It's roughly 5-7 times as expensive per km to bury the cables. It's mainly a cost issue.
It makes sense in dense areas, it does not make sense everywhere. Critical infrastructure has backup power anyway because digging does not solve all reliability issues.
Here in Aroostook county Maine I can tell you I have yet to see anywhere that didn’t have everything on telephone poles. Not that I can recall anyway.
Converting existing (and i hope working) infra has its own problems too and unless its absolutelly necessary it often gets sidelined.
You cant just dig a trench and drop the lines there. You need to make sure roadsides have enough space and if at any point it would require purchasing or getting permit from land owners it will get quickly complicate. Especially if there are many different owners on the stretch.
There needs to also be plans and precautions to secure that the electricity wont be cut for too long time during the work.
Also the road sides migh need to be cleaned from any vegetation and stones that might be big enough to be problem, not to mention the road it self might need additional work if its badly kept or if they need to widen it and that all rounds back to making sure there is enough space.
Its much easier to build underground cables from the get go, than change infrastructure that was build with telephone poles in mind.
Though in development of an area you probably already dig up the ground for other utilities, so in that case it is relatively easy and cheap to also put electricity lines in there too. But retrofitting in an already developed area is really expensive. So it becomes more a question of the default.
And you can have aerial fiber 😁. That's how france "fibred" the countryside.
Where did you get your numbers?
I found 2-3x and it's quoating it as $5-$15 per foot vs $10-$25
- 5-7 Sweden
- 5 to 6. UK
- 4.5 UK
https://benhopkinson.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-burying-our-grid
The second one has a link to an actual study on pricing. That study indicates directed buried is twice as expensive.
It's also has numbers on tunnel buried which is five times more expensive. Which makes sense but also means there is now a tunnel.
sweden hasn't had residential power lines on poles since like the 70's. when i visited north america in 2008 i was shocked by the aerial rats' nests everywhere.
Meanwhile as an American Japan shocked me with their electrical situation. Modern buildings just running wires openly along the walls and even urban areas having overhead wiring
Japan is one of the exceptions though, they get a lot of earthquakes.
That's because of the harsh climate though? Cheaper to pay more for digged cables than constantly repair aerial lines? At least it alleviates the cost.
i mean we still have aerial lines for high voltage.
Sure, but the cheap wooden low voltage that got wrecked in storms are gone.
we don't really get storms like that.
Duh, I grew up in Sweden and we had the occasional outage. But that was before they buried the lines.
https://wprices.com/energy-prices/household-electricity-prices-in-europe/
Sweden has residential electricity prices at $0.2768/kWh.
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
The US averages $0.1798/kWh.
The price of electricity in a country usually has nothing to do with whether power lines are run above or below the ground. Very often a large part of your electricity price is determined by taxes and subsidies for example. And in my country (the Netherlands) the suppliers of electricity are different companies than the ones responsible for the power network too. Like Sweden we haven't had residential power lines running above ground for half a century or so, it's pretty uncommon in (Western?) Europe.
Infrastructure is a huge part of electricity prices.
I think in most of Europe, the cost of the actual electricity and the delivery of the electricity (i.e the infrastructure cost) is split into two different costs. Not sure if the price cited above includes both.
If that is the case than your costs are incredibly higher.
Ditto Germany. We just have the big pylons running from the hydroelectric wossname in the Rhine.
idk where that place pulls from but i pay $.08/kWh. when i lived further north it was $0.02.
there was a period where the prices went to what you quoted but that was in connection to the nord stream sabotage where germany's prices skyrocketed and ours were dragged up along with them.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics
Here's the European Commission.
okay? i'm just checking my power bills.
That may be true. I'm just telling you that if so, it doesn't reflect Sweden as a whole.
sweden is split into four "electricity zones", from north to south. the prices seem to match those in zone 4, in the very very south.
Edit:
here is the current price for each zone in öre/kWh (an öre is 1/100th of a krona). divide by 10 and you get cents, ish.
for reference the current spot price when converted is $0.12/kWh. more than i pay but i have a fixed kWh price.
Well yeah, it's quite easy to keep your energy prices low when you
- have a wealth of hydrocarbon sources in-country
- supplement them by bombing other nations until they give you there's
- don't give a flying fuch about the planet
And yet, the US pays normal market rates for crude like everyone else.
