Posted on 07/04/2012 4:08:25 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
WASHINGTON (AP) - In the aftermath of storms that knocked out power to millions, sweltering residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it's taking so long to restring power lines and why they're not more resilient in the first place.
The answer, it turns out, is complicated: Above-ground lines are vulnerable to lashing winds and falling trees, but relocating them underground incurs huge costs - as much as $15 million per mile of buried line - and that gets passed onto consumers.
(Excerpt) Read more at gopusa.com ...
1. Where did I use the word “union” in my response?
2. If buried electrical transmission lines penciled out, we’d already see them. We’d see them in places where we have higher incidence of storm damage, eg, where I live in Wyoming, where there aren’t the same labor rates and right-of-way complexities increasing costs.
We don’t see underground transmission. They don’t pencil. Never have. Probably never will, and the point at which they’ll pencil moves further and further away as time goes on and the area(s) that would be the rights of way become more developed.
Good thing Bush isn’t still president. He’d be catching all kinds of hell for this debacle.
Two words: GOVERNMENT REGULATION.
Exactly ...
... Otherwise known as businesses, whose cost of doing business will increase to pay for burying the wires.
... Otherwise known as families, whose household budgets will be altered (negatively) to pay for burying the wires.
I'm fairly sure that you will be able to see how those two problems can negatively affect the economy, likely causing some businesses to fail or shrink, and thereby rendering some folks unemployed.
I strongly encourage New Yorkers to tend their own knitting ... leave us hillbillies to make our own engineering trade-space decisions.
BTW, you make an excellent overall point: in this economy it's damn' important we know how to fix things ourselves. IN the last year our diswasher, washer and dryer all required repair. I repaired all three myself using YouTube video's and ordering the parts online. Fixing the dryer would've been an easy $150. Washer probably another $200 and the Dishwasher an easy $250. Parts for all three cost about $125 in total so I saved myself a chunk of change and had the satisfaction of a job well done.
And I'm far from very mechanically inclined on this stuff. Gotta love instructional video's on YouTube.
News flash, you pay for the repairs...over and over, and over, and over...
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.
There was a DVD included in the package which laid things out so even I could understand it. LOL.
Reliance Mfg. made the switch, the ProTran model. You could try A Google search to see if someone posted it. Sorry I can’t be of more help. And thanks for the support. Apparently I’m some kind of Enemy of the State because I did the job myself.
Good luck.
L
I realize that's really hard for New Yorkers to comprehend, but it's true.
go buy a clue
Yeah, go figure. Self reliance is a bad thing. Who'd have thunk it?
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.
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.
They will be the first to scream murder, demanding the “Government” fix it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.