No powerlines in Europe? Really?

What the OP is referring to as “these ugly powerlines hanging from tree to tree or pole to pole like it is the case here in SF” may be the power lines for the transit system. The streetcars and most of the buses run on electricity tapped from overhead lines by an articulated conductor thing. They’re damn near everywhere, and they are ugly. Not as ugly as smog, though.

In my back yard. The powerline serving my house and the neighbors runs over the top of the privacy fence between the lots on adjacent streets. Everybody’s trees have grown up so the power lines are going through them. PG&E doesn’t seem to be bothered by this. And since they don’t have access from the street, if they have to work on the lines, they have to drag ladders into people’s back yards to get up the poles.

Interesting. This is the ideal way to do this, but it also proves the magnitude of the process and why it is not happening more often. Is the goal really “the turn of the century”? That’s a 100-year timeline. How many people living in San Diego today would take 2100 as reasonable for their neighborhood? Is it realistic for any company to plan for such a distant goal? What happens when populations shifts need to be accounted for or budget cuts have to be made? San Diego is growing and prosperous today, but that’s where the Rust Belt was 100 years ago. Their utilities are stretched to the limit without adding any extra services. Good as this sounds, it’s not a real answer nationally.

European countries do have overhead lines.

Each year they have fewer and fewer because they put money into their infrastructure. Underground lines are about ten times as expensive as overhead lines. Underground lines require less maintenance and have fewer problems. While per instance it might be more money to repair an underground line, it cost less over time. Trees don’t need to be trimmed for underground lines and people don’t hit them with cars for examples. In the US we have hundreds of competing companies who need to show short term profits. It makes no sense for them to them to in invest underground infrastructure. Without government intervention our grid will stay on poles. In the US aesthetics have more to do with the conversation about underground infrastructure than long term cost and sustainability.

Many European countries tend to invest more into their grid per kilowatt hour than the US. Consider a country like England, they invest 16.8 million dollars a year per gigawatt. In the US we invest a mere 4.5 million per gigawatt. We are a third world country in comparison. The result of their increased spending is a far more reliable grid with less waste. If you remove losses of electricity due to natural disasters and extreme weather in American it works out to 92 minutes a year without power per customer. In England it’s 10 minutes a year per customer.

You’d think with 4-5 times the investment into their infrastructure per year they’d be seeing bills 4-5 times as much, but that isn’t the case the average cost per kilowatts hour in Europe runs similar to the US. Usually there is only one company per European country to manage their grid. In the US we have hundreds. I’d guess a far share of the money we pay goes into those profits rather than the grid itself.

If we want a more reliable grid we’d need to follow the European trend which is more underground service. Remote area’s in both Europe and the US will probably stay above ground for our lifetimes.

Quite unlikely. European cities do have tramlines (street cars) that get their electricity from overhead (the German wiki article has several photos), I guess much more than the US, because public transport is more widespread in Europe, and Trams are more environmentally friendly and efficient than stinking diesel buses.

If the article is comparing only SF with other European cities and not the whole countryside, then it seems much more plausible and likely to be true at least for Western Europe.

Not quite true, in the past decades, e.g. in Germany power companies have become privatized. The way to make companies act for the common good is not to wait for them to develop a conscience or long-term vision (which they never will) but to make laws that require them to.

Absent that, you could do what worked once before in a recession, when FDR started building infrastructure (and hitting two flies at once: providing employment and infrastructure).

Actually, what you need far more urgent is one compatible sturdy system first instead of four (more or less parallel) grids. This prevents power produced with solar in the Nevada desert to reach the Mid-west, or with wind on the East Coast from reaching California during brown-outs.

Built one network grid, and parallel some wind and solar parks, and you’d be a great step ahead.

(bolding mine)

They aren’t?! :dubious::eek:

They (and you, too) should be! It can quickly become an extremely dangerous situation. :eek:
Besides the fact that tree limbs rubbing against power lines, causes unnecessary wear.
Which necessitates more frequent repair and replacement.
(And guess who’s going to foot the bill for the increased cost?)

Well, yeah, I am. And to be more precise about it, perhaps PG&E is, too, but not to the extent that they do anything about it. The real culprit is whomever designed a development with utility poles running between the lots. I have a utility pole up against a privacy fence in the corner of my back yard.

