformer blew up -- but only that half.

People in the building are starting to speculate about curses or poltergeists, since you'd think that after both had been replaced, they'd stop exploding after every power outage.

Re:Ridiculous Interrelations

[tom.rake]

My electricity is supplied through substation on 230kv transmission line that steps down to the 35kv distribution which feeds my development underground, my development is also part of a distribution loop in the 35kv grid. During hurricane Sandy my power was out for 10 hours others in my community waited several weeks. My brother who lives just off the development 700 feet from me, was feed by a rural style section of the 35kv grid and it took 2 weeks for all the trees to be removed to bring that part of grid back online. The original poster cited "top notch" infrastructure. But does this include all the infrastructure that connects him to the Transmission lines? Transmission if federally regulated by FERC and is very reliable. Most of the failures occur in the Distribution phase after the voltage is stepped down to Distribution levels. In the US most of the distribution infrastructure was designed in the '30s and '40s many of these rural designs were based on a tree network with very few redundant loops - the number of customers serviced counted above the quality of service. As the suburbs developed some loops were introduced but right of way complications and interests of local landowners made the creation of these redundancies expensive. A move to "deregulate" power utilities happened starting in the 1990s this added the calculus of "Financial Engineering" which cut maintenance efforts while housing construction was "Financially Engineered", this results in an overall reduction of quality of service. The public still opposes electric infrastructure upgrades ( http://www.stopthelines.com/ ). You need to design and pay for redundancies of local reliability and need to overcome local NIMBY attitudes.

Why is the grid so crummy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of priorities. If people really wanted a good grid, they would have been paying for it some time ago. Now enter the decline in fossil fuel reserves. If people really would have wanted to avoid spiraling energy costs, they would have invested in the lowest future energy costs, quite some time ago. Societies are not that smart, some people are, so it depends on how fast intelligence propagates throughout society, i.e. how quickly a learning curve is followed.

Silicon is super abundant and underpins direct solar energy extraction via the PV effect. This is 50-200 times more efficient than chlorophyllic based energy conversion and storage. Unless enough in society know how to produce this equipment and enough others are willing to support the former's efforts, energy procurement will be a stop and go process, fraught with inequities and poor long term planning.

As more people learn about and accept local power generation, via the acquisition of Silicon based generators, the "local" grid reliability will increase. The local grid can be as small as your residence. That's something the established energy producers will try to avoid, because it is not in their interest as they don't like the competition that local power production would bring.

Get rid of monopolies, introduce local energy generation and you'll make the grid much more robust and power failures less bothersome.

Re: Storage

[knightghost]

Storage is the "next great myth" - a solution looking for a problem. And government handouts.

I was stuck behind storm Sandy in New Jersey and discovered that 99% of the problems there were self induced. Guess what - they don't trim trees away from the power lines. Every time you get wind, dozens to hundreds (or thousands in this case) or branches snap the lines.

US-centric post

[vikingpower]

Power outages ? Here in central or western Europe ? Hardly ever. The electric power infrastructure in the USA is almost on the level of that in the Soviet Union just before the end of the cold war.

Bad development, maybe?

[leonbev]

Maybe the power grid software in that area was designed by the same person who designed "Close, and never show this again" functionality for the Slashdot Deals notification.

Nah... at least the power grid works at least some of the time. I still get that damn Slashdot Deals message every time I visit the site.

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the power grid in Germany is still orders of magnitude better than that in the U.S.

Re: Storage

[MightyYar]

To be fair, when the utility company trims trees the residents raise holy hell.

It's expensive

[MyNicknameSucks]

Last year, after the ice storm knocked out power to large parts of Toronto for several days, the local utility published some numbers of what it would cost to fully bury Toronto's power lines; it was a mind boggling number -- in the billions. No one has the will to spend that kind of money to improve the grid's up time by .1%.

But ... above-ground lines aren't the worst thing in the world. First, if there is a problem, above-ground lines are far easier to repair. Second, parts of Toronto are prone to flooding. We lost part of our subway system for a few days a couple years ago due to flooding shorting out the buried power infrastructure downtown.

FWIW, it's not the aboveground nature of Toronto's grid that causes most of our problems; it's 60 year-old infrastructure with a rated lifespan of 50 years that kills us. Coming out of WWII, there was public will in Toronto to build grand projects -- the citizens were fine with the idea of doing without for the greater good. Once the boomers came into power, they started nickel and diming everything and put off maintenance. Infrastructure spending? Not cool. Lowering tax rates far below what their parents paid? That's cool.

My experience

[Dereck1701]

We recently (as in the day before yesterday) had some high winds tear through our area causing power at my house to go out twice, each stint lasting about 6 hours. The cause in both cases?, a single quarter mile stretch where a major power line goes through a wooded wetland area. While the power companies in our area are getting a lot better, for about the past year there have been over a dozen permanently stationed tree trimming trucks trimming along power lines, even so there are still areas that have yet to cleared. That is a constant battle, made worse by some homeowners/areas which seem to freak out if the power companies so much as clip a few branches. So at least in my experience most of the cause is mother nature combined with a lack of "maintenance" (not to the lines, but trees). Beyond that my power hasn't went out once for nearly a year, not bad uptime for residential.

Re:Super-capitalism -not really

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Utilities are one of the most regulated businesses around.
2. Want ti see your electric bills double?
3. Move to a major city, most utilities are underground
4. I have underground power line on my short street in the suburbs. Power has failed twice in the last year. Takes a long time to find fault and dig up the lines. The lines are only 30 years old.

Re: Storage

[NotDrWho]

Yeah, except any any storage benefit the grid gets from electric car batteries will be FAR, FAR, FAR outweighed by the tremendous strain they'll put on the system as everyone stops powering their 2-ton cars with electricity instead of gasoline. The system is already strained as it is. Can you imagine what it would look like if 50% of people in the U.S. suddenly all decided to dump their gas cars for electrics? I'm not saying electric cars are a bad idea, mind you. I'm just saying that our current generation capacity isn't even close to ready to handle the significant adoption of them.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

It used to be that a power company was local. They had to respond to customers. But consolidation ruined that. They now have to respond to investors. Investors take the profits as dividends. Not improvements in service. Or quality of service. Now you have brownouts, load shifting, and sales to other markets to contend with. Making the local area unimportant. That's not where the money is. And expenses have to be held in line.

Trees vs. powerlines

[SIGBUS]

In my neighborhood (Chicago area), they most certainly trim the trees, to the point that many of them look downright weird. That doesn't completely prevent storm-related power outages, but it at least makes them pretty rare for me.

Still, if the crown of one of those trees snaps off, like it did in a severe storm late this June, it can result in an extended outage. That's when I discovered that my UPS outlasted the batteries in Comcast's local infrastructure by a wide margin.

Re:Trees vs. powerlines

[Noah Haders]

in san Francisco they pollard the trees, not for any specific purpose but more as an aesthetic. is this what they do by you?

Re: Trees vs. powerlines

[Anonymous Coward]

In london we have holes in trees next to roads that are exactly double decker bus size and outline :-). power/phone/water/gas/sewers/cable are all buried , cos duh... powercuts are due to someone digging in the wrong place, not bad weather.

Re: Storage

[Jason Levine]

We had two big trees in our backyard whose branches went around various wires in our backyard. We called the power company to trim them and they claimed it was the cable company's responsibility because it was closer to those lines. We called the cable company and they claimed it was the power company's job. Meanwhile, every storm we would worry about a branch snapping and taking out our power. (We wound up taking down our trees for unrelated reasons - one was dead and the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our back yard unusable and attracting flies.)

Re: Storage

[polar red]

and profit must always be positive. no, scratch that, profit must increase every year.

Re:One of the reasons for underground cabling in G

[dave420]

Surely that would make it more difficult, due to the large number of unexploded bombs buried in the ground. Trying to excuse the sorry state of utilities in the US in that manner only serves to make you look foolish.

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a caffeine shortage or why is everybody's sarcasm detector running low?