Sweden has residential electricity prices at $0.2768/kWh.
The US averages $0.1798/kWh.
I accept the cost-benefits analysis and wish to proceed on this quote.
That could be it.
Digging isn't free in Sweden either, right? Maybe OP thinks they're ugly, but sometimes good enough is good enough.
That has nothing to do with the power lines
Area of Sweden 73,860 sq mi
Area of the USA 3,531,839 sq mi
Population of Sweden: 10.6 million
Population of the USA: 340.1 million
So the population density is very similar and I therefore don't understand what you're getting at.
Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it's very rarely relevant to any discussion.
The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn't the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.
okay? we don't bury high-voltage lines, if that's what you're implying.
It's easy when nearly all of your population lives in a third of your landmass mostly in the south. We're still talking about residential. Most of our cities and towns are also not walkable if that gives you an estimate of how spread out we are even in urban areas here.
Besides it took laws for power companies to get the last rural communities and families. I remember my grandparents talking about it. Honestly the better investment would be putting up solar panels cut off from the grid with battery banks to cover the most rural over here.
all the power generation is in the north
I thought we were talking about residential lines, not transmission lines.
then why does geographical location matter?
Population density matters:
is there supposed to be an image in your comment? anyway, some more specific numbers then.
the stockholm region, the most populated area of sweden, is a bit less than twice the size of the city of houston TX, with about the same population of 2.3 million people. but the population density of the area is about 1/4th that of houston, at 380/km2 compared to 1400.
meanwhile the norrbotten region, the most sparsely populated area, is just above alaska in population density.
I mean there's a cost per mile to lay cable underground, and that cost per customer goes down when the population density is higher, which it is in all of Europe compared to the US.
the us has higher population density than sweden.
In certain areas. But most of the us has a rather low density. You don't see above ground lines in most US cities.
just like sweden.
I really don't understand that argument. So is most of the US not connected to the sewers? Since these are also dug underground. If you already dig trenches for the sewer system, then you can also place electricity lines for relatively cheap. Though that was not done in the US and retrofitting is a big cost, usually only done, when you need to dig either way (e.g. for modernizing the sewer system). So its more about the default and if a country can take the opportunity when sewers get modernized
Yeah, there's quite a bit of residential on septic tanks here. Incorporated towns is usually the line where public sewer exists. Before you ask, not every home here is on municipal water either nor natural gas. I remember a family growing up that got water deliveries for their cistern if their well ever ran dry. My childhood home had a giant propane tank for our gas appliances and a septic tank system because we lived on the other side of an interstate highway even though we lived "within the city limits". I remember dad always saying it was difficult for the utilities to bore under the interstate to get the handful of homes (maybe 50 of us?) in the city limits on the other side. More homes in the USA have access to power than municipal water, moreso than natural gas, and much moreso than public sewer. Like I said elsewhere, we are really spread out. This guy really puts it into perspective
my family's house is in a village of around seven households. we have our own well and septic tank. power lines are still underground.
The other half of this equation is for a bunch of rural power here in the US are handled by co-ops. So the people paying for the infrastructure directly are same people that pay the power bill. If the people don't want to pay for it, they aren't going to build it out. It's why I believe the best solution for these homes would be to solar panels and battery banks.
that also sounds like sweden
You have no idea how infrastructure is built.
This is literally what we do in the Netherlands though. There's a bigger and bigger push to group underground works from multiple parties to reduce cost and nuisance
They are. In developed countries.
In some countries it's way more important that a few people can buy a third Yacht.
Don't make the mistake of looking at one region and generalising to a universal. Where are you looking at?
Here in Switzerland practically everything <1kV is buried.
For high voltage lines they have only built one section to experiment so far. It's pretty expensive, heats the ground a bit and blocks water with all the concrete, so it's not so clear if it's a good choice for agriculture happening above.
I've wondered a lot why they don't bury more infrastructure in hurricane regions in the US for example.
It sure is frustrating as an American to be like "why is x not done this other way that's better and makes more sense?" And for the almost universal answer to be "we do it that way in <European country>"
Not frustrated at you, frustrated at the US
I’ve seen them buried in some hurricane prone areas here but not many of them. I don’t think they’d need to bury most of the high voltage lines as those are easy to maintain above ground but there are a lot of disaster prone areas that could benefit from residential power being buried locally
So yes we’d need to be smart about choosing the appropriate places for it but nearly all the places that could use it dont because $$
Same in many areas built in the lat 50 years in Canada too have mostly underground wires. At least in the West.
