Was driivng down a major thoroughfare yesterday, and thinking to myself how ugly the whole thing was. Suddenly, the reason why hit me like a ton of bricks: the power/phone lines! They stretched all over the place, across the street a couple of times per block.
So my question is for the urban-planner nerds; if I’m a city planner looking to improve the looks of a street, what options exist for getting rid of power lines? Can they just be buried, and run to the buildings underground? (That seems to be the norm for new or downtown buildings, so I assume so.) Would it just be a matter of cost, since all the affected buildings would need some rewiring?
Yes that can be done. However digging trenches to bury them in most cities is a real pain. What with sewers, water, gas lines and all such stuff already buried its a real hassel. As a rule of thumb, whenver you dig a trench more than XXX ft. long in a city you cut someone elses buried facility.
Also, once you’ve buried the lines, repair is much more difficult. Not just repairing the lines, but even finding the problem requires a whole lot more effort and money. Where I am, new developments have buried lines but older areas aren’t being converted.
I’d assume that at least part of the cost is justified by not having to have as many crews out when the next thunderstorm/ice storm blows through. If you bury the powerlines properly, one would think that they’d need far less maintenance.
But yeah, power lines are a quick way to uglify a neighborhood. The only problem with the underground ones is that they seem to spawn these ugly green utility boxes in front of all the properties. The boxes themselves look like industrial crap got dropped in some random homeowner’s front yard, so it sort of diminishes the benefit of taking down the powerlines.
San Francisco has an active Utility Undergrounding Program. It’s a pain while the streets are being torn up, but once it’s completed it makes a huge difference. Here’s a good New York Times article on the topic (may require registration).
I read recently (sorry no cite) that burying the lines in a new suburban type area runs about $1,000,000 per square mile. Presumably the cost is much greater in existing areas and much, much more in urban areas. The cost of maintenance goes up a great deal also presumably way offsetting the gains from crews having to lift a few lines back in place after a storm. You also have to careful track those things, keep tabs on what is close, and have an excellent system to keep work crews in touch with everything that runs through every square inch of everyone’s property.
I should add that it locks existing services in place also. Want 10 mbs DSL or cable? You can’t have it because they can’t just dig everything up to put something silly like that in and the poles were taken down long ago in the interest of beauty.
100,000 people living in Queens, NY, had no power for over a week, in part because of the difficulty of finding and repairing underground power lines. Imagine living on the 30th floor of an apartment building with no power, a fridge full of rotting food, and no water (pumps required for that height).
If you are going to bury utilities you should do what Paris did nearly 2 centuries ago and build man-sized utility tunnels. They were intended for water and sewage, but have subsequently been used for telegraph, pneumatic tubes, electricity, telephone, internet, … at very little cost. Enormous cost for the infrastructure, but it has paid for itself many times over.
Here in Manhattan Beach, CA there is a lively debate going on over undergrounding. Am I the only one that thinks power lines really aren’t that ugly? It seems to me that if you really want to make a neighborhood prettier, repainting, repairing cracked streets and sidewalks, and planting trees would probably be more effective. Is it just me?
After the massive power outages in St. Louis, the head of the local power company said the same thing – $1,000,000 per mile to bury the power lines vs. IIRC) something like $36,000 per mile for overhead. He also said that in some older areas it was impossible to bury the lines, due to the building density.
When I worked downtown an underground substation caught fire. It took days to clean the thing out, replace all the ruined equipment, etc. I’ve seen similar repairs on above-ground stations that took less than a day.
Those can no longer be done in USA cities, due to some language slipped into a bill in Congress.
This bill was supposedly to encourage cell phone towers, and overrode all local zoning and such regulations for them. (Many cities were concerned about cellular towers sprouting all over, and becoming an eyesore in neighborhoods, so were putting restrictions on them or requiring less unsightly towers.) The cell phone companies didn’t like these local requirements, so they got their friends in Congress to pass a national law overturning all such local restrictions.
The bill also contained a provision restricting local governments from charging fees to utility companies for access to public space. It was written very broadly, so courts have interpreted it real strictly – almost any fee is disallowed.
It would certainly be beneficial to a city to have downtown areas with a tunnel system under them, for electric, gas, phone, cable, etc. lines. And beneficial to utilities too, since it would be much easier & faster to string additional lines thru a tunnel instead of digging up streets. (But then again, that would make it easier for a new competitor to get into the business, too.)
But this law means that if a city built such a tunnel system, they would not be allowed to charge utility companies any kind of rent or fees for using it. Given the financial condition of most cities nowdays, they certainly aren’t going to spend millions of dollars to build such a tunnel system if they can never recover that money. (And as a taxpayer, I’d certainly object to it.)
I suppose it would be possible for a private company, or a consortium of utilities to build such a tunnel system. But there don’t seem to be private companies willing to invest the millons it would take up front, and wait years to start making a profit.
We’ve addressed this point numerous times, especially when hurricanes knock out power.
The answers have mostly been addressed here. The cost for retrofitting the entire U.S. power system underground has been estimated in the trillions of dollars. Wet, soggy, or frozen soils can shift or compact, causing lines to break in ways that are hard to detect. Digging up lines to repair is expensive and difficult and people hate having their yards destroyed. Putting in more modern equipment costs almost as much as putting the lines underground in the first place.
There are places and conditions and times when it makes perfectly good sense in a cost/benefit scenario to put the lines underground from the beginning. There are fewer times when retrofitting them is a good idea. There isn’t enough free money floating around in the world to do it for the whole U.S.
And then you’d have to ask: Who pays for it? Talk about a nightmare of finger pointing.
Nope, not just you. They don’t bother me either. I’m not a fan of undergrounding, because of initial costs, O&M costs, and upgrade costs (see Shagnasty’s post above). It kinda reminds me of the debate about cell phone towers - Yeah, you want service in the area, but refuse to allow a tower. :dubious:
Only if they’re designed by idiots. Any sensible underground wiring system will include excess tunnel capacity and pull cords. If you want to add more wires, or a different kind of wire, just take your bundle to the nearest access point, tie it to the pull cord, and pull it through to the next one. Easy as pie.
Perhaps it’s my practical nature. I’d much rather pay a lower cost per kilowatt for a system on poles and wires, than pay a higher cost for underground. Shucks, I’m just happy to be on the grid. YMMV.
I’d much rather pay a lower cost per kilowatt for a system on poles and wires, than pay a higher cost for underground. Shucks, I’m just happy to be on the grid. YMMV.