It seems kind of primitive to have power lines just hanging on poles, right?
Bit unsightly too
Is it just a cost issue and is it actually significant when considering the cost of power loss on society (work, hospital, food, etc)?
It’s roughly 5-7 times as expensive per km to bury the cables. It’s mainly a cost issue.
It makes sense in dense areas, it does not make sense everywhere. Critical infrastructure has backup power anyway because digging does not solve all reliability issues.
Here in Aroostook county Maine I can tell you I have yet to see anywhere that didn’t have everything on telephone poles. Not that I can recall anyway.
Converting existing (and i hope working) infra has its own problems too and unless its absolutelly necessary it often gets sidelined.
You cant just dig a trench and drop the lines there. You need to make sure roadsides have enough space and if at any point it would require purchasing or getting permit from land owners it will get quickly complicate. Especially if there are many different owners on the stretch.
There needs to also be plans and precautions to secure that the electricity wont be cut for too long time during the work.
Also the road sides migh need to be cleaned from any vegetation and stones that might be big enough to be problem, not to mention the road it self might need additional work if its badly kept or if they need to widen it and that all rounds back to making sure there is enough space.
Its much easier to build underground cables from the get go, than change infrastructure that was build with telephone poles in mind.
Though in development of an area you probably already dig up the ground for other utilities, so in that case it is relatively easy and cheap to also put electricity lines in there too. But retrofitting in an already developed area is really expensive. So it becomes more a question of the default.
And you can have aerial fiber 😁. That’s how france “fibred” the countryside.
Where did you get your numbers?
I found 2-3x and it’s quoating it as $5-$15 per foot vs $10-$25
- 5-7 Sweden
- 5 to 6. UK
- 4.5 UK
https://benhopkinson.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-burying-our-grid
The second one has a link to an actual study on pricing. That study indicates directed buried is twice as expensive.
It’s also has numbers on tunnel buried which is five times more expensive. Which makes sense but also means there is now a tunnel.
They are. In developed countries.
Because it’s much harder to bury things above ground.
I approve of this meme.
What meme are you referring to?
Don’t make the mistake of looking at one region and generalising to a universal. Where are you looking at?
Here in Switzerland practically everything <1kV is buried.
For high voltage lines they have only built one section to experiment so far. It’s pretty expensive, heats the ground a bit and blocks water with all the concrete, so it’s not so clear if it’s a good choice for agriculture happening above.I’ve wondered a lot why they don’t bury more infrastructure in hurricane regions in the US for example.
Same in many areas built in the lat 50 years in Canada too have mostly underground wires. At least in the West.
I’ve seen them buried in some hurricane prone areas here but not many of them. I don’t think they’d need to bury most of the high voltage lines as those are easy to maintain above ground but there are a lot of disaster prone areas that could benefit from residential power being buried locally
So yes we’d need to be smart about choosing the appropriate places for it but nearly all the places that could use it dont because $$
Almost anything infrastructure related, however it exists is probably the most efficient cost/maintenance ratio for that area. That is basically the only requirement for the engineers in charge of designing that kind of shit.
Unless you’re the Texas power grid. Then it’s literally the cheapest possible way to still be able to bill people for it.
If we can see that the huge influence corporations have is messing up the Texas power grid, and why don’t we assume that they are also influencing other infrastructures?
If you value stuff like safety and the environment, there’s also regulations.
My city sits on a filled in swamp.
My entire state if we’re honest.
Louisiana?
I would assume. That’s where I am.
I grew up far from it, in a vastly different terrain and climate, and I’ve lived here most of my life. But I remember having a cartoon book as a kid that depicted a house in a swamp (I think it may have been one of the books about The Woozles),l.
This memory resurfaced in 2024 when I had to drive from Houston TX to Galliano LA. It was swampy to say the least, and one particular view from somewhere along I10 (or maybe it was route 90, I don’t remember where) looked exactly like in that book. Many of my fellow countrymen have accidentally hit a moose while driving. I’m the only one I know who has run over an alligator.
How do you survive hitting a moose? I feel like that’s equivalent to hitting a brick wall.
It’s pretty dangerous, yes. But since mooses are so tall, you usually hit the legs, and the beast comes in through the windshield. Duck, and it’ll pass over you. However, they might then start to flail and kick you from the backseat out of panic.
And?