Re: Storage

[currently_awake]

The power grid is only under strain during peak use. The rest of the time it's got power to burn. If everyone charges their electric car at night there won't be any trouble.

Beeecause...

[Greyfox]

We want things like roads and bridges and water and electricity, but we don't want to pay for them? The last major investment we made as a country was the Interstate Highway System, and we no longer understand the concept of investment or the idea of investing in infrastructure. The whole point of having a power network is that everyone doesn't need their own power generation capability, since that's expensive and a large electrical plant will be more efficient. But if you want a solid guarantee that your lights will be on at any given point, you're going to have to invest in your own generation capability. In the last three years I've had two outages that lasted more than 24 hours. The average outage where I live is between 1 and 3 hours.

While we're on the subject of investing in infrastructure, we've got a water crisis coming up very soon now. With undeniable climate change, a large part of the country is never going to have to enough water, while another large part of the country is always going to have way too much. I think we need an interstate highway system level project to move water around the country as needed. I think this will be vital for the well being of tens of millions of Americans over the next couple of decades, but no one is even thinking about such at thing right now.

A Couple Answers

[Anonymous Coward]

My first answer is trees. Whether the utility(cost cutting) or its customers(refusals, backlash) are to blame, trees don't get properly trimmed away from above ground power lines and right of ways and this maintenance isn't done often enough. Their root systems are also not properly kept away from underground services.
My next answer is copper theft. Most utilities rely on ground wires as a safety measure and thieves wholesale steal this wire because its within arm's reach. Steal enough of this and an outage that would have left a small amount of customers without gets a chance to develop into something more. Utilities can barely keep up with this vandalism.
Infrastructure shortcomings would be the final piece of the puzzle. Many utilities aren't investing in themselves because of their publicly traded status. Skilled labor costs and increased energy production costs leave little margin for reinvestment while keeping shareholders happy. That infrastructure is starting to lack just like roads and bridges.

An Electric Utility Engineer's Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

As is often the case, there's several reasons. I work as an engineer for a utility that has been struggling with reliability.

The basic fact of electricity is that if something touches the wire and something grounded, or touches multiple electric wires, there's going to be a fault, which usually means there's going to be an outage. Electric service generally has to go several miles from the substation before it reaches your house. Preventing anything from touching wires for that distance is difficult, and a problem that cable, telephone, and other types of utilities don't face.

  There's also different philosophies on system protection. For example, is it better to momentarily blink the lights for a lot of people, or have a lower number of people have an outage that will probably last an hour or two? The company I work for prefers the former, despite the fact that many of the customer complaints I see are about momentary interruptions, not sustained outages. The reliability metrics we report to regulatory agencies currently only include outages lasting longer than 5 minutes. Until we're forced to report on momentary outages, I don't think that's going to change.

Another factor is that our system right now is rather dumb, for the most part. "Smart grid" is here in some ways, but not in others. There's a few areas where we have pilot programs to do automatic switching in the event of an outage to reduce the outage's impact, but its not widespread yet. Even when it is widespread, it still won't prevent momentary interruptions. Its also not cheap, and requires a lot of engineering work to get running.

As for the elephant in the room, undergrounding, it's expensive. I don't think most people understand just how expensive it is. I'm sort of peripherally involved with a major undergrounding project we're doing now. It's in a relatively densely populated area, not out in farmland or anything. The cost per customer is expected to be somewhere in the ballpark of $15k. Also, undegrounding is a capital expense, which means one way or another,customers are going to pay for it. Utilities don't generally do capital work without the assumption that they will be reimbursed for it. They also aren't sitting on the piles of money necessary to do it out of pocket.

  I get the whole "my service sucks, the utility needs to pay to fix it" mentality, I can't count the number of hours I've been on the phone with Comcast about my cable being out, so I understand frustration with utilities. (On a sidenote, god damn do I wish Comcast had to deal with all the regulations we do.) But look at it this way. If your reliability is bad, you say "I don't want the utility getting more money. Why should we reward them for bad service?" If your reliability is good, you say "They don't need more money to spend on reliability upgrades, my service is already good enough." Somewhere along the line, the money to do reliability work has to come from somewhere.

I do think we're going to see a lot more undergrounding in the next 10 or 20 years, at least in urban and suburban areas, but its going to come at a cost, and there's probably going to be some sticker shock. I also think that smart grid technologies, such as the automated switching, are going to become more prominent. The industry really is changing at a faster pace than ever before, and the pace is only going to accelerate. But its still going to take a lot of time, money, and man-hours before we have perfectly reliable service.

(Sorry for any typos/errors. I'm at work right now, so I typed this on my phone. Didn't want to submit it from my work computer.)

Greed

[JimSadler]

It really can be as simple as greed. Your power company likes its money and wants to keep it in pocket. Heavily populated areas can generate a lot of complaints and woes for the power company whereas smaller areas can not. You may be able to find that power crews do not stand at the ready to service outages near you. In my town we suffered a similar issue with cable TV. If a car smacked a pole and took out the cable or someone cut the cable in a digging operation on Friday night it would take until Monday to get the cable back on. It was really lousy as we do not get over the air tV here. I had lived in a highly populated area about 100 miles south of me and was accustomed to repair crews being able to jump to the job in a few minutes any time of day or night. Our area grew in poulation and service improved accordingly. That might be solely due to alternatives to cable becomming better in quality than they were 15 years ago.

depends where you live - some figures

[ray-auch]

Thought I'd actually look up some real numbers for reliability by country (terms can be found on wikipedia, larger is not better...):

International Comparison of 2007 Reliability Indices

COUNTRY ..... SAIDI SAIFI
United States 240 .. 1.5
Netherlands .. 33 .. 0.3
Austria ...... 72 .. 0.9
Denmark ...... 24 .. 0.5
France ....... 62 .. 1.0
Germany ...... 23 .. 0.5
Italy ........ 58 .. 2.2
Spain ....... 104 .. 2.2
UK ........... 90 .. 0.8

Source: Council of European Energy Regulators ASBL. (2008). 4th Benchmarking Report on the Quality of Electricity Supply. Brussels: CEER.

Re:depends where you live - some figures

[dbIII]

Sadly it's meaningless numerology without an indication of what the numbers actually stand for.
When I was in the power industry I had access to a wonderful series of books by ESRI with plenty of illustrated examples of what happened when you drove various power station components far beyond the realms of sanity - all US examples (compiled by a US based org of course, so that's why all US). Whatever the average is there are at least some utilities in the USA that drive their power plants to destruction through lack of maintainence or poor operational procedures. So many millions that could have been saved by employing one chemist or engineer instead of just an untrained Homer Simpson at the controls.

Re:depends where you live - some figures

[organgtool]

Since not everyone specializes in utilities benchmarking:

SAIDI: System Average Interruption Duration Index (average duration of interruption measured in hours)
SAIFI: System Average Interruption Frequency Index (average number of interruptions each customer experiences per year)

Re:depends where you live - some figures

[mister2au]

SAIDI is clearly in MINUTES per year, not hours per year !

Re: Storage

[stevelinton]

It's even better than that. In exchange for a discount, most people would settle for a charging outlet that guaranteed (say) net full charge between 8pm and 6am. That is it might charge for three hours, draw for one and then charge for two, or charge at half-rate for 8 or whatever suited the grid.

More overall capacity might be needed, but this kind of thing makes it very flexible.

Re: Storage

[DigiShaman]

Um, easement!

When you purchase a home, you should know where the easement is before you buy it. Either people need to trim their own damn trees, or the city will do it for you; often in the form of a rushed lopped job.

Sounds like Ann Arbor

[Anonymous Coward]

We had power outages and campus wide announcements about outages due to high wind this week.

While it might seem better, the hospital isn't immune. The hospital has lots of generators and battery backup units. So, it turns into lots of power bumps--momentary blinks, which often people don't notice.

Many of the area office buildings have been building out generators to make things easier to endure.