A couple months back, a nice huge tree limb in somebody’s back yard a few doors down the street DID fall and take out the power to a couple blocks. I was lying in bed reading, saw a huge flash out the back window (yeah, from a couple doors down), and the place browned out (it only took out one of the two lines of the two line service into the houses). I shut off my whole house fan which kept trying to run and was wheezing, and eventually pulled my house’s breaker so that motors like that one and the fridge wouldn’t be trying to run on inadequate power and burn out. Somebody was passing word around the neighborhood that we should do that. The line actually snapped about a block up the street from the fallen tree limb and landed in THAT guy’s back yard. Took PG&E about a day to give us the power back, mostly because they had to wait for the tree guys to finish (they don’t have vehicle access to people’s back yards either, obviously).

u/g lines are the normal in Greater London but you do occasionally get o/h local power distribution in urban areas. Much more common in rural ones, of course.

In the UK [ and most of Europe ] all high tension cables are carried on overground pylons but all urban and most rural domestic electric feeds are underground.

One of the many aspects of the superiority of the 240 volt system compared to the puny N. American 110 volt system, but we don’t like to crow about these things in case you invade our asses.

I live in the northeast United States. Most of the household heat here is oil or natural gas and most of it will not work without electricity. I am not an electrical expert but even if the pumps and other controls only require a small amount of electricity to run they are not wired in a way that would make them easy to plug into a generator. They are hardwired so you would have to get power to the fuse panel somehow or rewire them I guess. It’s not something I have heard of people doing.

older homes may be wired to only operate off the electrical grid.

in modern homes an option that people can choose is to have a generator transfer switch put in. this switch in one position (normal use) uses power from the electrical grid and in the other position (emergency use) uses power from your generator (while cutting your home off from the electrical grid). this generator transfer switch might also be wired to a subpanel where essential loads only ( like heating system, refrigerator, freezer, a few receptacles and if you have them solar thermal collection pump, sump pump, water well pump) are run by your generator.

these generator transfer switches can be installed into older homes if desired.

Our power lines are always too close to trees where I live, and when the wind gusts get over 30mph the power usually flickers or goes out.

I’d love the idea of underground power lines!

Look at the distances involved in each country. Even in the cities. People density…

It cost a lot more per person to go under ground in most US cities.

We do not have the falling bombs fresh in our memories like most of Europe.

If a company can make more doing it that way, they would. Someone said it costs less in tghe long run. What is that time frame factoring in the distances and the number of users / density in this country.

Offhand, that seems like a bit of an exaggeration to me, so I’d like to see a cite for that claim, please.

For the majority of Europeans (excluding people living in the Balkans, Chechnya and such places), 1945 isn’t particularly “fresh in our memories”. Even my mother who’s 70, don’t remember much from the war. So, falling bombs are definitely not a factor which is considered particularly strongly when Euro power companies decide whether they are routing utilities above ground or below.

The regular autumn storms are, though.

Sure. But even a die-hard Euro-centric like me has to admit that even the far North Atlantic autumn storms are farts compared to a Midwest tornado or a Southeast USA hurricane or typhoon.

Unless those tornadoes are so attracted by trailer parks that they miss the power lines completely…

Given how regular the winter storms hit the East Coast and Midwestern US each year, often bringing either heavy snow or high winds or both and thus toppling power lines, this would be a good investment for a home owner to be indepent of downed lines, right?

Any good reason why, if the companies are unwilling to provide stable infrastructure, those affected by outages aren’t becoming indepent themselves? Does it hit only poor people who live in flats (and can barely afford the rent, but no generator), and home-owners already have generators (though I rarely hear of them)? Or is energy indepence, even for temporary emergencies, too un-american? (It’s against capitalism and too socialist, like solar power is?) What’s the reason?

Which is why it makes sense that the Euros bury their lines to be safe from the (relativly) harmless storms, and Americans leave their lines aboveground to be open to the wilder storms.

Oh, wait…

Out of curiosity what would something like this cost including installation(including a generator)? Just a ballpark figure say for a system that could handle essentials (IE furnace, fridge and a couple lights) and a system that could handle the whole house (doesn’t seem like it would be that much more). I tried a google search but I really don’t have any idea what I am looking for.

Right now I am in a good sized city and power outages of more than an hour are extremely rare. I do have friends out of the city who have lost power for a few days after bad storms. If I buy a house outside the city I would most likely buy a generator and consider one of these transfer switches too. Edit - now that I think about it, I have two friends who live in the same city as me who have lost power for days after separate bad storms. Probably 10% of the city was without power both times. One storm was a week ago and the other was a about 4 years ago.

Many of the houses around here have sump pumps (to keep groundwater out of the basement), if there is a power failure that becomes an issue for many people.

I know a handful of people who own generators but I do not know anyone who has one wired directly into their home electrical system.