Cost, difficulty, and harder to maintaince. Want to add new coax cable? Sure toss it up. New housing being? Split it. Fiber, yep throw where the coax is. Etc. (its still high voltage, so regulations for safety obviaouly play a role here too).
Underground? Is there rock too hard to drill there? A gas line? Did we just cut an active internet line or just some junk? Tree roots? Will it containate a water table? Will it shift and break the line here? Great we have conduit, is it broken? Leakage? Big enough to handle a high gauge for an upgrade?
i say this as man in love with a good tunnel and conduit. Trust me when i say, yes we ought to do it in general, but also yes is a pain in the ass.
I know in northern Maine it’s very easy to dig and immediately get flooded. Know a guy who created a pond by just digging and letting the water fill in naturally
physics. cost.
lived a lot of places, some of which (like here in PNW) have neighborhood buried cables. It’s lovely, and hella reliable. We don’t lose power in windstorms or floods or snow.
It is expensive. And not appropriate for all places - for example, places with high water tables won’t be able to do it, like Louisiana - you can’t keep the water out year round even with a billion pumps. Also hard to do in places with bedrock near the surface for expense reasons.
Maintenance, modification, assessment, and initial installation are all more difficult. And yes that means more expensive, and yes the cost difference is significant. It is more resource and personnel intense to work underground lines than overhead.
When it comes to damage from weather, while underground lines can be slightly more resilient they are much, much more of a pain to assess and and fix. A good line crew can put up a new pole in about an hour. It takes a lot longer to run underground digging equipment.
In some places underground lines are run, of course, because for various reasons the associated downsides are deemed worth it. However when you’re looking at a whole infrastructure, you want easy to service, fast to install, and cost efficient.
I guess unless you plan the community to have underground lines to begin with it’s just a no go?
It can be done, but the people paying for it need a compelling reason. Just saying “It’s kind of primitive ya know.” isn’t enough.
Well there are many compelling reasons but they all seem to be countered with “but that’s expensive”
So I think it’s fair to say it’s primitive because the reason for use is it’s the cheapest solution to the problem of power delivery
but they all seem to be countered with “but that’s expensive”
And time consuming and more difficult to assess, maintain, modify, and install. While increasing the underground footprint which makes it more difficult for other underground utilities and construction.
Well there are many compelling reasons
And when the reasons are good enough the lines go underground. Otherwise yes the cheap and easy way is better as the baseline, because paying ~10x more and taking much longer to install a system that is harder to work with for no good reason is stupid.
I mostly agree with you.
Underground footprint is kind of flimsy reason tough, because if the grid and the infra around it is well designed, in the plans should allready be a plan how to expand if other utilities are needed later.
Also enviroment where the lines are going to be build is important. Close to surface bedrock or soil with lots of big rocks. Overhead of course. Going trough or next to forest in area where winds may fell trees or snow packed on the branches may bend trees. Underground is the smart choise.
Also while underground is slower and more expensive to fix, its rare that multiple lines break at the same time. Most areas has backups upon backups, so even if one line gets damaged it does not mean large amount of households are going to be without power. Overhangs on the other hand are more on the mercy of nature and big storms are more likely to break same line from multiple points or break multiple lines.
Also broken overheads are more dangerous when broken and fixing them is more precarious.
Both have good and bad things.
in the plans should already be a plan
“Should” is the worst word in the English language.
Underground lines, when damaged can also be dangerous. I’ve known of multiple dogs in may area who’ve died instantly just stepping on top utility access points that become electrified due to damaged underground lines. For overhead lines, if it’s not down, it’s generally not a safety hazard to the general public and if it is down, vast majority know to steer well clear of them and report the damage.
Wow. Needed to google those dog strories. Atleast the ones i found were because live wire was connecting to sewergrate due the degration or damage to the lines. It was hard to find any proper knowledge why that happened, but what i know about ground lines and safety regulations those things should be impossible to happen if the lines were build following regulations (at least by my countrys standards, cable must be dug deep enough, that frost does not effect to ground and it needs to be insulated. There needs to be also atleast 20cm or 7.8 inches of fine sand, or fine rockles dirt around it as a safety layer. So live wire should never be able to contact cement or any metal parts even if the cable is broken and soil is wet)
There was also incredible sad story about 15 dogs dying after overhead line dropped in to a kennel.
