Look at a map.
Just start at the distribution center or sub-station.
Now look at the Number of users per running mile of underground cable. ( you can assume the cost per foot or mile will average out the same for each country in regards to ground type. )
To get to each user requires more underground cable.
We can’t even keep our roads up and you all think we should start an underground electrical grid? Who is gonna pay for it?
Oh, more taxes… right? Higher prices on homes? … How is that working for us?
No, that doesn’t count as a cite. I was thinking of something like, you know, real numbers, you know, for grid* costs. You know, dollars, Euros or some other freely convertible currency.
Local grid, not long-distance high-voltage distribution. As has been mentioned a couple of times, we do the latter overhead also here in Europe.
But the article quoted in the OP talked about “black power lines in cities”, obviously referring to local power distribution, and not high-voltage lines. (And I did also mention the difference in my post …)
I can guarantee that my electric bill per KWH did not go down since 2008. I can state that for the tail end of the hurricane, we had our town DPW sitting on their ass for almost the entire week waiting for someone from the electric company to be arsed to show up and flick some breakers to turn power off in downed lines so they could remove trees. For the blizzard, we chatted up the crew that came to our house and discovered for eastern CT they had all of 5 2 man work crews on for eastern CT.
I have noticed more and more power outages in the past 10 years, it is bad enough we are considering changing from our portable generator to an installed Generac that will automatically change over when the power to the house goes down so we will no longer have to deal with wondering when the hell our power will be back and running out in the middle of the night, or out in a storm/snow to refill and restart the generator just to keep our food from rotting in the freezer and sitting in the dark. I will admit I like heating with the wood stove though - I make a killer pot of chili on the top.
Yes, I see that you and others noted the difference between the two. I thought that this thread risked creating the false impression that transmission lines in Europe are commonly run underground (even if the posters themselves are well-informed), but I may have been mistaken.
In any event, if I were not myself working in the electricity business, I can’t say for sure that I would be aware of the differences between transmission and distribution, between TSOs, network operators and suppliers, so I wouldn’t criticise anyone else who was unclear about these distinctions. Not that any such confusion has been evident in this thread.
I don’t know about the goal so much as the paper work I received had the area left to convert and the amount that is being converted per year and I did the math. The first I heard about the program to put the utilities underground was when I received in the mail the paper work that they were going to start doing this in my neighborhood. I would say the vast majority of people in San Diego living in neighborhoods with above ground utilities are unaware of the program.
I think power lines in the US are not only run overland rather than underground because of the cost factor. How much do you think it costs each year for repairs to these lines, not to mention the power outages that people are constantly having to endure. Also the US is still using the almost obsolete 110v 60 cycle lines. The infrastructure in the US is third world at best. I’ve lived in Germany for 44 years now which BTW do not have overland power lines except maybe a few outlaying small areas. In that time I have never experienced a power outage other than maybe a few times ( like 2 times) for a couple of hours due to upgrades or maintenance which were announced before the work was to be done. People in the US can’t say that. Time to wake up America.
There’s a very good technical reason why high tension AC power lines are generally not run underground - it creates a large capacitance between the line and ground/earth, which shunts away power and massively reduces the efficiency of the transmission network. In situations where this is unavoidable - such as the grid link between England and France - the AC is converted to DC before the underground line, and then converted back to AC again at the other end.
Norfolk doesn’t exist?? Why was this not reported? Did Sizewell blow up and the guvmint suppressed the news> What about Suffolk?
To the OP’s question: You don’t see those ugly ples trailing power cables in towns (you do see telephone cables though). In the countryside, the cost of burying the cables would be too great so yes, you do see them marching across fields. They are the ones that fail in severe storms or very cold weather and people who live at the end of them will usually have alternative heating or generators for emergencies.
As others have said, power lines are basically a big no. I’ve lived in small town England, Birmingham, London and Stockholm. None of them had power cables everywhere. The only exception is telephone cables. For one reason or another, they still exist. I was recently in the US and was genuinely amazed by the amount of cables everywhere and how generally unsafe it all looked. I know it isn’t, there aren’t masses of people dying all the time due to unsafe wiring, but my reaction shows how unusual I found it all.
In other news, last weekend I took this photo from a balcony in downtown Stockholm. The area is clearly built up, the buildings are about a hundred years old and there’s nothing like the cabling I saw in the US:
My son in Seattle has a gas generator with such a transfer switch that cost him about $10K. He also has to run it for a while every couple months. The neighbors don’t like that, but they like it better when he invites them in during power failures.
The place that does this the best is Paris. Long long ago, they installed underground tubes that came to hold water, sewer, electricity, fiber optic cable and, once upon a time, a system of pneumatic tubes. The tubes are large enough to permit access for maintenance so the constant street digging that you see in Montreal for one aren’t needed.
But all urban environments I am aware in Europe are festooned with overhead wires for trams and trolleybuses. Not only don’t I find them ugly, they tell me where I can find public transit.
In my area of Michigan, new developments are required to have underground utilities. Older homes like mine will probably be served by overhead lines for a very long time. I have a whole house generator with a transfer switch. I’ve needed it - we have lost power for as long as a week at a time. 2013 was a bad year, I lost power for 14 days that year, 7 days at one stretch. Not having power out here means no water, no flushing toilets, no showers, no heat or lights. The only drawback is a generator large enough to run your home is pretty greedy of fuel. 2 gallons plus per hour, and if you are on propane, that can mean $7 to 10 per hour. During the winter of 2013, we had ice storms that took out the electric lines, then temps down to -15F. Folks without generators had their houses froze up. I know it convinced a couple of my neighbor’s to move to Florida:cool:
Some older US cities (like New York City) and older, downtown parts of other cities have this.
There were many other cities planning to install such ‘utility tunnels’ back when the number of utilities increased suddenly, what with cable TV, internet, alternative phone companies, etc., and to gradually move existing utilities into them underground. These tunnels save money because repair is much easier & faster, as is upgrading utilities. It’s also better for the city, because they aren’t constantly digging up the roads, causing traffic detours & congestion, and eventual patching of the street (which wears out faster).
Alas, the utilities used their lobbyists to get the US Congress to pass a law with a little provision hidden in it that prohibits cities from rental fees for use of these tunnels. Which pretty much removed the incentive for cities to build them (or even do maintenance on existing ones).
So new utility lines in the US are added overhead on poles thru alleys, rather than underground, because that’s much cheaper. (Also, it keeps out competition – having to put up an overhead network on poles thru alleys is much harder than just running it thru a municipal utility tunnel.) Completely new developments often do utilities underground, but each company runs their own underground lines, with no common trenches or coordination with the others. Often cutting each others’ buried lines in the process.
So the plethora of overhead lines in the US is large & growing, because of a corrupt provision hidden in a law passed 30-some years ago.
There’s also the fact that buried power lines have a greater transmission loss than overhead lines. (Someone with more electrical engineering than me will have to explain why.) And this loss continues for the entire lifetime of the buried line.
With much of the electrical grid overburdened by increased demand, with constant exhortations for consumers to save electricity by things like replacing incandescent bulbs, the additional loss of buried power lines could be significant in many places.
