And the Juice is still off

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Power still off in many areas.

 

If there ever was an example of what happens when the grid fails, this is it.  Overhead wires eh?

[metarvo 712]

It makes me glad my state has its own grid.  There's been some snow and ice here, but there haven't been all that many power outages yet this winter.  I feel bad for those who are dealing with this, though.  A lot of the older power sources (e.g. coal, hydro, etc.) are being blackballed in favor of newer sources (e.g. wind and solar).  That limits generation capacity unless the newer sources pick up the slack, and the renewable sources are often spread out, so more transmission lines are needed.  The grid is aging and in need of maintenance, but repairs generally get made only when an outage occurs.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Update.

 

Must be nice to be off the continental grid.  Actually, I believe that the one affected is only the North-eastern grid, and there are subdivisions.

[heat33330 26]

It's ridiculous that governments haven't started to work at getting the majority of power-lines underground.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Very expensive and I am not sure that the high-tension transmission lines can be placed there under present state of practice.

[heat33330 26]

True, it is expensive but you could do it in stages with priority on major lines. It's better in the long-term and protects the power-lines from the elements.

[Fatherted 129]

There's been colossal power outages in Britain as well due to floods across the country, and I had my first power cut in seven years when everything went out for 10 minutes, IN SWITZERLAND! Must have been someone's iPhone USB cable because it came back on very quickly.

[hym 358]

True, it is expensive but you could do it in stages with priority on major lines. It's better in the long-term and protects the power-lines from the elements.

 

There is a lot more to burying power lines than just costs (though that is a major one).  Transmission lines are giant capacitors.  Utilities hate this because it forces them to de-rate the line and suffer efficiency losses that cost them money, but there is no way around it.  They accept that it is unavoidable and do their best to try to keep it to a minimum.  Burying transmission lines makes this capacitance issue worse, sometimes to the point that the utility has to install special hardware to compensate for the phenomenon so that they can continue to push useful power down the line to the customer.  This represents millions of dollars in additional costs, plus it complicates the engineering work to the point that it may be necessary to bring in power engineering consultants to solve the issue.  (This is a problem because there are a limited number of organizations in the world that possess these skills, and they charge millions for their services.)

 

There is also the issue that because buried transmission lines are less tolerant of abuse than their above ground siblings, they have to be significantly de-rated to ensure safe operating margins.  This means that you need more infrastructure to serve the same demand, which means hundreds of millions (or billions) in additional equipment expenditures to handle the same customer demand.  The equipment that you need costs more money per foot than above ground cable does and you need more of it.  Additionally, there are fewer companies that offer the products you need, they have fewer fabrication shops capable of making those products, and they need more time to produce it.

 

Additionally, buried power lines are not necessarily more resilient than above ground cables.  Mud slides, floods, earthquakes, forest fires, and more can damage underground power lines.  Damaged lines can be harder to identify and harder to fix.  In some cases, like flooding, the power company may not be able to do anything about the damaged power line till the ground dries out, which could be days.  Reliability analysis of above ground versus under ground power lines has suggested that the under ground lines do not usually offer appreciable improvements in service reliability, and frequently suffer significantly longer restoration times than above ground power lines.

 

Finally, there is the issue of cost.  Louisiana looked at burying its power lines, then stopped when it saw the cost was roughly $70 billion.  North Carolina and Florida both considered it, till they saw that their electric rates would roughly double.  In general, if you want to bury power lines, you need to be prepared to pay 10-15 times the cost of running them overhead.

[Duke87 1,070]

Long distance transmission lines which are on cleared rights of way and built to be high up are fine and dandy as is. The reason people want underground power lines is so trees won't fall on them, which is the cause of most blackouts in the northeast. So really it's local distribution lines we're talking about here.

 

Now, yes, from a purely monetary perspective, the costs of underground lines are high and the utility sees little financial benefit from them. This is of course why private for-profit utilities tend not to be fond of them.

 

But let's think about the broader picture here: if you went and buried more local power lines underground (just don't do so in flood-prone spots), the blackouts caused by major storms would be far less extensive. This helps the area recover faster, which has regional economic benefits. It minimizes the negative public safety implications of prolonged blackouts (particularly during very hot or very cold weather). And it avoids the inconvenience of having no power for days for a lot of people.

It would, however, have to be subsidized in order to happen.

 

And granted, underground lines are not indestructible - but let's be realistic here: during hurricane Irene, and during the freak snowstorm that followed a couple months later, the lights stayed on pretty much everywhere in New York City that had underground power lines. The suburbs, where the lines are mostly above ground, got wrecked.

The same could even be said of Sandy, with the exception that part of the city got knocked offline by flooding - but even then, the northern half of Manhattan along with most of Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx did not suffer an outage. The suburbs? A week with no power.

