The environmental impact of ALL that trenching for underground cables !

Alan

I won't go into the differences for maintenance and repair between the two...

Why not?

The dangling wires are an expedient. 'It's cheaper' is the rationalization given for all that is done in this country, even if it's not and even if there are other benefits to 'more expensive'. Lowest cost is not always best value.

Problems with dangling wires:

- Weather and debris vulnerability. Underground utilities are far more robust.

- Ugly. One of the depressing features of the auto slum- scape is the endless mess of ridiculous dangling wires, not to mention all the other power infrastructures added to them; the poles and towers, transformers, grounding, switching, lamps, meters, etc. This is a significant issue; why do we build anything in the first place? Do we exist in order to please the infrastructure? Or, does it exist to serve us? Do we not build for pleasure and utility or is all a part of the rat race? Is our life- support system an end ... to support of the cost side of a business ledger? At bottom, who cares whether a utility makes money or not; the issue is value to the user which is the community the utility pledges to support. If a business cannot serve the customers except by expedients it will fail.

- The 'eyesore' issue is a reason large transmission lines cannot be sited. Nobody wants to look at them; they destroy the landscape. Adding capacity to the grid does and will continue to involve long passages through the courts as adding capacity is always sued by persons and entities adjacent to it. Capacity is ugly. Ugly is an externality that cannot be ignored - like all the other externalities - by the utilities. NIMBY is powerful and load- shedding always takes place in 'undesireable' neighborhoods whoee inhabitants cannot afford lawyers. Putting capacity underground solves the problem. Putting distribution under the streets is simple because the streets already go everywhere ...

- Dangerous. Power lines fall on people while energized and kill them. Underground utilities do not do so, although poorly maintained installations can cause fires and explosions. Nevertheless, the same sorts of maintainence failures take place in the dangling wire universe and the fires and explosions take place in open air. (I used to live in a building that was badly damaged by a transformer explosion.)

- Not only is our electric infrastructure a great eyesore, it is an unnecessary eyesore. In most cities, the electric distribution is currently underground. Almost everywhere in the US, the water, sewer, natural gas, telephone, subsciption television and communication/internet systems are also underground. Even where electric is overhead, cable TV and telephone are placed underground because such an istallation is less vulnerable to weather and connections can be made and service performed without the need for a large, six- wheel bucket truck. As for installation; the companies that provide broadband internet are currently installing tens of thousands of miles of fiber 0ptic duct underground and have been doing so nationwide for the past fifteen years. What is easy for the fiber optic people should be no less easy for the power companies. Other utilities have the same universal service requirements and safety concerns as does the electric utilitiy.

If the gas company can provide universal service underground, with large pipes, valves, meters, ducts and other equipment, and do so on a cost effective basis, so can the electric utility.

Putting the wires underground is a job that needs to be done, It is obvious and the requirement increases with every long blackout caused by a storm. To put in a depression tens or hundreds of thousands of otherwise unemployed men to work at good jobs with good pay; the wires of America can be buried at a small cost to a government that has spent already trillions on air. It would be an investment with a return of agreeability, safety and permanence.