In areas that get a lot of hurricanes like New Orleans, why isn’t most of the electricity run underground where it’s less vulnerable by now?
In: 2197
I live in houston and I can answer this. It’s really, really expensive, and companies don’t want to pay for it and legislatures aren’t going to force them to. That’s about the short of it.
For the longer answer, when maintance is required, that too becomes much more expensive, requiring crews to dig up yards, and possibly sections of streets, parkin lots, etc. It doesn’t matter how well it’s planned initially, people tear down houses and rebuild, empty lots with underground wires become buildings, all of that adds to the expense and difficulty maintance as well as added cost to the builder to bring the underground sections of wire above ground before entering a building or home.
Lastly, invarible, no matter how good the record keeping, eventually some sections will get “lost” or “misplaced.”
Sure, there are solutions to all of the specific problems I mentioned, but they all increase cost, significantly. Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention, the cost of transitioning through an infrastructure that’s already in place. NO is about 400 years old, it’s a dense city, the cost of tearing it up to move powrelines is astronomical. Rural or undeveloped areas can put in below ground power lines when they are first developed, but then you run into all of the problems mentioned above.
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