Thats easy

[lapm]

Because bean counter walk over the engineers... Grid is built cheap as bossible instead of being reliable, maintained even cheaper and that means no alternative routes, no backups... All this in name of Maximizing profits... After all you cant sue them for not delivering, so wheres their risk of this gamble...

Why? Protected monopoly

[dbIII]

Why? Protected monopoly. The price for having such a money spinner granted by a government is supposed to be to supply good service, but for various political reasons, up to and including outright graft, that's not always written into the contract or there are loopholes. Hence ridiculous shit like fires when Hurricane Sandy hit 1920s infrastructure with too many live wires in contact with wood! The third world has bad shit but not that bad.

Re:If you can afford it, get a whole house generat

[Anonymous Coward]

We found it easier to setup things to manage without power. How many weeks can your generator go?

Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a service/product that is price regulated to be cheap. The average consumer pays more for television service than electric service. The energy companies can't compete for top engineers, nor do they have much freedom to innovate their power grids whatsoever. Basically anything a utility does has to be approved at multiple government levels giving them little wiggle room on power delivery options. With all that, what is their motivation in pushing 99% uptime to 99.9% uptime? None.

The problem is

[kilodelta]

Greed. Plain and simple. Because most power providers in the U.S. are corporate beings - they care not about service but about profit. So they'll keep string aerial lines and using 19th century technique to keep it going. When burying it would be so much better. And the thing is, they COULD bury it and it wouldn't be all that much more expensive than re-stringing aerial cable.

Even the Bell System was smart enough to know this. Most of it's critical infrastructure went UNDERGROUND and that on the poles was basically engineered to take a F5 hurricane and not come off the pole. But you have to remember, for the majority of Bell's life they were a REGULATED monopoly. No such thing ever happened with electric power. In fact the demise of Bell was brought about by advances in telephony switching. It got to the point in the early 1980's where long distance cost per minute was plummeting due to the #4ESS toll switch. So the cat got out of the bag and the end of the Bell System. It's pretty much back together now as at&t and Verizon anyhow.

Re:The problem is

[Anonymous Coward]

Bell System wires are smaller, much lower power, and DC. Power system wires are larger, much higher voltage and power, and AC. These differences mean enormously higher burial costs for power systems. Your info, while correct, is apples vs oranges.

Power companies who put profits above service do so at their peril. Regulating bodies take a dim view of poor service and are likely to limit profits even more.

Re:The problem is

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate yes. But just about completely control by state apparatchiks. Blame state control as much as "corporate greed".

Re: Storage

[msauve]

"profit must increase every year."

That's what inflation is for.

Brown outs once a month on average

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I live in a suburban area in one the USA's ten largest metropolitan areas. Sorry, but I don't like to be more specific about where I live. On average I experience brown outs once a month. A true loss of power probably occurs 3 or 4 times a year, almost always in conjunction with some type of weather event (ice, snow, heavy rain). In the past I was stupid and never used a home UPS for any computers I had, so from time to time I would have disk drive problems after power outages, even if only brown outs. I also had quite a few PC power supplies fried by brown outs. Switching to UPS devices has stopped this. In fact, we have so many brown outs that I actually have my TV and some electronics connected to a UPS which I use really to protect against the constant brown outs rather than using it to provide power in outages to those devices. I wish power was reliable where I live, but it's not.

Re:Brown outs once a month on average

[LVSlushdat]

You're lucky they're just brown-outs... Given ANY kind of weather, wind, a bit of rain, or a deluge of rain, my power company hits my neighborhood with these frequent little 10-30 second complete outages. The power goes out *just* long enough to kill all of my computers. Our area was built in 1977, and the utilities are all underground. Oddly enough, several blocks over is an area that is a bit older and has power above ground and does not have these outages. I have several friends who live in this area and they don't get the outages. I've had to go out and buy a small ups for the cable modem/router/voip box and two big ones for the workstation and server.. For the rest of the house we just live with it...

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

That could be because they just trim the immediate area around the line and make it look like crap.

Greenies

[sycodon]

Now, don't get all pissed and shit and whipping out the negative mods, but in Austin, the primary cause of power failures are all the people who go ape shit whenever the power company starts to trim trees. "Preserve the Historical Nature!", "Save the Trees!", etc.

Then, when an Ice Storm comes along or high winds, the tree limbs break and fall on the lines. Of course, then they go ape shit because they have no power. What is really funny is that the power company is owned by the City.

Simple

[bravecanadian]

It costs money and it isn't sexy to spend money on infrastructure.

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[giantgeek]

If you don't like being dependent on the utility for your electric power, generate your own. You also have control your power consumption. Those are two forces that could change the market for electric power.

same materials, but capacitance is a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Buried (or submarine) cables have much higher capacitance to ground than cables up in the air, and that raises all sorts of troubles with managing the power flow. There's significant reactive power that flows through that capacitance which needs to be compensated. Capacitive (leading) power factor makes it harder to stabilize the system (in the sense of keeping all the spinning generators loaded appropriately, and in phase). The reactive power also increases the total current, which increases the losses.

Re: Storage

[peragrin]

We called the electric company once as a branch had fallen on the line and was being held up. It was a y shaped branch that had broken from the tree above and balanced perfectly on the line. We got fined for calling in a problem that didn't exist. The inspector knocked the branch off the line and then said it was the wind. We had a witness to that so the fine disappeared.

In NY power companies are only required to trim trees once every 20 years. Most of the trees that grow reach full height in 10 years.

Reasons

[mothlos]

Medium sized power outages are generally caused by a failure of local transmission lines. These lines are frequently exposed to a variety of hazards, particularly trees, wind, ice, wildlife, and humans. There are only really two ways to secure against this, burying cables and building redundancy, both of which are quite expensive. Transmission fees in the USA are usually heavily regulated and the prices they may charge would not cover such an expense. It is also unclear if a market would want to pay for this, and it is very difficult to discriminate in price and service among customers who would.

Finally, bureaucracy and in-fighting between local utility providers sometimes blocks redundancy when it might otherwise available. Historical feuds, hurt feelings over regulatory decisions regarding service area, and disagreements over cost sharing to handle inter-network connections can leave one person at the end of a service line with no way to get power from another provider just down the road.

Re: Storage

[ksheff]

I don't think that is going to happen any time soon. Electric cars are still too expensive and impractical for most people. Not everyone lives in a house where they can install their own charging system or can afford to buy a vehicle that's just for commuting. Battery production will need to improve quite a bit in order to supply that number of vehicles too. Hopefully by the time they are more practical, the utilities will have improved their side of things, not to mention home solar & wind generation should be cheaper by then too.

Obama Nation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, our infrastructure has been in decline for decades. Can't build Bombs For Civilians if you are trying to Keep The Lights On.

Edit: Captcha = grumbled

Re: Storage

[Dereck1701]

"Um, easement!"

That is far from certain, for modern installs they tend to be pretty good about getting one and making sure they stay in it. But in the past at a bare minimum they didn't maintain proper records of when they did get an easements, and in some cases for older lines an easement was never procured or they were but the line wasn't put on the easement. So it is a legal quagmire that most utilities don't like to get into so they generally get permission, and if they can't get permission THEN they start digging for legal justification.

coruption

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple answer, you have allowed scum to take money for votes and put it in the pockets of unions rather than in the actual infastructure that is badly needed now. Way to go public unions!

Worst of both worlds

[sjbe]

I've often wondered about the possibility of not re-burying the trench: make the trench shallower, cover it with a walkable grate, and just leave it that way.

Looks terrible, creates a safety hazard (grates WILL be pulled up and people electrocuted), creates a metal theft problem, doesn't adequately protect the cable from freeze/thaw problems, doesn't protect from rodents & wildlife adequately, still vulnerable to weather, etc. Problems with doing this are legion. The biggest is safety. You do NOT want the general public to have convenient access to power lines because someone will inevitably do something stupid.

It's actually cheaper and safer to bury it. A grate like you propose would be kind of the worst of both worlds in practice.

you don't have a shovel?

