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posted by martyb on Thursday September 14 2017, @12:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the better-ask-Betteridge dept.

It is the height of a highly destructive hurricane season in the United States. The devastation of Harvey in Texas and Louisiana caused nearly 300,000 customers to lose electricity service, and Hurricane Irma has cut service to millions of people. Soon, winter storms will bring wind and snow to much of the country.

Anxious people everywhere worry about the impact these storms might have on their safety, comfort and convenience. Will they disrupt my commute to work? My children's ride to school? My electricity service?

When it comes to electricity, people turn their attention to the power lines overhead and wonder if their electricity service might be more secure if those lines were buried underground. But having studied this question for utilities and regulators, I can say the answer is not that straightforward. Burying power lines, also called undergrounding, is expensive, requires the involvement of many stakeholders and might not solve the problem at all.

Would burying power lines render them more weather-proof?

Read the full article on The Conversation.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Virindi on Thursday September 14 2017, @12:50AM (8 children)

    by Virindi (3484) on Thursday September 14 2017, @12:50AM (#567548)

    It would be nice. I live in a place where the power goes out on average once every two weeks (running average for 2017 year to date). It is at best very annoying, and my line pretty much surely costs the power company more than the revenue it generates.

    The county and the electric utility, maybe 10 years back, did a study about rerunning all the lines underground. The resulting cost estimate was enormous and completely infeasible. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars for an urban county that at the time had 200k residents (and a very high population density, at the time I believe the most densely populated unincorporated county in the country). Basically the best case scenario in terms of converting single family homes to underground.

    The more reasonable answer to my problem is the intermediate solution. In the old days, up until the early 2000s, the electric utility used to trim the trees around the power lines yearly. Since 2000, they have trimmed them exactly once. Some management type decided it was cheaper for them to just let my electricity get knocked out than to do proper maintenance, the same maintenance that had been done since the lines were installed in the 1930s and 1940s.

    As the result of saving on that maintenance, now they are replacing the entire line every month or two. Every two weeks the transformer explodes, which can't be cheap either. And I don't think linesmen drive out to replace stuff for free.

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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:14AM (5 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:14AM (#567606) Homepage Journal

    It would be nice. I live in a place where the power goes out on average once every two weeks (running average for 2017 year to date). It is at best very annoying, and my line pretty much surely costs the power company more than the revenue it generates.

    Where I live, we have underground electrical lines. I live on an island that periodically gets hurricanes (the last big one was in 2012) and only *twice* in my half century of living have we had pervasive power outages. The first was in 1977 [wikipedia.org] and the second was in 2003 [wikipedia.org]. There have been numerous hurricanes before, between and after those blackouts which had zero oe little impact on power. Why? Because all the power lines are underground.

    In 2012, some parts of the island did lose power for several days as well. However, that didn't impact me in the slightest.

    What's more, none of these power outages had anything to do with downed or damaged power lines. Why? Because they're all underground.

    Having electric lines above ground makes little sense, except to the MBAs and power company execs who don't want to spend the money on it, and won't be affected by such things because, wait for it, they live in areas where the electricity cables are all underground.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:39AM (2 children)

      by Virindi (3484) on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:39AM (#567614)

      Don't get me wrong, I would love buried power. It would be a big difference!

      My point was that it would be prohibitively expensive to upgrade these neighborhoods. It is easy to say "it should be converted!" but someone would have to pay for it, and by someone I mean the taxpayer/end user. Would I be willing to pay $1000 to underground my power*? Yes! But I also have one of the least reliable lines anywhere. There are plenty of others for whom it would be a wasted expense.

      However, tree trimming was part of the original engineering for the lines. It was done from 1940 to 2000 not because of some pointless reason, but because it was required by the original design. It should already be baked in to the cost, and does not represent a large upfront expense.

      *One of my neighbors once asked the power company about undergrounding his line. He was quoted $100,000. The $1000ish number I am using is based on dividing the study cost of undergrounding the whole county by the number of county residents at the time of the study.

      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:03AM (1 child)

        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:03AM (#567629) Homepage Journal

        Your point is well taken. Public utilities should be required to maintain their infrastructure. Full stop. If they're not, there's likely a problem with corruption in your local/state governments.

        That said, I'll just point you back to the last sentence in my original reply to you and assert that it applies in spades to your situation.

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:26AM

          by RS3 (6367) on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:26AM (#567636)

          I fully agree- it's a problem of short-term MBA thinking (don't bury), versus long-term (bury them). And the better job they do initially, the longer it will last trouble-free.

          Everyone is talking about $. Our obsession with $ makes us look bad to the rest of the world. Can you put some kind of value on how unpleasant life can be during, and as a result of many days or weeks without electricity? For example, I have a water well- no electricity, no water! Electricity runs furnace too. And there's all that spoiled food...

          Your power company MBAs and execs. likely have generators, which really aren't terribly expensive considering the benefit... (shuffles off to check local cl for generators...)

    • (Score: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:58AM (1 child)

      by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:58AM (#567683) Homepage Journal

      Can you imagine power poles in New York City? What an eyesore and a hazard that would be! A disaster for the property values, for the curb appeal. You go to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, nobody knows more about money. You go to the NYSE, nobody knows more about business. You go to Trump Tower, nobody knows more about real estate. No power poles in sight! 🇺🇸

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:37AM (#567679)

    We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars for an urban county that at the time had 200k residents (and a very high population density

    So about the same price as one F35, the fighter jet best known for being slower than an old Russian TU-160 bomber...

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 14 2017, @01:34PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday September 14 2017, @01:34PM (#567777) Journal

    Some management type decided it was cheaper for them to just let my electricity get knocked out than to do proper maintenance, the same maintenance that had been done since the lines were installed in the 1930s and 1940s.

    I think it's going to get worse with all the new plastic hardware being used on the lines now. Plastic coated fiberglass or glass reinforced plastic is all the rage but will not outlast the metal and porcelain/glass insulators of last century. In my neighborhood in south queens, the old hardware still standing is 90-100 years old. Sure the poles are heavily weathered, arms thin and populated with rotted wooden pins from previous repairs. But they are still delivering electric. Only one short power outage this year and the last was sandy. Before that, the great northeast blackout of 2003. Not bad for nearly 100 year old hardware. All the newer poles going up are taller and use plastic insulators. I'm sure the bean counters love the low cost. Doesn't matter to them because by the time the hardware falls apart and the utility is swamped with repairs, they'll be retiring to another part of the country they didn't fuck up.