[metarvo 712]

Let's not forget that if something goes wrong with an underground power line, a lot of digging has to be done the way it does with water lines.  This step isn't required with the familiar overhead wires.  Oh, and there had better not be anything built on top of the lines, or things would get complicated.

[Duke87 1,070]

Let's not forget that if something goes wrong with an underground power line, a lot of digging has to be done the way it does with water lines.  This step isn't required with the familiar overhead wires.  Oh, and there had better not be anything built on top of the lines, or things would get complicated.

 

Any underground lines should be under the street. There is no reason for them not to be and that solves the "stuff built on top of it" problem

 

As for digging to fix breaks, not necessarily: the wires run through conduits and if a section of wire goes bad, all you have to do is go into the manhole on either side, snip it, pull it out, pull new wire through the conduit, and splice it back in. No shovel needed. You only need to dig if the conduit itself breaks, which it isn't nearly as susceptible to doing as a water main since it doesn't contain anything under pressure which can rupture it if it weakens.

[hym 358]

But let's think about the broader picture here: if you went and buried more local power lines underground (just don't do so in flood-prone spots), the blackouts caused by major storms would be far less extensive. This helps the area recover faster, which has regional economic benefits. It minimizes the negative public safety implications of prolonged blackouts (particularly during very hot or very cold weather). And it avoids the inconvenience of having no power for days for a lot of people.

It would, however, have to be subsidized in order to happen.

 

Which raises the question of who would subsidize the cost of burying the lines.  In general, neither people nor governments are willing to foot the bill necessary to perform extensive line burying operations, so you're back at square one again.

 

There is also the cost/benefit analysis to consider.  Most power line damage comes from these three sources:

1. Fallen trees
2. Water accumulation
3. High winds

The first is solvable with proper tree trimming programs, and is usually readily doable using existing fee structures and prices.  The second can be solved using some technology that superimposes a high frequency signal in the power line to heat the line above freezing to prevent precipitation accumulation.  The third cause doesn't really have a solution, but it is fairly uncommon for wind speeds to be high enough to cause a power line to snap.

 

Personally, when the vast bulk of power line damage can be prevented via programs and technology that are cheap, simple, and commercially viable for little or no increase in consumer prices, it makes it hard to justify the cost and hassle associated with burying the power lines.

[Duke87 1,070]

Maybe it's different in other areas, but in the northeast, utilities have largely stopped trimming trees because every time they do, nearby residents complain about their trees being cut up. And if the tree is part of a park or wildlife sanctuary or what have you, that only gets a thousand times worse.

 

So the companies have thrown their hands in the air and given up, having decided it's easier to clean up the mess whenever a storm comes than to fight with people to let them take preventative measures.

 

The availability of FEMA money for storm recovery has also corrupted priorities among utilities and public service agencies since they have realized that the feds will readily pay to rebuild things if a storm destroys them, but federal money for measures to prevent things from being destroyed in the first place is tougher to come by.

[Jasoncw 12,030]

Yeah I don't get it but people fight the tree trimming. Once the power company was removing some big old trees that were in some power lines, and there was outrage over it on the news from the home owners. I understand that people like their trees and I would be sad if I had to lose trees like that, but the fact of the matter is that the places where the trees were needed to not have trees.

 

But they've stopped doing that for the most part.

 

They only trim every few years and they do the minimum. Behind my house is a tree that the lines were literally tangled up in. Some branches were holding lines up and other branches were pulling lines downward. They trimmed a few months ago, and iirc the last time the lines got any relief was when the tree pulled them down and we had a live power line in our backyard for a few days.

 

Right now it's a painful decision, whether or not to bury them. New areas are building them underground, which is how most of them should have been done in the first place. Now there are areas in Detroit that lose power 4 or 5 times every summer, and every time there's a storm we hear on the news of the tens of thousands of customers out of power.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

I have lived in planned subdivisions that had buried power lines a few times.  It is not that hard to do when in an initial build.  One of the subdivisions was built in Scarborough, Ontario in the late 1960s and all you see of the power system is an occasional green hydro box covering a transformer box.  The technology is not new, but installing it ex post facto must be very expensive.

 

Some towns and cities now have bylaws requiring this approach, but rural areas like mine do not.  During that last storm we had an outage of about four to six hours, but it was in the dead of night and I only found out in the morning when I had to reset my clocks.  For all the complaining about Hydro One around here, it is not all that bad.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

And in tropical B.A. ...

 

Just remember the three laws of thermodynamics:

 

1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't get out of the game.

[Msprintz 25]

It's called an ice storm, and that part of the Northeastern United States has seen its share of pretty severe ice storms. Burying power lines is not effective when there's enough ice and the weight on the lines from these storms is capable of bringing down those tall metal high tension pylons. Yes ice storms of that magnitude have happened up there, one that blacked out much of region for weeks and for some people months back in 1998.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Living in southern Ontario means we see a lot more of them than most.  There is another one heading for New Brunswick, which hasn't got its act together as yet.