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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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:30AM
The dependence of the wind damage to wind speed is supralinear - if only considering a simplified model with "damage is proportional with the kinetic energy transferred", you'd get something that goes with the square of the speed. This simplified model may apply for "laminar flow" which is as close as possible to "sturdy buildings in constant (trade) winds".
Unfortunately, the relation damage/speed goes even further than supra-quadratic for stormy weather; even when considered only local effects, gust of winds, induced vibration, turbulence/vortices etc. will increase the damage with more than the square of the wind speed.
When considering "damage integrated over space/time" the things goes even more complicated - e.g. debris from one place carried by wind into another will produce secondary damages [accuweather.com], if the wind is strong enough you can even see a cascade breakdown effect (if a "clean tornado" is scary, imagine a tornado whirling all the debris).
Here's an Fine study fitting the hurricane loss (L) over maximum speed (Vmax) and size of the storm(R) [iop.org]: it goes with L = 10c VmaxaRb, with "with c determining an overall scaling factor and the exponents a and b generally ranging between 4–12 and 2–4 respectively. ".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford