Overhead power / telecom lines (and cable car power lines) have always been a thing in America. Adding fiber and additional infrastructure hasn't really made it uglier. It would be different if we had buried power lines to start with.
Certainly, in general it's done via overhead wire or third rail and feeds energy back into the grid. It's not worth it in general when those aren't already present.
Buried power lines are definitely a thing. They're common in cities where you don't want a tangle of wires overhead and in more affluent suburbs for the same reason.
They're pretty nice because you rarely lose power in bad weather, the power tends to only go out on nice days when the backhoes are active.
Long distance HV lines are always overhead though. They would require relatively expensive insulation to be run underground.
Yes, but SV doesn't have alleyways to run the power lines through, so you have all of these ugly wires everywhere and you're not allowed to have big trees in the front yard, since they could interfere with the power lines. It's really ugly and looks like Baghdad after the war.
I remember back in the 90s in Finland there still used to be overhead medium-voltage powerlines in lower-density urban areas; those are practically all gone now, replaced with underground lines. In higher-density areas underground was the norm even back then.
Many HV trunk lines (ie. tens to hundreds of kV) are buried as well, and those that aren’t, of course have wide buffer zones to avoid being hit by errant cars or falling trees.
In the countryside (which there is a lot in Finland), overhead lines are much more common due to the cost of burying them all. Still, it’s increasingly being done because a few storms in recent years left thousands of rural residents without electricity for days or even weeks – and such storms are only becoming more frequent while our lifestyles are getting even more dependent on electricity.
Burying all those lines is of course expensive, and the expenses will ultimately be paid by the consumers. There has been some pushback due to this – transmission fees have gone up a lot in the 2000s and utility companies are accused of using the costs as an excuse to inflate their profits.
In general, no. In a lot of the established USA, all lines were run overhead on poles. New neighborhoods are typically now built with underground everything, but that's here nor there. The densely populated parts of Louisville where Google was attempting are all overhead phone/power/cable. Going underground would have been prohibitively expensive.
Yes, but any setup that's capable of feeding power back to the grid requires costly safety interlocks to allow linemen to make repairs at the street without your house unexpectedly energizing the line. Some jurisdictions just outright disallow it.
The overhead wires get a bit difficult when you consider driving up to hotels, getting the buses out for maintenance, etc. etc. you'd need to build the wire infrastructure, and much of that would be on private property.
Yes, but it's quite probable that (as Mvandenbergh claims) there is no way to make the equipment 100% safe. It occasionally fails. Humans have a response time. People make mistakes. Homeowners shriek if you cut their electricity off preventively.
PG&E has 81k miles of overhead power lines and 26k miles of underground distribution lines.
How can you operate a system where one screwup -- one decaying tree too close to a line, or one underground construction mistake -- anywhere in 100k miles of power lines can create a $15B bill?
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