Everywhere. La fires were caused by sparking lines, previous fires as well. Ice storms knock out power anywhere, it makes sense to bury them when possible.
Because it's much harder to bury things above ground.
I approve of this meme.
What meme are you referring to?
Almost anything infrastructure related, however it exists is probably the most efficient cost/maintenance ratio for that area. That is basically the only requirement for the engineers in charge of designing that kind of shit.
Unless you're the Texas power grid. Then it's literally the cheapest possible way to still be able to bill people for it.
If we can see that the huge influence corporations have is messing up the Texas power grid, and why don't we assume that they are also influencing other infrastructures?
If you value stuff like safety and the environment, there's also regulations.
Power lines need way less maintenance if you bury them.
Orders of magnitude less maintenance.
The cost to reach them to diagnose and replace outweighs the decreased maintenance. Digging is really expensive.
its likely becauses it protected from damage by the ground/concrete, and wear and tear from weather.
I was in a suburb once that had the lines running in an accessible plastic rectangle running between the sidewalk and road and it seemed pretty brilliant
Which is a solution for a limited area where the extra cost and longer install time might be deemed worthwhile, but when you want to run miles upon miles of lines then it is less feasible.
I think it’s probably reasonable to run the large transmission lines open because they’re huge and easier to landscape but most people live in dense suburbs or cities (where they’re already underground)
And most dense suburbs just have their power polls waiting precariously under trees which requires additional tree maintenance and is expensive to fix after a storm
I agree there are places it wouldn’t make sense but it seems like nearly all the places where it would make sense still havnt bothered (cost, I know)
In a dense urban environment you are wanting retrofitted lines run through terrain already full of concrete, water lines, and other urban features. That would take a lot of coordination in design and still likely miss things (which means more time and money on redesigns). It also means a long installation time which means extended disruption to the area.
These sorts of underground lines are easier to run in totally fresh new construction, but then again, it runs into servicing issues and extra expense.
is expensive to fix after a storm
Assessing and fixing underground lines is much harder, more expensive, and disruptive.
Companies have done the math, repeatedly.
If underground cost less even over a 5 year period, they would be doing it.
My city sits on a filled in swamp.
My entire state if we're honest.
Louisiana?
I would assume. That's where I am.
I grew up far from it, in a vastly different terrain and climate, and I've lived here most of my life. But I remember having a cartoon book as a kid that depicted a house in a swamp (I think it may have been one of the books about The Woozles),l.
This memory resurfaced in 2024 when I had to drive from Houston TX to Galliano LA. It was swampy to say the least, and one particular view from somewhere along I10 (or maybe it was route 90, I don't remember where) looked exactly like in that book. Many of my fellow countrymen have accidentally hit a moose while driving. I'm the only one I know who has run over an alligator.
How do you survive hitting a moose? I feel like that's equivalent to hitting a brick wall.
It's pretty dangerous, yes. But since mooses are so tall, you usually hit the legs, and the beast comes in through the windshield. Duck, and it'll pass over you. However, they might then start to flail and kick you from the backseat out of panic.
And?
physics. cost.
lived a lot of places, some of which (like here in PNW) have neighborhood buried cables. It's lovely, and hella reliable. We don't lose power in windstorms or floods or snow.
It is expensive. And not appropriate for all places - for example, places with high water tables won't be able to do it, like Louisiana - you can't keep the water out year round even with a billion pumps. Also hard to do in places with bedrock near the surface for expense reasons.
Maintenance, modification, assessment, and initial installation are all more difficult. And yes that means more expensive, and yes the cost difference is significant. It is more resource and personnel intense to work underground lines than overhead.
When it comes to damage from weather, while underground lines can be slightly more resilient they are much, much more of a pain to assess and and fix. A good line crew can put up a new pole in about an hour. It takes a lot longer to run underground digging equipment.
In some places underground lines are run, of course, because for various reasons the associated downsides are deemed worth it. However when you're looking at a whole infrastructure, you want easy to service, fast to install, and cost efficient.