[swschrad]

it's possible to dig it yourself...

Re:you don't have a shovel?

[thegarbz]

A lot of things are possible given enough time and effort.

The lead in line for the phone needs to be 600mm deep. We live in an area with hard clay soil. I tried hand digging. Got about 2m after a full day of work and then called an earth moving company. Not only do I have better things to do with my time, but I also have better things to do with my health.

Re: Storage

[durrr]

Big in terms of cost. You might as well use gas turbines instead and can then create energy denovo.

Re: Storage

[geekoid]

So we don't need storage for electricity? good to know.

Moron.

Set up a 3 way call

[tepples]

We called the power company to trim them and they claimed it was the cable company's responsibility because it was closer to those lines. We called the cable company and they claimed it was the power company's job.

Does your phone service support three-way calling?

Re:Set up a 3 way call

[dgatwood]

I have a feeling that if the GP did that, both companies would say that it's the phone company's responsibility....

Re: Set up a 3 way call

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you do when you get one service rep but you're still waiting for the other? Ask them to hold?

Re: Set up a 3 way call

[tepples]

You politely argue your case with one rep while waiting for the other. Then once they're both on the line, you join the calls. (Yes, I'm aware that 3-way on POTS doesn't quite work like this; the third parties can hear each other as soon as the call connects.)

Re: Set up a 3 way call

[MightyYar]

I've actually done this. I needed to arrange a call between Verizon and CallCentric. I called Verizon first and told them what I intended to do, and they gave me a direct line to call in order to set the call up. I probably should have kept that number :)

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[HeckRuler]

On the contrary, market forces work fine.

Pft. Their attempts at inserting additional market forces worked SOOO well.

And there is no market force from the consumers. They have no choice about where their power comes from. There are natural monopolies at play. The only thing they can do is complain. That's a political force, not a market force.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Ours has an awesome machine. Just drives down the road with a giant cutter on top, bottom and sticking out the side. They do it once a year or two and we don't seem to have any problems. Well, except for a lot of trees looking like this: http://www.stategazette.com/photos/12/57/62/1257622-H.jpg and http://www.seattle.gov/light/Vegetation/images/power-line-trees-530x351.jpg

The problem whose solution is storage

[tepples]

The problem whose solution is storage is the variability of wind and solar, the most prominent renewable energy sources, from one hour to the next.

Re: Storage

[DutchUncle]

That's because what the utility company calls "trim", most people call "cut", if not "butcher". The root of the problem goes further back: The telephone/power poles are all placed just off the edge of the road, between the curb and the sidewalk, and the town plants trees IN THE SAME STRIP - directly under the wires. Trees belong further away from the wires, but people have this idea of a "nice lawn" (which nobody ever uses, at least not in the front of the house). I see this being done in brand new construction, too.

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[vidarlo]

It's true that renewable power levels like wind-power rise and fall, but once you look at a larger area then it pretty much evens out.

But dimensioning the grid for average power draw is cheaper than dimensioning the grid for peak power. During the night, power consumption is low, and batteries can be recharged. When everyone wakes up, and makes coffee peak power occurs. With local storage the consumption can always be kept at the average level.

This also means that when there's good wind, you can save the energy for consumption later, without transporting it. Yes, batteries have a 5% energy loss, but so do long haul transmission. And long haul transmission technologies like HVDC costs a lot of money when you get into high effect converters.

I'm currently involved in a project where the conclusion was that a local battery storage was cheaper than renewing the power grid for peak load. The point where it's cheaper to install a Smart Grid Solution instead of bigger grid is only gonna move in favour of smart grid the next few years...

Grid reliability

[dixonpete]

Is all about investment. The City of Toronto is reportedly well behind its investments in the local Toronto infrastructure. The less you invest keeping equipment up-to-date the more breakdowns you will have. http://www.torontohydro.com/si...

You need more nuclear and less renewables

[Anonymous Coward]

Our "unusable" grid is almost completely underground and so reliable, that outages are almost always planned and announced by postcard a week in advance.

I remember only two unplanned outages in the last 40 years.

And the renewables have nothing to do with stability, that is pure propaganda.

Power outages

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you live in a rural area? I'm no expert but lightning storms, heavy rain and wind can damage electronic components. Even in the suburbs of Baltimore, MD, people experience power outages. Power lines between the main station and substation can be damaged by lightning and wind. Even the smaller sub-stations and utility poles can be damaged easily. What do you expect with overhead power lines? 100% reliable power in 75 mile an hour windstorm with frequent lightning that and trip open a circuit breaker? Perhaps you should move to a big city that has underground cables. Just a thought.

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, there are too many people running around who really think this way...

Re: Storage

[TCaM]

Any power company will tell you where to avoid planting trees, this includes anywhere in the utility easement and anywhere that they may grow up under overhead service lines. People of course ignore this because they have no common sense. Yes in many cases the trees were planted by previous property owners but ultimately if you own a tree and it is causing a problem for your power, phone or cable, why wouldn't it be your problem? Many power companies will do minimal trimming because of the dangers associated with downed power lines, but cable and phone lines are much less likely to be a danger if downed, just a service loss. Unless the trees are actually interfering with the distribution system, don't expect the telco or cableco to do anything. They will replace the service drops when they get pulled down by trees, but won't pay to maintain your trees for you.

I can tell you about Gigabit fiber on those poles!

[Your Average Joe]

Well if your lucky to live in an area that is serviced by an electric coop you might get high speed gigabit fiber on those wooden poles. Yes the COOP's are doing it where the commercial power companies will never do it, ever. So some people are lucky and get fiber from Google others get it from the COOP. The rest of America is going to just wait....

If your in an area where your power is underground it might take an additional decade or two for you to get gigabit fiber to your house from underground.

So have if your way. I say cut the trees down that could knock out power and that would be like 90% of the power issues. It also means your internet will keep working. ;)

Re: Storage

[sjames]

That's because they don't properly trim trees, they hack off whatever might be near the lines. If they would actually trim the trees so they don't look like the crippled survivors of a war, people wouldn't gripe.

There are a couple trees near me that they 'trimmed' such that they will almost inevitably fall over onto the road sooner or later. That's what happens when you cut all the branches off of one side. It's a classic "somebody else's problem now" sort of 'solution'

Why is it a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

the assumption with this argument is: why is it a bad thing for power to go out for a little while?

are we talking power loss for a few hours, days, or a week tops? i would think that's part of life, first world problems.

buy a generator if you don't like it.

Re: Storage

[ArmoredDragon]

I would have to agree with that. Arizona for example has a VERY reliable power grid; so reliable in fact that a lot of companies are building datacenters in Phoenix, in spite of the heat. Yet at the same time Arizona doesn't rely on storage. Phoenix in particular is powered by the Palo Verde Nuclear plant (largest in the US) as well as hydro power from Salt River Project. Arizona has so much power that it actually provides California with 25% of theirs.

I blame it on the Moon landing.

[hey!]

July 20, 1969 was, possibly justifiably, the biggest national ego-validation event in human history. The problem was after that when it came to national achievement, our eyes were firmly pointed back in time. We no longer do things "because they are hard". We're more focused on cashing in on the achievements of past generations.

When you tell Americans we have a backward mobile telephone system, a technologically primitive electric grid and distribution system, and Internet connectivity that lags behind the rest of the developed world, the reaction is usually disbelief. How can that be? We put a man on the Moon -- although by now it should be "grandpa put a man on the Moon."

It's more profitable, duh

[Anonymous Coward]

First, you don't have to spend capital rebuilding or maintaining your network, then the shortages mean your product is at peak expense, then you can go whining for a bailout to help you make what you were supposed to be doing in the first place, then you get those useful idiots blaming renewables for it.

THERE IS NO DOWNSIDE TO THEM.

Re: Storage

[ArmoredDragon]

To add to that, in Arizona, power outages occur maybe once a year for any given area, and failures are rarely (perhaps never) the result of the grid itself failing. Last time it happened for me, it was because some derp wrecked their car into a transformer (and being able to damage a transformer in such a way with a car is a rather difficult thing to do because they're otherwise pretty well protected.)

