I was talking about putting the LOCAL URBAN powerlines underground, not in the hills of West Virgina or Wyoming, or the Great Plains...
As for primary distrubution, NYC does it all underground up to 500kWA.
LOCAL URBAN powerlines go down the least due to weather. Where I’m talking about Wyoming, I’m talking about above-ground lines that go down like clockwork. If there were economic upsides to burying local loop powerlines, it would be seen where they go down most frequently and the avoided costs of repair justify the expense. The economics “should” pencil out faster, right? Repairing power lines in winter is a bitch, people can’t live without power in winter as long as they can in summer, the rights-of-way issues are less complicated, etc, etc. So with the higher frequency of outages, higher repair expenses and easier permitting issues, we should see a higher urgency to bury lines in places like the upper midwest and Wyoming/Montana.
But it doesn’t pencil even here. Never has. Never will.
Urbanites are so fixated on their own existence that they view all such disruptions to their oh-so-very-important lives as major milestones in human history... so every time there’s a disruption like this (or the NYC blackout in the 70’s), they a) talk about burying power lines and b) they can’t STFU about it for a decade or more.
As it is, people will soon have other reasons to bitch about power reliability, and above-ground transmission lines won’t be one of them.