Im sorry i was little unclear. The safety part was mostly about doing repairs. Where i live number one reason for the lines to get damaged are fallen trees, be it by wind or packed snow. Cleaning windfall trees is difficult by it self as the trees are often tangled and if the tree is in tension when somebody cuts it wrong it, the tree might swing with an force enough to break a neck. Add to that mess tangled wires, constant hurry to fix it and the likelyhood that the wire that needs repairing is on the middle of nothing.
There’s a pragmatic reason too. Power lines and transformers need constant maintenance. When the line fails somewhere, it’s easier to access when you don’t have to dig, and also less disruptive.
Also, they’re up high because people in general are dumb af and will fuck with them if they’re within reach.
Power lines need way less maintenance if you bury them.
Orders of magnitude less maintenance.
The cost to reach them to diagnose and replace outweighs the decreased maintenance. Digging is really expensive.
I was in a suburb once that had the lines running in an accessible plastic rectangle running between the sidewalk and road and it seemed pretty brilliant
Which is a solution for a limited area where the extra cost and longer install time might be deemed worthwhile, but when you want to run miles upon miles of lines then it is less feasible.
I think it’s probably reasonable to run the large transmission lines open because they’re huge and easier to landscape but most people live in dense suburbs or cities (where they’re already underground)
And most dense suburbs just have their power polls waiting precariously under trees which requires additional tree maintenance and is expensive to fix after a storm
I agree there are places it wouldn’t make sense but it seems like nearly all the places where it would make sense still havnt bothered (cost, I know)
In a dense urban environment you are wanting retrofitted lines run through terrain already full of concrete, water lines, and other urban features. That would take a lot of coordination in design and still likely miss things (which means more time and money on redesigns). It also means a long installation time which means extended disruption to the area.
These sorts of underground lines are easier to run in totally fresh new construction, but then again, it runs into servicing issues and extra expense.
is expensive to fix after a storm
Assessing and fixing underground lines is much harder, more expensive, and disruptive.
Would you rather spend $100 for a 5% chance of losing power for 4-8 hours per year, or spend $10,000 dollars for a .1% chance of losing power for a minimum of 2 days?
Is that the real cost differential? Someone else said it’s only 5-7x more expensive which doesn’t sound that bad
Not to discount the significance of such expenses but 5-7x is way different than 100x the expense
also the value of lost power can be significant, if someone dies you lose all their economic output for life and some people can work from home so even a few hundred people losing power could add up and have been worth paying for underground cables
Heat dissipates easier in open air than in conduit, meaning the conductors can be undersized drastically compared to if they’re in conduit. Ever notice how the wires from the weatherhead are 2/0 awg, and on the poles and to your house (even after the transformer so same operating voltage), are way smaller? More like 12 awg on poles? The cost for the larger wire buried underground would be massive.
Also, as others have said, maintenance is significantly easier.
Every major infrastructure project that involves tunneling or digging runs into massive cost overruns, so basing the number on a cost estimate is already fishy. 100x is probably overkill, but not absurdly so. US infrastructure averages 8-12x more than elsewhere in the world, and it’s getting worse. New York adding less than two miles of track to their subway still cost more than double the estimate. California is spending infinite money on a rail line that may never exist.
Bit unsightly too
i actually love them, aesthetically.
i think they’re cheaper to replace/repair in earthquake prone regions
ALSO if you’re in a snowy remote region, serial killers LOVE to snip these so they can “pick people off” one-by-one. This might seem detrimental to the local economy, by virtue of depleting the workforce, but serial killers are great for local tourism once they’re put away.
They have that Serial Experiments Lain aesthetic I cannot explain.
One reason for my region: overhead lines on wooden poles will better withstand an earthquake and will be quicker to rebuild after a major disaster. Stuff underground will get all shifted around or filled with water and mud.
Interesting how it varies with the threat. In my region wild storms are a lot more common so most new developments go underground.
You don’t pay for all the space between poles. Its also cheaper ad quicker to stand a pole than to build a manhole.
It would be better for everyone if was all underground. It is purely cost with a smidgen of time efficiency.
Go dig a trench the length of every city street in the world, and come back and tell me how easy that was.
How costly too.
Do i get fellow workers, overtime, and modern equipment?
If you want those things you need to deal with national, state and municipal governments for contracts.
Well I’ve never seen anyone deal with power lines who didn’t have those things so cheers, doesn’t sound too bad