Re: Storage

[StingyJack]

We raise hell because they are butchers about it, at least in south jersey (PSE&G). Have a 300 year old tree near the lines? Let's cut down 80% of it so we dont have to come back and trim again in the next 20 years.

In big city you already have holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly how many big city does not have sewer ?

An excellent answer in the form of an article.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/03/blackout-whats-wrong-with-t.html

Laying cable

[sjbe]

When they bury cables, do they at least have the good sense to be surrounding these cables in pipes?

Depends on the type of cable and where it is being buried and how deep. Often yes but conduit is not always necessary. A lot of the cables are pretty robust on their own and the biggest utility in conduit is making it easier to service the cable later on. If you don't need to do that then it isn't always necessary. I'm more familiar with what they do with data cables and those frequently are not put in conduit.

I just imagine that if people dig trenches to lay cables, it would make sense to have them lay a pipe

The conduit they use for transmission usually comes on reels from what I've seen. They trench it into place then use some specialized wire feeding equipment to push the wire through once the conduit is in place. My father actually used to service and sell this sort of gear. They also don't always need to dig trenches. There is a lot of boring equipment not unlike stuff used for drilling that can be used so that you don't have to dig up everything between two points to lay the conduit. Some of this stuff is pretty cool to watch in action.

If the wire wants to curl up, so it doesn't want to go straight through the pipe, then fine: just attach the wire to a battery-powered toy car, and drive it through the pipe.

Wire curl isn't really the big limitation because the conduit is (usually) fairly smooth and it's not usually super hard to straighten the wire. The big problem is that you are essentially pushing a rope and the force you can use is limited by the durability of the cable jacket and the weight of the cable itself plus friction. 4AWG copper wire (think jumper cable thickness) for instance weighs 126lbs per 1000 feet. Add in frictional forces and you have to drive the cable with a force of a few hundred pounds to feed 1000ft of wire through a piece of conduit. Since the insulation material is relatively soft it's not hard to get to the point where you cannot feed more wire without damaging the cable due to the force required.

Why not just stand at one end of a pipe, pull out the old cable, and replace it with a good cable?

Sometimes they can do that but it depends on the circumstances. Remember that if they are replacing a cable there is probably a reason and the old one may no longer be intact. It also can be the case that they need additional wires. This sort of work is quite a bit more challenging than feeding wires through conduit in a building.

Re: Storage

[MightyYar]

I live in an old suburb where they ran the wires behind the houses. Trees are still a problem, since they like to grow in the no mans land between properties.

core upgrade and locations

[Anonymous Coward]

same effect as w/ "global warming": a measurement station was constructed 100 years ago and their was no concret and sphalt. now the little town grew to a city and thus the measurment station is surrounded by cojcret and sphalt.
in the same sense a transformer was installed to supply medium voltage and lots and lots of smaller transformers were hocked up.
the core grid weasnt upgraded / expqnded.
like a well washed tshirt the its coming apart at the sames and no locations planned to put a transformer station to feed all the lil transformers... its just to ... costly : )

Re:core upgrade and locations

[Anonymous Coward]

i used to lern speling from a book with no concret and sphalt
than someon poured cojcret and sphalt in the boock and now speling is hard

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, who would have thought that deregulating only the supply side while still regulating maximum prices could lead to problems? Oh right. Everybody but the government and cronies directly benefiting.

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful; in some areas it's flat-out illegal to generate solar power, worse yet some places make it illegal to consume any non-grid power for certain applications.

A friend of mine in Kentucky has a large vegetable garden, about 1/2 acre on his property. It's surrounded by a low voltage electric fence, to keep out rabbits and such, which for ~10 years was powered by a tractor battery. Well he got tired of having to swap out, recharge, or replace the batteries all the time, and bought a solar kit, the panel is about 30"x30" and charges up its own battery pack. Neat setup, it cost him several grand but he never has to touch the thing or worry about the juice running out.

Mid 2012 he's doing some renovations on the attic and roof of his house, the contractor calls out the electric company to disconnect power at the weatherhead for a few hours while they put in some new paneling. One of the electric guys sees the solar cell and all sorts of shit ensued. Electric guy says you can't use a single drop of sunshine without X, Y, and Z permits, and by the way, I have to report this. It got heated (my friend is the type who likely launched into "bull fucking shit I can't, it's my property and the fuck if you're gonna tell me what I can do...") and the electric guy warned him to prepare for some big fines. So he writes a letter to his public utility commission, he wants to get himself on record and ask for clarification. Explains how he's using the solar panel, it's easier and more eco-friendly than burning through tractor batteries, etc.

PUC writes him back and says not only is it illegal to use solar anywhere in the entire county without permits X, Y, and Z (which would run many thousands of dollars), it was also illegal to use the tractor batteries! Any power consumed for any purpose must be purchased from the utility. There was a short list of exceptions like small household appliances, emergency backup generators, etc. but of course electric garden fence wasn't excepted. A fee schedule was included and it was ridiculous, they have it rigged to where the law automatically assumes you're generating half your own energy consumption, the utility is allowed to retroactively adjust your bill for the power you "stole" by not buying it from them, on top of multi-thousand dollar statutory fines.

He responds to them, apologizes, pleads ignorance, and says he'll unhook the fence. Hasn't heard a peep from them or from the utility in 2 years, and of course he didn't disconnect the fence. It's still running from the solar cell. But if they spot it again they might not just drop the issue.

tl;dr Energy companies have lobbied to make generating your own power illegal in many parts of the US, proceed down that path with caution.

Re: Storage

[knorthern knight]

> (We wound up taking down our trees for unrelated reasons - one was
> dead and the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our
> back yard unusable and attracting flies.)

Just be thankful you don't live in Toronto. See http://www.toronto.ca/311/know... Even removing a *DEAD* tree will cost you several hundred dollars for the paperwork+approval alone...

> Private tree permit exemptions
>
> A tree that is dead, terminally diseased or imminently hazardous does
> not require a permit, however the applicant must send a detailed Arborist report
> and receive approval from Urban Forestry before proceeding with any tree work.

The cost of a contractor to cut down+remove the tree+stump is additional. An "Arborist" is a licenced professional "tree doctor" with an applicable university degree. Their reports are equivalant to an MD's "medical opinion", and their fees are equivalant to having a medical specialist examine you without medical insurance. And in case you're wondering...

> Fines for illegal tree removal
>
> A person convicted of an offence under City of Toronto Municipal
> Code Chapter 813, Article III is subject to a minimum fine of $500.00
> and a maximum fine of $100,000.00 per tree involved in an offense;
> a special supplementary fine of $100,000.00 is also possible.

Aerial or underground ?

[Sedennial]

Actually it isn't. I work for a publicly owned electric and telecom utility. At a cost that can run upwards of a million (yes, $1,000,000) per *mile* to replace move aerial to underground, the rate payers don't generally want to pay for it. Almost all new construction is buried.

And while it seems like most of the causes for outages would be removed by going underground, you only exchange one set of causes for another. Cars get replaced by gophers. Trees on the line get replace by ice when conduit riser fills with water and freezes. Aerial teardowns due to heavy equipment become backhoes that dig on the wrong place and tear up a line.

You also have confined space issues. Now instead of everyone being certified for climbing, bucket trucks, and cranes, they also have to add confined space training and equipment (including continuing education), confined space rescue teams, interlocal or interagency agreements for CSRTs. All of these things add hidden (but not cheap) costs.

In addition fault locating and repair on an underground is much more manpower and technology intensive than aerial. All of these things drive the cost.

Another problem that factors in is environmental regulations. It is much easier (and cheaper by hundreds of thousands of dollars) to get permission to do an aerial build than underground. Every underground build had to deal with permitting for aquifer contamination, native artifacts, wetlands remediation, and so on and so forth. Permitting can add 10% to 100% to a segment of utility infrastructure.

