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)?
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.
They are. In developed countries.
In some countries it’s way more important that a few people can buy a third Yacht.
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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
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.
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 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. It also means a long installation time which mean 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.
Companies have done the math, repeatedly.
If underground cost less even over a 5 year period, they would be doing it.
Power lines need way less maintenance if you bury them.
Orders of magnitude less maintenance.
its likely becauses it protected from damage by the ground/concrete, and wear and tear from weather.
The cost to reach them to diagnose and replace outweighs the decreased maintenance. Digging is really expensive.
They generally are, in rich countries. In poorer countries with less developed infrastructure you can still commonly find them.
shrugs in American
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.
less efficient. loses more power to ground capacitance
They wouldn’t be coated or in a tube/box of some kind to ameliorate that?
Yeah they would, as multiple countries with a better standard of living than the US have already been doing it for quite a while.
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.
It would save money in the long run though.
Yes, do people in power care though?
At best they do not care no. They are extracting money for donors. As such more often they oppose more efficient ways of doing things on behalf of the ones doing it now.
Please provide the research you are basing that claim on.
You would pay thousands for each meter of duct built including resurfacing whereas you would likely stand two poles with the same distance for less than a grand.
Take it that overhead is more likely to cause future issues, they would need to be significantly more for that to be the case. Where this comes in is regulations on SLAs and fines, loss of service costs. But on a pure cost basis it likely would take a long time for underground to balance out.
Companies also dont care and would prefer to lower build costs at the risk of future operational costs
Tax cuts and tax discounts to the rich and filthy rich
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing to be aware of is that it’s much easier and cheaper to repair damages or upgrade it. Underground is not without problems too, moisture or ground movement for example.
There is moisture above ground too and ground movement can affect the poles as well. I would think that there is more exposure to damages above ground with cars hitting them, tree limbs, strong winds, animals chewing through wires, etc. While it’s easier to repair damages above ground I believe there would be less of them with buried lines.
Cost and ease of maintenance. Isn’t it obvious? The only ugly thing is instead of having separated multuple conductors without isolation on the wire, you can have isolated wires, and twisted together, so instead of 50 wires throughout the air, you would have one thicker.
Let me reverse the question
Why do power cables need to be buried in non dense urban area?
Yes it will make it a bit ugly, but so what?. It’s not like it being ugly will do anything anyway. It’s not like being a bit ugly is a very annoying thing unlike when there a trash heap and it smells bad.
I think we should just keep it up there for sub-urban and rural areas, and invest the saved money on other things.
Also, im from developing country so my perspective is bit different for this topic.
It makes life harder on Spider-Man if you bury things.
I work for a Telco and most of our service interruptions are caused by fibre cuts, falling trees on poles, and ice or fire damage to aerial cables. Underground is just so much better.
Plus if theyre underground the great north american fiber seeking backhoe can get its fill! /s
sweden hasn’t had residential power lines on poles since like the 70’s. when i visited north america in 2008 i was shocked by the aerial rats’ nests everywhere.
That’s because of the harsh climate though? Cheaper to pay more for digged cables than constantly repair aerial lines? At least it alleviates the cost.
i mean we still have aerial lines for high voltage.
Sure, but the cheap wooden low voltage that got wrecked in storms are gone.
we don’t really get storms like that.
https://wprices.com/energy-prices/household-electricity-prices-in-europe/
Sweden has residential electricity prices at $0.2768/kWh.
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
The US averages $0.1798/kWh.
Sweden has residential electricity prices at $0.2768/kWh.
The US averages $0.1798/kWh.
I accept the cost-benefits analysis and wish to proceed on this quote.
That has nothing to do with the power lines
idk where that place pulls from but i pay $.08/kWh. when i lived further north it was $0.02.
there was a period where the prices went to what you quoted but that was in connection to the nord stream sabotage where germany’s prices skyrocketed and ours were dragged up along with them.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics
Here’s the European Commission.
okay? i’m just checking my power bills.
