they have been here in sweden, only high-voltage lines remain aboveground (with much much more robust infrastructure) and the odd teensy weensy rural line that probably isn’t even active any more and remains simply because no one cares enough to dismantle it.
Ask New York City. It’s expensive af every time a change needs to be made underground because you have to dig everything up, and once you’re down there, it’s just a nest of wires in conduit so knowing which one you’re supposed to work on can be a challenge.
Underground wires have to be insulated to prevent short circuits to ground. The longer a wire needs to go, and the more power it needs to carry, the thicker it needs to be. Since insulation goes around the outside, this increases exponentially and the cable quickly becomes mostly insulation in many cases, which is expensive and inefficient.
Also, there’s only so much ground you can dig up before you hit bedrock. So, in some cases, power infrastructure expansion is limited because there’s nowhere to bury the wires.
In many places it’s easier to let the damage happen and repair it cheaply.
Yet in London, power lines are buried, alongside gas and water supplies and most of the telephony network.
Its a choice about what cost is acxeptable for the long term benefits of protection from the elements and safety generally. It costs more upfront, but extends the lifespan of cables as theyre protected from temperatures, UV, fainfall, and falling tree branches.
When they do need repair / replacement it requires digging but theyre generally subsurface, and many utilities are under pavements or to one side of the road, allowing roads to be kept partially open. But they generally require repair less frequently than exposed cabling.
fiber optics solve most of this for comms. clearly doesn’t help for electricity.
Why do they have to be dug back up? Would it not be possible to make an extra level for all cables when you dig for sewers or subways?
This also solves the grounding problem.
If you only want to do the minimum for every change then yeah, just put it above ground, but that’s how business works, governments are suppose to plan long term.
Because then all the phone calls would have sounded muffled.
Couldn’t you just yell a little louder into the phone to make up for it?
You’re thinking of “too quite” which can be solved with louder speech. Muffled remains unclear regardless of volume.
Incorrect. “Too quite” can only be cancelled out by some “not very”.
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In australia buried lines are fairly common. It’s more expense and harder to do maintainence, but it’s also way better and safer.
Perth started burying their lines in the 90s. It was supposed to take 30 years. Last I heard, they’re about half done.
Yeah i was in high school in perth in the 90s so i remember poles disappearing.
Perth has expanded massively in the last 10-15 years, i’m not surprised initial estimates were way off. Or even less surprised than normal since i believe every single infrastructure project in history has been late and overbudget.
There were supposed to be five pyramids at Giza. Cutbacks…
j/k
Bet the power stays on more during storms and shit as well.
Poles get knocked over, struck by lightning, trees, blah blah.
Where I live, ground settling causes problems with utilities. Gas company had to come last week to redo line to my house because it had dropped a foot.
More expensive to build. That doesn’t get offset by accidents and whatever. Also harder to repair in case something really is broken with it.
Very very expensive. For fiber, though, it’s starting to make sense economically.
In addition to cost (as everyone else said), work and worker qualifications. Working on underground lines requires special confined spaces training and certification, because it is more dangerous, could deal with not just electricity, but potentially hight temperatures, water, sewage, toxic gas, lack of oxygen, etc. There are even fewer people willing to do that compared to riding a bucket to the overhead lines.
Source: Worked for electrical utility
$$$
There’s 3 answers.
- It’s shitty to maintain underground wiring and it’s shitty to trench it in the first place, so while you are saving money in the long run, you’re paying upfront to run it and your routine maintenance costs are higher in short bursts instead of lower cost per issue, but a lot more issues. This makes people angry the money line didn’t go up enough that month and now you’re fired… even though you saved them money in the long run.
- You can’t run it very far underground. I won’t get into the physics, but suffice it to say, running power underground tends to be “leaky”, and it will bleed away very quickly over relatively short distances.
- Sunk Costs. Tech for trenching and boring has gotten a lot better, it costs less to do than it did 100 years ago, but moving the lines now and tearing down the old ones would cost money upfront and no one wants to pay for that.
High population of native predators:
Here they are for residential supply. It’s been this way for almost 50 years.
For high voltage AC, underground calling is actually a nightmare from a maintenance perspective.
In the city i live in (Victoria, BC) the wealthiest part of town has buried lines. Everywhere else, they’re on poles.
Some unprepared countries tried this, in an effort to modernize. Without interdeparrment communication, good documentation, coordination, signage and, well, maps that included depth data that are maintained and updated in real time, yould have frequent outages each time one works department or private contractor did some digging in an inocuous patch.
Source: am malaysian.
The poors get overhead lines, the wealthy get underground
In areas prone to severe weather they tend to get buried.
Especially after multiple event trash pole mounted ones.
I use to live in Huntsville Alabama. Between the tornadoes and ice storms Huntsville utilities just gave up and started burying them.
I’ve lived in areas where they aren’t underground BECAUSE of potential severe weather. The powerlines run through miles of wilderness and are serviced by helicopter. Which doesn’t come out when the weather’s bad. But if they were buried (which would be massively more expensive) they’d tear up lots of wilderness and flood/break regularly due to soil movement and tree growth.
Plus, running conduit through rock is a lot harder than drilling a few holes to mount a pole.
Where I am now? It’s all in conduit under the street beside the storm drains, except where there hasn’t been new development to pay for it. Seems like they have to service the conduits a lot more than the poles though, and fixing a pole line stays out of the way of traffic and takes a couple of minutes, where fixing underground shorts involves blocking off a lane, snaking the cables, and bringing in specialists — takes up to 3 hours for a similar repair.