I guess unless you plan the community to have underground lines to begin with it’s just a no go?
It can be done, but the people paying for it need a compelling reason. Just saying "It's kind of primitive ya know." isn't enough.
Well there are many compelling reasons but they all seem to be countered with “but that’s expensive”
So I think it’s fair to say it’s primitive because the reason for use is it’s the cheapest solution to the problem of power delivery
but they all seem to be countered with “but that’s expensive”
And time consuming and more difficult to assess, maintain, modify, and install. While increasing the underground footprint which makes it more difficult for other underground utilities and construction.
Well there are many compelling reasons
And when the reasons are good enough the lines go underground. Otherwise yes the cheap and easy way is better as the baseline, because paying ~10x more and taking much longer to install a system that is harder to work with for no good reason is stupid.
I mostly agree with you.
Underground footprint is kind of flimsy reason tough, because if the grid and the infra around it is well designed, in the plans should allready be a plan how to expand if other utilities are needed later.
Also enviroment where the lines are going to be build is important. Close to surface bedrock or soil with lots of big rocks. Overhead of course. Going trough or next to forest in area where winds may fell trees or snow packed on the branches may bend trees. Underground is the smart choise.
Also while underground is slower and more expensive to fix, its rare that multiple lines break at the same time. Most areas has backups upon backups, so even if one line gets damaged it does not mean large amount of households are going to be without power. Overhangs on the other hand are more on the mercy of nature and big storms are more likely to break same line from multiple points or break multiple lines.
Also broken overheads are more dangerous when broken and fixing them is more precarious.
Both have good and bad things.
Underground lines, when damaged can also be dangerous. I’ve known of multiple dogs in may area who’ve died instantly just stepping on top utility access points that become electrified due to damaged underground lines. For overhead lines, if it’s not down, it’s generally not a safety hazard to the general public and if it is down, vast majority know to steer well clear of them and report the damage.
Wow. Needed to google those dog strories. Atleast the ones i found were because live wire was connecting to sewergrate due the degration or damage to the lines. It was hard to find any proper knowledge why that happened, but what i know about ground lines and safety regulations those things should be impossible to happen if the lines were build following regulations (at least by my countrys standards, cable must be dug deep enough, that frost does not effect to ground and it needs to be insulated. There needs to be also atleast 20cm or 7.8 inches of fine sand, or fine rockles dirt around it as a safety layer. So live wire should never be able to contact cement or any metal parts even if the cable is broken and soil is wet)
There was also incredible sad story about 15 dogs dying after overhead line dropped in to a kennel.
Im sorry i was little unclear. The safety part was mostly about doing repairs. Where i live number one reason for the lines to get damaged are fallen trees, be it by wind or packed snow. Cleaning windfall trees is difficult by it self as the trees are often tangled and if the tree is in tension when somebody cuts it wrong it, the tree might swing with an force enough to break a neck. Add to that mess tangled wires, constant hurry to fix it and the likelyhood that the wire that needs repairing is on the middle of nothing.
Yeah, my story is purely anecdotal, plenty of people have died from downed lines, especially instantaneous failures in high weather events. just not in my limited experience. Just want to give some counterpoints as the failure cases can be silent but deadly to the general public, unlike most other underground utilities.
in the plans should already be a plan
"Should" is the worst word in the English language.
Harder to maintain if it is underground.
Nonsense. It's just about being cheaper.
Saving money is a valid choice, but it may just be short term outlook here.
My brother used to work for a public electric utility and they buried their power lines where possible. The neighboring private utility guys always pointed out how much cheaper their lines were to maintain. But the public utility had solid data providing they saved money over the long term, by better protecting their lines
Yeah, this makes sense to me. Less likely for something to go wrong but more difficult to deal with when it does. The end result is a product of both of those, so depends on how much less likely and how much more difficult.
Which is what i'm saying.
Harder to maintain if it is underground.
? fewer calls for cables cut by trees / stupid people, known junction boxes in the ground placed at regular intervals to access it (not having to guess which set of poles are carrying for which residences etc), if it's cut you're still going to have to replace the line, that's gonna happen whether they're 20' up or 3' down.... less working at height which is a great boon to safety.
I'd ask lineworkers tbh, I can see lots of advantages for underground but cost may override everything else. and physics, some places are never gonna work for it - wet lowlands, bedrock etc..
Cost, difficulty, and harder to maintaince. Want to add new coax cable? Sure toss it up. New housing being? Split it. Fiber, yep throw where the coax is. Etc. (its still high voltage, so regulations for safety obviaouly play a role here too).
Underground? Is there rock too hard to drill there? A gas line? Did we just cut an active internet line or just some junk? Tree roots? Will it containate a water table? Will it shift and break the line here? Great we have conduit, is it broken? Leakage? Big enough to handle a high gauge for an upgrade?
i say this as man in love with a good tunnel and conduit. Trust me when i say, yes we ought to do it in general, but also yes is a pain in the ass.
I know in northern Maine it's very easy to dig and immediately get flooded. Know a guy who created a pond by just digging and letting the water fill in naturally
You don't pay for all the space between poles. Its also cheaper ad quicker to stand a pole than to build a manhole.
It would be better for everyone if was all underground. It is purely cost with a smidgen of time efficiency.
It would save money in the long run though.
Please provide the research you are basing that claim on.
Yes, do people in power care though?
At best they do not care no. They are extracting money for donors. As such more often they oppose more efficient ways of doing things on behalf of the ones doing it now.
You would pay thousands for each meter of duct built including resurfacing whereas you would likely stand two poles with the same distance for less than a grand.
Take it that overhead is more likely to cause future issues, they would need to be significantly more for that to be the case. Where this comes in is regulations on SLAs and fines, loss of service costs. But on a pure cost basis it likely would take a long time for underground to balance out.
Companies also dont care and would prefer to lower build costs at the risk of future operational costs
It would definitely depend on circumstances on this one. In california it would pay for itself with less fires alone. But all areas would have less service costs fixing them after storms. My power just went out a few weeks back here, and last year north a ways all the power got knocked out, some for weeks, in an ice storm that left .5 to over 1 inch of ice on stuff or something.
They generally are, in rich countries. In poorer countries with less developed infrastructure you can still commonly find them.
shrugs in American
Bit unsightly too
i actually love them, aesthetically.
i think they're cheaper to replace/repair in earthquake prone regions
ALSO if you're in a snowy remote region, serial killers LOVE to snip these so they can "pick people off" one-by-one. This might seem detrimental to the local economy, by virtue of depleting the workforce, but serial killers are great for local tourism once they're put away.
They have that Serial Experiments Lain aesthetic I cannot explain.
Money.
I work in different utility but the principal is the same. It costs roughly 10x as much to bury cables in the ground than it does to put them in the air on poles.
It tends to make sense in dense urban environments or where there's other factors but for almost all rural and suburban settings the costs to dig in underground cables, ducting, access structures and the associated safety concerns, plus the increased costs to access and repair, far outweigh the possible costs of running cables overhead, even though they're more susceptible to damage.
edit:sp
I would bet that the initial cost is much higher while the lifetime of the installation isn't nearly as far apart. Tree trimming isn't needed, poles don't need replaced as they age, less damage from storms, and I would assume the lines themselves don't age as fast when protected from the elements.
Plus ongoing maintenance increases in cost each year. It really seems like the short term savings are overblown.
When a storm comes through and there are widespread disruptions, it is common to send cars along routes to assess the condition of each pole and its equipment. Damaged equipment or lines is easily visible. In a fairly short amount of time the damage can all be assessed and waiting line crews can get to work quickly fixing equipment.
With underground infrastructure, it takes longer to pinpoint exactly what's and fix it.
Except underground they wouldn't be damaged by a storm in the first place.
The break even point for us is estimated at about 30 years, so you have a point, but if you can point out any business that looks at returns over that time frame, they don't operate in utilities.
And on your other point, not being exposed to wind and rain doesn't mean underground cables aren't susceptible to damage, rats love chewing cables, builders love ignoring prints etc and the time and costs involved in putting things back in the ground are, like I said, dramatically higher.
Squirrels chew on lines above ground too!
I never said that burying them was a perfect solution.
One reason for my region: overhead lines on wooden poles will better withstand an earthquake and will be quicker to rebuild after a major disaster. Stuff underground will get all shifted around or filled with water and mud.
Interesting how it varies with the threat. In my region wild storms are a lot more common so most new developments go underground.