That may be true. I’m just telling you that if so, it doesn’t reflect Sweden as a whole.
sweden is split into four “electricity zones”, from north to south. the prices seem to match those in zone 4, in the very very south.
Edit:
here is the current price for each zone in öre/kWh (an öre is 1/100th of a krona). divide by 10 and you get cents, ish.
for reference the current spot price when converted is $0.12/kWh. more than i pay but i have a fixed kWh price.
The price of electricity in a country usually has nothing to do with whether power lines are run above or below the ground. Very often a large part of your electricity price is determined by taxes and subsidies for example. And in my country (the Netherlands) the suppliers of electricity are different companies than the ones responsible for the power network too. Like Sweden we haven’t had residential power lines running above ground for half a century or so, it’s pretty uncommon in (Western?) Europe.
Infrastructure is a huge part of electricity prices.
I think in most of Europe, the cost of the actual electricity and the delivery of the electricity (i.e the infrastructure cost) is split into two different costs. Not sure if the price cited above includes both.
Ditto Germany. We just have the big pylons running from the hydroelectric wossname in the Rhine.
Well yeah, it’s quite easy to keep your energy prices low when you
- have a wealth of hydrocarbon sources in-country
- supplement them by bombing other nations until they give you there’s
- don’t give a flying fuch about the planet
And yet, the US pays normal market rates for crude like everyone else.
That could be it.
Digging isn’t free in Sweden either, right? Maybe OP thinks they’re ugly, but sometimes good enough is good enough.
Meanwhile as an American Japan shocked me with their electrical situation. Modern buildings just running wires openly along the walls and even urban areas having overhead wiring
Japan is one of the exceptions though, they get a lot of earthquakes.
Area of Sweden 73,860 sq mi
Area of the USA 3,531,839 sq mi
Population of Sweden: 10.6 million
Population of the USA: 340.1 million
So the population density is very similar and I therefore don’t understand what you’re getting at.
Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.
The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.
okay? we don’t bury high-voltage lines, if that’s what you’re implying.
It’s easy when nearly all of your population lives in a third of your landmass mostly in the south. We’re still talking about residential. Most of our cities and towns are also not walkable if that gives you an estimate of how spread out we are even in urban areas here.
Besides it took laws for power companies to get the last rural communities and families. I remember my grandparents talking about it. Honestly the better investment would be putting up solar panels cut off from the grid with battery banks to cover the most rural over here.
all the power generation is in the north
I thought we were talking about residential lines, not transmission lines.
then why does geographical location matter?
Population density matters:
I mean there’s a cost per mile to lay cable underground, and that cost per customer goes down when the population density is higher, which it is in all of Europe compared to the US.
the us has higher population density than sweden.
In certain areas. But most of the us has a rather low density. You don’t see above ground lines in most US cities.
just like sweden.
I really don’t understand that argument. So is most of the US not connected to the sewers? Since these are also dug underground. If you already dig trenches for the sewer system, then you can also place electricity lines for relatively cheap. Though that was not done in the US and retrofitting is a big cost, usually only done, when you need to dig either way (e.g. for modernizing the sewer system). So its more about the default and if a country can take the opportunity when sewers get modernized
Yeah, there’s quite a bit of residential on septic tanks here. Incorporated towns is usually the line where public sewer exists. Before you ask, not every home here is on municipal water either nor natural gas. I remember a family growing up that got water deliveries for their cistern if their well ever ran dry. My childhood home had a giant propane tank for our gas appliances and a septic tank system because we lived on the other side of an interstate highway even though we lived “within the city limits”. I remember dad always saying it was difficult for the utilities to bore under the interstate to get the handful of homes (maybe 50 of us?) in the city limits on the other side. More homes in the USA have access to power than municipal water, moreso than natural gas, and much moreso than public sewer. Like I said elsewhere, we are really spread out. This guy really puts it into perspective
You have no idea how infrastructure is built.
