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.
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.