Where I live, all the power, except major cross-country transmission, is underground.
You do find more minor transmission lines out where it gets rural, right down to telegraph-style wooden poles, but you'll pretty much never see it in cities or suburbs. (Wooden telephone poles are a different matter).
The only advantage of power-by-pole is ease of repair. Once it's underground, it has to share trunking with the other utilities in the area, and I'm pretty sure the number of times a road needs to be dug up varies as the square of the number of utilities under it.
But at least it's relatively safe under there when the road isn't being dug up for the fourth time in a year.
There are several environmental factors that generally contribute to underground viability.
Ground water- obviously flooding, but evem heavy rain areas, or just high humid soil levels can create problems (cables produce heat, while soil's usually cool so condensation can be a problem wherever theres a splice/ junction)
And speaking of cables producing heat, this can become its own problem. Dirt acts as an insulator for heat. Since the transfer of large amounts of electricity produces heat, unless your ground is cold enough to actively cool them, this means derating the cables (using much larger ones to transfer the same power) which greatly raises the cost.
This is why even in cooler climates, hi voltage / long range transfer is done above ground.
Earthquakes and ground frost difference issues can also cause cables to get sheared.
Ofc, above ground power has plenty of its own issues- trees falling forest fire areas, just general exposure to the elements.
But generally, ease and expense to fix issues, and relative lack of disruption to infrastructure while doing so, win out, Making above ground preferable if there are any potential issues with underground.
Theres also a bit of a political aspect that should be mentioned- who owns the lines- burial is always more costly, so if energy co's own the lines like in america, theyre rarely going to want to spend the extra money burrying and unburrying to fix/ add, unless its really more cost effective. (Or the municipality is footing the bill/ has already done the infrastructure, like a lot of denser urban areas in the US, like NYC and DC. )
Even in river valleys, the cabling tends to be well insulated and underground here. Again, unless it's especially rural.
I've seen places where basements / cellars have been completely submerged by freak floods and all the old electrical infrastructure (cables, meters, etc.) is still in place and back in use once everything has dried out, save perhaps for a few minor repairs.
But I get it. Where it's cheaper and the health and safety / OSHA / whatever it's called where you are, rules don't disallow it, overground is going to happen.
Go dig a trench the length of every city street in the world, and come back and tell me how easy that was.
How costly too.
Do i get fellow workers, overtime, and modern equipment?
If you want those things you need to deal with national, state and municipal governments for contracts.
Well I’ve never seen anyone deal with power lines who didn’t have those things so cheers, doesn’t sound too bad
When my mom got fiber internet, they had to dig a trench through everyone’s front yard in the neighborhood. They managed to destroy one of her Christmas yard decorations.
When I got fiber internet, a dude in a truck ran it from a pole across the street in like two hours.
People seriously underestimate how disruptive underground work is. Imagine instead of a neighborhood with lawns a dense urban area full of concrete, asphalt, and plumbing and how long it would take to retrofit overhead power infrastructure to underground. People would be furious.
Would you rather spend $100 for a 5% chance of losing power for 4-8 hours per year, or spend $10,000 dollars for a .1% chance of losing power for a minimum of 2 days?
Is that the real cost differential? Someone else said it’s only 5-7x more expensive which doesn’t sound that bad
Not to discount the significance of such expenses but 5-7x is way different than 100x the expense
also the value of lost power can be significant, if someone dies you lose all their economic output for life and some people can work from home so even a few hundred people losing power could add up and have been worth paying for underground cables
Have you, personally, ever had to maintain something that is buried?
Because I used to think buried wires were the way to go, too. I am older and wiser now.
There are ways to do it that are not so terrible but the preplanning is immense and it would be difficult to implement in many places that are filled with lots of underground utilities already
I’ve also seen a few people around me bury the line from the pole to their house so it probably has to be done piecemeal like that if at all
This reads a lot like someone who hasnt had to dig a half mile long, 4 foot deep hole, where for the most part you cant use any heavy equipment.
The cost of just that labor alone would be immense, then you have to do all that again bare minimum for any issue. And thats even assuming the ground is ammenable for it, which is not the case for a lot of places. Sure you have to deal with icing or the occasional damaged pole, but youd also have issues with it underground. Sooo many people do not call in to check for utility line locations.