It all boils down to costs. If you can go to your local utility board, commission, or shareholder meeting and convince them that raising rates by 50% to 500% won't get them burned out of their homes, I'll bet they would jump at it. Every utility I know would love to move most of their aging infrastructure underground.

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah yeah ... americans with their braindead idea how power grids work. As if it was not possible â" even in the USA â" to read up about it.
For starters: "peak demand" is not at the morning when everyone stays up, but it starts around 10:00/11:00 and lasts till 15:00/16:00.
Of course power grids need to be build for the peak and not for the average ... how else would you meat peak demand?
No idea about your project, sounds like a household project to me ... as soon as even the simplest garage, bakery or small shop is 'connected' you simply can forget battery storage.

Because money and the inherent problems with AC.

[fishnuts]

It costs money to upgrade and stabilize the power grid. It costs money to stay ahead of the failure curve.

The current infrastructure sucks mainly because it's unpredictable and takes too much effort to synchronize disconnected sections of the grid before connecting them. You can't just "route around" a dead transmission line if there are generator stations active on both sides of the break. You must wait for the two sides to synchronize in phase before connecting them, which can take several seconds to a minute. If you don't, you'll cause even more breakers to trip.

None of this would matter if we switched distribution to HVDC. We have the technology, but again, the cost to convert everything to employ DC-DC switching converters is prohibitive. The biggest upside to switching everything to DC (all the way to the end-user) is that you could add standby capacity by simply connecting batteries to your mains circuit between the main breaker and load panel. The more people in a neighborhood using batteries to buffer their power source, more aggregate protection the neighborhood has against blackouts.

Not so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having lived in a few places, the "US" way of maintaining the the high voltage feeder lines (that feed the step down transformer on the pole outside your house) is to be pretty lax on keeping trees and stuff away from them, and to rely more on fixing stuff up when it breaks.

In NZ for example, the power companies usually do a pretty good job of keeping trees and things away from the 11kV and higher lines, and it usually takes a pretty bad storm to start knocking power out. Auckland excluded - they seem to have a major melt down about every 10 years.

I live in Seattle now, and I see trees just waiting to fall over power lines on residential streets everywhere, I see much older wooden poles used, and way things are connected up and strung up seems to be a bit more relaxed and far less neatly done.

However I much prefer to pay 5 to 10c/kWh and have the power break down from time to time, than the privatized rip off its become in other countries.

Re: Storage

[Noah Haders]

the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our back yard unusable and attracting flies

these two statements contradict. by definition if your yard attracts flies it has a very significant and specific use.

Re: Storage

[Jason Levine]

In our case, the trees were planted several owners before us. The reason I didn't want to take care of it myself was that the branches criss-crossed around various wires. One slip up and I've taken out a major power/cable/whatever line. And even if I ignored it, one bad storm and the branches would snap taking down the lines. All we wanted them to do was some trimming to prevent this, but nobody was willing to do it. (Not a problem now since we took down our trees, obviously.)

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[vidarlo]

When peak power is occuring is less interesting. The interesting thing is that using a conventional grid it happens - time waries.

Power grids does not need to be dimensioned for peak power - provided you have local energy storage. 1MWh of Lithium batteries will weigh in at approx. 10T, and will fit in a small garage, and will be able to supply a peak power of 2MW for half an hour. During periods of lower use, they can be recharged - bringing the peak load on the grid down. They can also assist in smoothing power production. Have an excess gigawatt? Put it into your batteries around the neighbourhood.

The project is definitively not backyard. I cannot tell details, but it is supplying a power in the megawatt range twice an hour, and then recharging using the power grid - enabling huge peak loads that the local grid cannot support. It is a project you've read about in Wired...

If you google smart grid you'll see that it's a big thing. Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric and many other big companies are working on it. So your comment smells of trolling with no real insight in the field.

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[HeckRuler]

. . . The entire reason they deregulated anything at all was to lower the price to the consumer. That's the goal. That's why they did it. They argued all the way to capitol hill that "trust us, market forces will work their magic and prices will come down".

They deregulated generation and transmission, specifically splitting companies to separate the two. The two sides were supposed to compete and buy/sell power amount themselves to compete for the lowest price. The maximum prices were a safeguard in case it all went to hell.

Listen, Enron found they could manipulate the industry and create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. If there was no regulated maximum price, the price would simply be pushed off to the regular people who have zero choice about who to buy from.

I understand what they were trying to do. A competitive capitalistic market is fantastically good at finding out how to eat each other's lunch, deliver better products, and make a buck. This is a REALLY ROCK SOLID example of a deregulation clusterfuck. And not for the reason you pointed out.
In general, I'd agree that market forces don't work on essential utilities (because not delivering is not an option, as well as the natural monopolies aspect)

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[angel'o'sphere]

Ofc smart grids help.
Especially if they have access to grid wide 'storage' ...
Nevertheless ... actually you mix up but half correctly use 'peak power' ... we are storing in this situations only very low percentages of the daily produced energy. And also only very low percentages of the power consumption.
SmartGrids like I believe you mean them, are usefull to prevent wasting the peak solar energy around day time ... they don't help at all to cut down on the grid to be scaled for peak, as the peak is still there.

So your comment smells of trolling with no real insight in the field.
Two mistakes in one sentence, hohohoho. Go figure ...

I think I know why

[Anonymous Coward]

Because so many places are in the US?

Super-capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia is about the same area as the mainland US (not counting Alaska), and has less than 1/10 the population - more area to cover and fewer people to pay for it. Australia has some of the largest grids in the world.

Australia has underground power in almost all city development for many decades. Rural power is still above ground, where there is grid power.

There are occasional power outages, but they aren't particularly common. I recall a large outage (some hours) in the 1970s when a hurricane dumped a lot of salt water on a distribution node and the cutouts didn't work correctly, but it is memorable mainly because it was rare.

Sounds like Ann Arbor, Mi

[Nova1313]

Constant outages. Go DTE! :)

Re: Storage

[morgauxo]

With most electric cars I could drive to work but wouldn't have enough charge to get home :-(
I could try to charge while I work but maybe my employer wouldn't appreciate paying for that!

Is your local utility a wholly owned subsidiary?

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, that would explain it. The parent corp siphons off all the profits instead of investing in maintenance & capital improvements. See Constellation and BGE.

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[vidarlo]

A smart grid will help. If you're able to serve up 20-30 percent of the supply from batteries (EV's can be batteries in a SG system too), you can reduce the grid. They can also serve as UPS systems, effectively smoothing out dips as switchgear changes layout of the grid.

So yes, smart grid with energy storage can help by averaging load over time. For an EV you can configure it to be fully charged at 4, when you leave work, and let it feed the grid in the meantime. You can supplement this with stationary batteries. As EV's become more common, used batteries from EV's which are unsuitable for the size constraints of the EVs can be repurposed to fixed location storage, where size is not as big concern.

Re: Storage

[dywolf]

have you seen how they do it? around here they dont come out with chainsaws and trimmers.

they use a tree grinder: an oversided brush cutter on the end of a cherry picker arm. and they just go at the tree til the wires are clear.

instead of neat cuts and easily disposed limbs, it leaves the trees looking like a mangled mess, with trunk ends splintered and cracked.
and a ton of small chunks and shards of wood laying on the ground.....that they also dont clean up, but leave behind.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

they dug up my entier yard looking for the buried power cables (buried power cables apparently run under my lot from N to S ...even though my house is hooked to aerial power lines running east west), just months after we had bought our house and I had compeltely redone the lawn (previous owners grew weeds and dirt rather than grass). they knocked part of the fence (their easement was the section of land between the fence and major road...running E/W with those aerial wires)....it was a general mess

they even promised me they would repair and reseed the damage.. ..but naturally none of that occured.

so a few months later they asked my why i wasnt paying my power bill.

so i told them, i assumed they had agreed with my earlier letters (with verified postal delivery) that it was a fair arrangement that i not pay my bill until we were square. and i had priced the damage at ~3000$, which is ~1.5 years of payments, cause that's what i spent in time and labor to get a decent yard going, and included what i expected to spend repairing their damage.

been a few months now.
havent heard back from them again yet.

Re: Storage

[morgauxo]

Why modded down? I was responding to the "buy a car just for commuting" bit!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Government regulation.

Privatization.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the electrical company is a non-profit community-owned resource, it will probably be more reliable (and cheaper).

doesnt have to be that way

[YoungManKlaus]

no problems in my country, but you know, we are commie EU and stuff ...

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[angel'o'sphere]

No, you can not reduce 'the grid' storage etc. does not help you in any way having the necessary capacity to transport the amount of energy that is needed at a certain time.

It only helps you to store surplus and leaves you the option not to power up plants but use the previously stored surplus.

Bottom lime for a random factory close to you, the grid changes not at all.

Hint: if your town needs 2GW power around noon, the grid has to handle 2GW, it does not care if the power comes from a plant or a battery close to you. The total energy is the same.

Re:In Netherlands

[Anonymous Coward]

Same in the Netherlands. Basically there are powerfailures only due to wrong digging, or doing major work on the grid (like adding new neighbourhoods

Corporate proft

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of a virtual monopoly, they eschew preventative maintenance and system upgrades in lieu of profits. What are you going to do, ask them to turn off your electricity as a form of protest? The only recourse I had to counter the inept response by Jersey Central Power & Light (headquartered in Ohio) to several east coast storms was to switch to Ethical Electric and this actually saves me money vs. paying the traitorous JCP&L for the pleasure of week-long power outages. This is your America, cherish it.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends.

Any tree that is less than 10 years old and under 4 meters in height should be considered "owner-maintenance", anything that crosses a property line should be considered joint ownership, and if the utility or city decide it's a danger, the city should tell the owner to fix it within 7 days otherwise the city will fix it for them and bill them for 50% of it.

I used to live somewhere where about 30ft of property overlapped with the hydroelectric right-of-way. The Hydro crew came and trimmed one of the trees (that was on our side of the property line) with only 20 minutes notice. The house was just recently put up for sale... you'd have thought they would have done this ... oh a year ago... or waited for the property to be sold. So that day my parents come home and it's like "what the hell happened to the tree?"

bird strikes !

[Pop69]

Big goose migration stop on the other side of the hill from me. Used to have a couple of power outs a year due to bird strike on the line until they finally wised up and put it underground

Re: Storage

[dave-man]

Trimming trees costs a lot of money. Regulatory agencies drive the prices for power (and then point fingers at the utilities). So the utility does what they have to and then waits for the weather to point to weak spots. Then the utility files for Federal emergency funds and hires crews and equipment from far away to clean up and ... trim trees.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should have put them under ground? I think they've done that in some cities

Re: Storage

[AK Marc]

Here, the power company will trim them, and nobody else can. But then they'll send the bill to other people. Nobody should be trimming near the trees, except for people who are electrically trained. Or so says the electric company.

obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

" Lightning storm? Power outage. Heavy winds? Power outage. Lots of rain? Power outage" This is all the result of poor maintainance. Where I live the power company cut way back (pun intended) on trimming tree branches away from the overhed power lines for several years. Then came a bad ice storm in February. The entire town was without power. We were lucky, our power was only out for 8 hours or so. Some parts of town were without power for 36 hours or more. The police, sherriff, and fire departments called in everyone that they could, and were still totally overwhelmed. The fire chief had to priortize responses to fires that threatened structures. Branches across power lines that were on fire were let go unless they threatned to set a building on fire. All of the local fire, police and sherriff's frequencies were in constant use.

All of this because the local power company was skimping on necessary tree trimming and other maintainance.

A similar situation arose with local land line phones at about the same time. our phone line would get very noisy. we would complain, and it would get better for a month or 2. Then the situation would repeat. A good friend who worked for the phone company told us that there were less good clean phone lines in our area than customers, and the phone company didn't want to spend the $ to fix the bad lines. So whenever someone complained, the were switched to one of the good lines, and someone else got switched to one of the bad lines.

I suggest that anyone having situations like these write a letter to their local utilities board, suggesting that there be no rate increases until the situation is corrected.

Woodys in California

[Anonymous Coward]

"IIn California for example much of the earthquake damage seems to be wooden houses although they have noticeably strengthened building codes Californians are still stuck with a whole lot of vulnerable older houses"

I've lived in Southern California my whole life, since 1951. I've lived through several major earthquakes. A basic A-frame wood frame house, sided with stucco and or wood, does very well in earthquakes. After a major quake in Long Beach, California (Southern coastal region of Los Angeles County) in 1933 building codes limited all sorts of construction. This is why Los Angeles had few skyscrapers built before the 1970's; there were height limits.
So, "In California for example much of the earthquake damage seems to be wooden houses..." is partly explained by the fact that almost all home construction in California since the 1930's is wood A-frame with wood siding (lately plywood or similar products) with stucco exterior. Wood houses outnumber everything else around her 100 to 1, or something.
Some of the older wood houses have problems in earthquakes in that they slide off the foundation, which may be only a few points, or they may side cradled over a small sub basement. They were designed that way, to allow them to shift around during a quake. In recent times the problem with this design was pipes and electrical wiring were broken if the building moved too far. Maybe in the old days they just fixed things cheaper, but now-a-days fixing the pipes is so expensive it's often cheaper to tear it down. Or over zealous building inspectors who don't understand the old way of building things condemn a savable building.

Earthquake retrofit trivia: as part of making older masonry buildings stronger to survive a quake, metal rods can be installed. On the exterior the rods are often fixed with a small square of wood and larger end cap. You can see these frequently in old Seinfeld episodes, a clue that not all Seinfeld shows were filmed in New York!

Privately Owned?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the 'Last Mile' is owned by corporations, you can guarantee they're doing the 'absolute minimum' to keep the money flowing in.

Let me guess, you still pay a fee even if you're out of power for a week?

Re: Storage

[Slick_W1lly]

Yeah - so about that..

I live close-ish to some power lines. Some 4 or 5 years ago - I guess following that NorthEast USA blackout period which was unrelatedly due to some electricity surge from Canada.. or something - the power company came along and cut down a bunch of trees off 'my land' within 100 feet of the lines. I was pretty peeved. I like trees. I have a whole bunch of them on my land. Next year they returned and cut down more... This has happened for every year since..

Sandy comes along - all the trees which sheltered my 'other trees' have been cut down. Result - I lost 9 trees which were previously sheltered from the wind (and I guess hadn't grown the root structure to survive). 2 hit my house.

Elsewhere - where the utility company had not cut down trees to 'save the power lines' - all the trees survived.

While I appreciate that the utility company needs to protect their lines - there are *much worse* situaitons than where my trees border their lines - even just 1 mile down the road. And I'm convinced they opened up the nightmare that was Sandy.

Also BURY YOUR FUCKING POWER LINES.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound like that sort of regulation is unusual. It's everywhere, even in my anti-guvment do what I want state.

Tree removal among power lines - above or below ground - is both dangerous and involves the risk of not only damaging yourself or your property, but also the power company's property, your neighbors property, and reputation. The cheaper transformers you can blow cost more than a car. That's not counting other equipment.

You'd better believe the utility companies have long since put criminal laws and serious fines in place to protect their assets, because there's no way you're going to be able to pay for the damages.

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[guruevi]

Depending on your local laws but if the company or a government inspectors hasn't complained about it in >24mo around here, then it's supposed to be 'grandfathered' in.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gone through three hurricanes now in South Florida: Jeanne, Francis, and Wilma (the eye passed right over my place). My home was kinda in the sticks and heavily wooded all around; close to West Palm Beach, but not close enough--our power used to flicker off every time it was a little windy at night. It happened so often that I had to use a UPS on my computer to keep from losing hours of work, all too often.

