Power Lines in Seattle Area (Pacific: appliances, new home, neighborhoods)

[Joe Doer]

Being that we live in a forest here in the Pacific Northwest, it would be nice to see power lines buried rather that out in the open ready for a tree to fall on them. I can imagine the cost would be quite high to do this but the cost incurred by the power companies to repair downed lines has to also be enormous. Not to mention the impact on lives in this area when power is out for four or five days at a time. You can't put a cost on that.

[evergraystate]

Putting powerlines under ground would be several orders of magnitude more expensive than dealing with the occasional wind storm. You wouldn't be able to afford the electric bill. The utilities do a good job of triming trees near power lines.

[Hemlock140]

It makes no difference. All of our power lines, plus phone and cable are underground yet we lost power for nearly 24 hours. The main transmission lines and substations cannot go underground, so as in our case, a problem 5 miles away affects us.

[Botev1912]

Originally Posted by evergraystate

Putting powerlines under ground would be several orders of magnitude more expensive than dealing with the occasional wind storm. You wouldn't be able to afford the electric bill. The utilities do a good job of triming trees near power lines.

OK then how are cables in Europe underground almost everywhere? People never have these no power problems after storms?

[evergraystate]

Originally Posted by Botev1912

OK then how are cables in Europe underground almost everywhere? People never have these no power problems after storms?

Thats simply not true. In some cities with high density urban environments, power lines were co located under ground where infrastructure already existed without having to dig new trenches. Mostly older cities with large existing brick and mortar sewer systems. Places like Manhattan have massive underground infrastructure for steam, subways and very large sewers. In this type of situation its easy to stick the cables in the existing tunnels. But in a city like Seattle with very low population density and no existing tunnel network, it would be prohibitively expensive and pointless to dig up all the streets just so you can bury a cable.

[Hemlock140]

Look at a transmission line some time on the big towers crossing an open area
from one city to the next. They are far apart with lots of air to cool them. When placed in the ground they must be kept from grounding and cooled with liquid or gas. In order to maintain a redundant grid, cities are fed from various directions, so there would have to be digging of deep trenches under hills, mountains, prairies, lakes, rivers and farms. Less than 1% of them in the U.S. are underground.


In Europe there are two main differences. They have much less demand, with few homes having the number of KWH-hungry appliances and gadgets that we have. Second, the entire continent is small geographically, cities closer together. Still, I doubt there are many underground transmission lines there.

[eskercurve]

My uncle is/was in the power business and runs/ran a company that bid on contracts to supply power to remote areas. He says that putting power lines underground is prohibitively expensive and is only done when a city or county already has significant infrastructure underground. Further, he says that while Seattle and the Pacific NW is not particularly earthquake prone, he says that repairing underground power lines after an earthquake can take weeks more than above ground ones, depending on the damage.

In order for Seattle or any other city for that matter to have underground lines they'd have to have subways essentially.

The earthquake line is an interesting point. In Japanese neighborhoods you frequently see a rat's nest of power lines crossing overhead. The rationale is simple - much easier to repair damaged power lines after a quake if they're above ground.

[UnusualSuspect]

I don't know a whole lot about all of this, but I do know you don't need to have subways or tunnels in order to have underground power lines. We had underground power lines in my Iowa hometown, and we certainly didn't have subways or tunnels. Not all the power lines there are underground, but a lot of them are, and I think they enacted a law requiring all new power lines to be underground.

We certainly never got power outages like the ones out here, but we had a LOT more storms. I'm sure it had something to do with the power lines...

[Joe Doer]

There are communities in California, very near the San Andreas Fault, where you will not see even one power line.

When we were shopping for a new home about a year ago and saw power lines in the realtor pictures, that house was not considered. Overhead power lines are a terrible property value killer!!! Tax payers might consider putting them underground if they saw what it might do to their home value.

[Botev1912]

Originally Posted by evergraystate

Thats simply not true. In some cities with high density urban environments, power lines were co located under ground where infrastructure already existed without having to dig new trenches.

have you been to Europe? Because I don't remember seeing overhead power cables anywhere even in cities without subways. There might be some but at least they are not visible as they are here