Yes the hook up from the city to the house can be buried pretty easily, but that wire is very different from the wire used on the poles at least where I live.
I do not miss construction.
... And yet almost all developed nations do it without any issues. ... And funny enough technologies like micro trenching work for most use cades.
Oh boy....
Most? Not true.
So, prove me wrong.
You made the claim you provide the proof
Looks like you have your answers! Many places have lots of underground utilities already (at least enough that they would have to keep switching between buried and raised, or just stick with raised), and they would have to change then over piecemeal.
It makes much more sense to stick to burying utilities with new construction where able, rather than replacing all the lines currently raised on poles.
Heat dissipates easier in open air than in conduit, meaning the conductors can be undersized drastically compared to if they're in conduit. Ever notice how the wires from the weatherhead are 2/0 awg, and on the poles and to your house (even after the transformer so same operating voltage), are way smaller? More like 12 awg on poles? The cost for the larger wire buried underground would be massive.
Also, as others have said, maintenance is significantly easier.
Yet almost all of the developed world does it....
And most of the world runs on 240 or 220v, which is a higher voltage and allows for smaller conductors.
Idk, another factor is the US started their electric grid in the 1800s to the 1940s. It was the first in the world. Hard to stop once something is set as a standard like that. It's like asking why they used lead and asbestos or built foundations out of stacks of sandstone rocks, all of which applies to my house haha. I'm sure in a few decades people will look back and question our use of plastics.
The difference between the US the rest of the world is 4 years and due to the Edison-Westinghouse struggle the US were overtaken by the end of the century. (Same goes for Telephones btw. NY had less then half the phone lines Berlin had by 1900)
The argument with the time difference is often cited but not based on fact - it's more about the fact that electricity networks in the US were a commercial/capitalist enterprise from the start which was not the case for European cities for a long time.
And even today power grids in the US are,well, seen as something to be run with the maximum amount of profits with the minimum amount of goverment regulation. If you consider the difference to Europe or parts of Asis it's insane.
Fair enough
Every major infrastructure project that involves tunneling or digging runs into massive cost overruns, so basing the number on a cost estimate is already fishy. 100x is probably overkill, but not absurdly so. US infrastructure averages 8-12x more than elsewhere in the world, and it's getting worse. New York adding less than two miles of track to their subway still cost more than double the estimate. California is spending infinite money on a rail line that may never exist.
Probably harder to maintain easier fixes in colder areas where the ground freezes for half a year.
Not true. I. Most cases they are better protected against the elements if underground.
But it costs money to do and requires higher tax rates to be spent on it instead of military and paying off corrupted politicians
Shielded and reinforced underground conduits my friend!
Sounds like it would cost a lot on a city tax to go that distance to replace it
AC lines would get large capacitance losses being buried vs. overhead. ElectroBOOM explains why in his vid about high-voltage DC lines starting at this point in the vid.
Granted this is at high voltages in the five-digit range and beyond, and I'm not sure how much that would matter at 240V split-phase that homes typically get in North America*, but that's a technical reason why power lines are still overhead regardless; it's more efficient and with less capacitance losses to have overhead power lines spaced far apart than to bury them.
*Yes, really, I meant what I said, North American homes still get 240V, but it's split down the middle; 120V circuits for things like lighting and such, and normal devices that you plug into a NEMA-5 outlet such as portable space heaters, use a single hot line and a neutral line while 240V circuits for high-powered appliances like clothes dryers, ovens, HVAC systems, and things of that nature, use both hot lines, and optionally neutral in addition for things in, say, an oven or a dryer that only need 120V such as lighting, while the heating elements need 240V in those applications.
I’ll also add that maintenance of underground infrastructure is more costly than above ground.
My neighborhood, built from bare dirt about 30 years ago, does, as do the other neighborhoods and commercial sites built here since then.
The answer is always money, though. It's cheaper to put wires up on poles, so that's how it was done. It's expensive to move them underground, so the wires stay up on poles.
Money.
Let me reverse the question
Why do power cables need to be buried in non dense urban area?
Yes it will make it a bit ugly, but so what?. It's not like it being ugly will do anything anyway. It's not like being a bit ugly is a very annoying thing unlike when there a trash heap and it smells bad.
I think we should just keep it up there for sub-urban and rural areas, and invest the saved money on other things.