The three hurricanes severely damaged our power grid, bringing down trees and power lines everywhere. We went, altogether, a month without power (not recommended, not fun). However, after repairs were made to the electrical delivery system, it became *extremely* reliable, and has been so since. I know that this has been true of other nearby areas affected by the hurricanes as well. Almost made the suffering worth it, and in the long run, it is.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S.: What we realized it that if the electric company doesn't trim the trees away from the power lines, a hurricane will.

Perth Western Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to suffer the same problems in the 1990s. Subsequently the majority of electrical cables were buried and the number of grid failures reduced significantly.

Re: Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Power lines should never be built above or near trees, unless elevated several metres above the highest point the trees will ever reach.

Re: Market forces don't work on essential utilitie

[chihowa]

I installed solar panels on my house for exactly this reason. It's really just a whole house UPS, but once the batteries, chargers, and inverters are installed, adding panels is a minor extra cost. No more power outages. Saving money (and not giving as much to the power company) is a bonus.

Re: Storage

[leslie.satenstein]

Either way, storage is the "next big thing" for the electric grid. For one thing, it's essential for integrating intermittent sources like most renewables. But it will also help to make the entire grid more "islandable" -- diverse and distributed -- and thus more robust.

In Quebec, we were accustomed to power outages, until the electric utility put James Bay online. This was a phenominal amount of water resource and cheap electricity. As a consequence, a majority of homes in Quebec switched to all electric heating and A/C. This consumption required redundancy for transmission towers and lines. That redundancy came after one bad winter storm tore down a few miles of towers and the lines. Now they are rebuilt and are transmission paths are in triple. The transmission lines are not side by side, but as I understand it, they run parallel about a mile apart. The towers are also much more reinforced. Don't want outages, introduce redundancy.

Never even had a voltage sag in Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to say that I]ve live all over Japan and have never had so much as a sag in the voltage in ten years. Of course my rates are about 20% higher than my parents' back in New Hampshire (where they just lost power), and they have no compunctions about "trimming" trees down to bare nubbins. You get what you pay for.

Record profits not just cost

[dbIII]

There is a vast amount of padding for profitability and it's a "who watches the watchman" situation since the government setting the rules is one of the direct beneficiaries of increased profits.
Energex reaps record profits:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/...

Queensland electricity bills could be reduced without selling state's assets: report
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a...
It links to this report:
http://images.brisbanetimes.co...
Points 9 and 10 are interesting - 88 million in the last year the government received out of the pockets of electricity consumers as a dividend. The previous government did the same which is one reason it has not been raised by the opposition. It's one of the many downsides of pretend privitisation and a pretend market (others include a loss of economies of scale from artificial barriers constructed between groups that all have the same owner).

Here is a better article

[dbIII]

Powerful surge in profits as Energex delivers huge dividend for State Government
http://www.couriermail.com.au/...

Re:You need more nuclear and less renewables

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not recognise the sarcasm, as it is a problem that is often discussed in Europe. Germany has to invest a lot in the national power grid to cope with the increasing use of renewables if they want to maintain the current reliability and quality.

Re:One of the reasons for underground cabling in G

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet countries that were not bombarded in WW2 (like Sweden) also have mostly underground cabling.

Re: Storage

[MightyYar]

Seeds have this annoying habit of ignoring power lines.

Solar peaks 11:00-15:00

[Anonymous Coward]

And an evening rush peak is coincident with most wind power peaks.

Renewables *are load following* in that their peaks are fairly congruent with load peaks, whereas nuclear, especially, but ANY "conventional" plant run at peak economic efficiency, CANNOT follow load, and therefore we make up this "baseload" that is how we manage with slow, unreactive plants in our system: we plan enough to cover "baseload" we just invented and that will be the power that is run at maximum profits.

If we didn't start off with such unresponsive power sources, we never would have invented the term baseload.

It is a shibboleth of our economic imperatives in profit seeking allied to the technology we applied to the problem.

Cost and war

[MoarSauce123]

I once asked the same question to a local power company making the comparison with western Europe where power outages are generally a rare occurrence. At the place in Europe I lived in for 27 years we had one power outage and that only because a guy with the steam shovel ripped the cables out of the sidewalk by accident. In the US the main reason that power grids are still constructed like in Edison's times is cost and the fact that the US was not devastated by wars in the past century. It is cheaper to nail cables to poles as opposed to run them underground. Underground cabling is more expensive to put it, but it really is only impacted by heavy flooding (as are poles). I could not find any comparison of cost between spaghetti wiring and doing it the right way, it might just be that fixing it after every breeze is cheaper in the long run. And any infrastructure run by for profit businesses in the US is banking on cheap = better.... for shareholders that is. So unless the entire mindset of maximizing profits against the greater good gets changed the best investment is in gas powered generators and battery backups. Sad, but true. In return you can enjoy rather low electricity prices in the US. In Europe electricity costs way more, but you rarely get outages...although even that is changing now because the infrastructure put in place right after the war is now EOL.

Trees

[Anonymous Coward]

In most cases, when that kind of outages occur, it is caused by trees too close to the power lines.

The maintenance on the trees might be skimpy, or the owners are trying to prevent trimming, or the company or city might be trying to force owners to pay for trimming themselves.

Or of course, the general maintanance might be skimped, either by the company or the city. Depends on the local laws, which is responsible.
Like, loose wires can swing in the wind and hit together, shorting out.

Every State and City has their own laws about power distribution, so complain locally.

An awesome discussion

[MooseMiester]

The real reason IMHO is that we have over-regulated everything to the point that it's darn near impossible to accomplish anything cost effectively.

I live in an area with lots of trees, and storms. Line clearance used to be just cut the damn trees down. Then the tree huggers got all upset (which is insane most of the state is wooded). So the cost of line clearance tripled, and we now have trees with giant holes that the lines go through. Costs much, much more.

Cutting down trees is a dangerous job. So a few guys get hurt, and the power company has big money, so along come the ambulance chasers. The result is that the power company fired it's tree cutting staff. They contract it all out, to avoid the liability. So now we need a power company guy and a tree cutting guy on site, double the cost, half the line clearance budget. The tree cutters got together and formed a union, so no more competition, all the tree cutters charge really high prices, because, as everyone knows "Those evil power companies, they have all kinds of money, and so we should get more of it. They have SEPARATE PRICE for power company work .vs. everybody else. No kidding.

You want to run more lines? The EPA gets involved, the environmentalists get involved, the lawyers get involved... all these people cost money. So very few new lines are built, and the existing infrastructure is more and more loaded.

This is the story in darn near every industry today. And what are we doing? The feds, the states, the counties, and the cities are writing thousands and thousands of pages of new regulations every day. And the cost of everything just keeps going up and up and up, with reliability going down.

All this shit worked quite well before everyone started screaming "There ought to be a law"....

Re:Because money and the inherent problems with AC

[MooseMiester]

You'd need a power station every two or three blocks to run DC.

You are at the "point of the spear" for....

[Anonymous Coward]

You are at the "point of the spear" for US infrastructure collapse.

Outdated infrastructure...

[sornord]

If the power company is like the local ISP monopoly where I lived until earlier this year, most of the activity was financial: companies buying and selling each other. The ISP tech who told me this while working at my house said little to no money was put into infrastructure for the past 20 years or so.

Re: Storage

[400_guru]

We have a co-op rather than a private utility. They trim every year and if you don't allow that they add a cutoff switch to your leg so that when branches/trees/etc fall on the lines you get cut off and the rest of customers still have power. They then only repair your leg when the weather improves enough for it to be safe for their linemen to work there. The system isn't perfect of course as not every tree can be trimmed far enough back to make the lines immune to damage but our power rarely goes out even in high winds, storms etc and we're out in the boonies.

Re: Storage

[kilodelta]

This isn't surprising at all. Utilities long ago split responsibility for poles fairly evenly between the incumbent telecom carrier and the incumbent power provider. So when something does wrong they just stand there pointing the finger at each other until such time the pole topples over taking all their lines out.

And let's not talk about construction and rental fees on said poles. It's what tanked a municipal wifi project.