Also, im from developing country so my perspective is bit different for this topic.
I work for a Telco and most of our service interruptions are caused by fibre cuts, falling trees on poles, and ice or fire damage to aerial cables. Underground is just so much better.
Plus if theyre underground the great north american fiber seeking backhoe can get its fill! /s
It makes life harder on Spider-Man if you bury things.
storm damage.
Cost. Including maintenance costs.
Including growth
In Germany: They are in the more urban areas.
The more rural have it either on street poles, poles on the roof, both or underground.
They are safer and less prone to fault underground.
It just costs more.
One point for above ground is that it is far easier to know when it’s damaged to the point of being unsafe for the general public and much simpler and quicker to repair. For underground, you don’t know that until there is a failure that causes outages or someone/something gets hurt.
While I have seen numerous downed power lines, I have not know anything actual hurt by them. On the other hand, I have known multiple dogs who’ve died stepping on top of electrified access points while out for walks. While this is purely anecdotal, it’s not black and white either.
Other underground utilities have more obvious failure signs to the public (smells, flooding, water damage etc) and generally have minimal short term consequences while electrical faults tend to go unnoticed until a significant failure event (i.e. power goes out or something gets killed). Our town has hundreds of reported natural gas leaks, that is take years to fix while pole repairs tend to happen within an hour of being reported with police standing by until the crew shows up.
You can do it, but it costs more. I understand that some of the reason that California's electricity rates are as high as they are is because PG&E is doing a bunch of burying lines.
EDIT:
https://schlanj.substack.com/p/why-electricity-prices-in-california
The IOUs spent $7.7 billion in 2024 on wildfire mitigation, which equates to 4.2 ¢/kWh. Due to years of fire suppression, exacerbated by warming trends, and the desire to build homes in wooded areas, wildfires caused by downed distribution lines are a never-ending problem. To resolve the situation, the utilities are burying the power lines, but the cost is enormous.
Wildfire mitigation accounts for just over half of the price premium.
it's about cost. They're more expensive to bury and to maintain.
And it's not that helpful in storms either because even if the lines near your house are burred, they're still connected to the above ground stuff that runs along roads, rural areas, and the big transmission lines themselves.
One thing to be aware of is that it's much easier and cheaper to repair damages or upgrade it. Underground is not without problems too, moisture or ground movement for example.
There is moisture above ground too and ground movement can affect the poles as well. I would think that there is more exposure to damages above ground with cars hitting them, tree limbs, strong winds, animals chewing through wires, etc. While it's easier to repair damages above ground I believe there would be less of them with buried lines.
It costs less to maintain poles in high density areas than it would to burry them and have to close off entire neighborhoods.
They wouldn’t be coated or in a tube/box of some kind to ameliorate that?
Yeah they would, as multiple countries with a better standard of living than the US have already been doing it for quite a while.
places with above ground lines are effectively low priority for the municipality and utility companies. it's the common way in places where it's common because short term benefits are always treated as more important than long term benefits
They are in most residential areas here in Denmark.
Cost and ease of maintenance. Isn't it obvious? The only ugly thing is instead of having separated multuple conductors without isolation on the wire, you can have isolated wires, and twisted together, so instead of 50 wires throughout the air, you would have one thicker.
Anyone learns to just ignore them. So not unsighly becuse you look past them
Are you going to to pay for the massive infrastructure change that would require?
If you look around, every new subdivision I see being built is underground, in the multiple states where my family and friends live.
In some areas though, the ground is incredibly rocky, or general conditions promote aboveground for new indrastructure, but that's rare.
Tax cuts and tax discounts to the rich and filthy rich
Flood = Death
First, underground lines will be flooded far sooner. Second, IF water were ever to reach the height of those lines you're right, everyone in the vicinity would be dead long before that happened.
The discussion was underground lines. Flooding means death with those. If a flood hits hanging lines those MFers died long before the water hit them. Common sense has to be applied.
No, people do not get electrocuted during floods because electrical lines are buried.
Dont argue with me. Go argue with google:
Yes, people can get electrocuted in floodwaters, as both underground and overhead power lines can electrically charge the water. Submerged infrastructure, including transformers and cables, often stays energized, making flooded areas, basements, and debris-filled water extremely dangerous.