[context: I’m in a small city of 6k people. This stupid town is known for constant power outages due to high wind and snow. Are they stubborn or is it really that hard to switch this small town to underground power so we stop having power outages anytime someone even sneezes?]
In: 38
Underground high voltage cabling is easily 10-100x the cost per meter of overhead cabling.
If a 900km powerline costs $2.4 billion, the same distance of underground cabling would be will over $200 billion.
If your town is relatively wealthy and the city is willing to issue bonds and/or increase property taxes to cover it, it can be done most likely.
Underground power is expensive and can be rather inconvenient to install and maintain relative to overhead wiring.
In short: Cost. The cables themselves cost more, then it also costs more to set up (5x or so from the last estimate I saw) compared to above ground cables.
Then after all that extra expense, it’s both more expensive and time consuming to fix something if it goes wrong.
Most cities simply don’t have the budget to do that, or the personnel to do that, even if it might be cheaper in the long run.
Cost and time. It would cost a lot to bury everything, cost more in labor to dig it up to fix it(you would still have issues due to ground freezing/water/ice), take more time to dig it up vs getting a bucket in the air, and take more time I restore outages. Plus soil is an insulator (temperature wise) and so some of the equipment would still need to be above ground or have cooling systems designed and built for them (another big cost). All of that would cause your utility rates to skyrocket worse than they likely already have.
Cost, mainly. It’s not a big problem to just trench in extra utilities in a new subdivision when you’re already laying water sewage and gas, but if you have existing infrastructure to plan around, you need to break up the ground, finished concrete work, et cetera, for limited reliability gains and extra concerns about strikes, vehicular carnage (your transformers are now on a pad), and security.
Your town is better off keeping up with tree pruning prior to winter and upgrading the hydro and internet as required with new longer fibreglass crossbars n such. I live in semi-rural Southern Alberta and have had more reliable hydro out here than in town where it was underground in my neighbourhood.
They can and they do. In the Netherlands hardly anyone has overground power. Only in the rural areas will you find the poles.
It really matters to what degree people wish to invest into each other. And how much space is worth above ground.
One thing you can question is: How come the drainage is below ground and how difficult would it have been to then also put some power lines in?
Eli5: the reason in the US typically is due to costs. The rule of thumb for cost for underground 1 mile of distribution overhead lines is approx $1M where as overhead line costs on average while overhead installing can range between $100k – $300k per mile
Non-Eli5:
Electric utilities would love to underground overhead lines and typically look at selective undergrounding of overhead lines. The reason why utilities would want to start these expensive projects are because the work conducted is capitalized. For a majority of US investor owned utilities capitalized costs go into the rate base (what you pay in your electric bill) which is approved by a Public service commission or office of public counsel. These approval groups are meant to represent customers and protect them against utilities spending recklessly, causing unnecessary utility bill hikes.
Cost.
Buried cables are significantly more expensive. Then add in the disruption of road closures and outages to install.
If you’ve got a small population who is going to pay for it?
you just really see above ground lines in America for some reason
everything is in the ground here in Iceland except 200k lines to alu factories
Depends what you mean by underground power. If you are talking about low voltage distribution grid it is done so in most of Europe. It is safer, better way and the fact it is rather rare in US is absurd.
If you are taking about transferring power to the city via high voltage/medium voltage lines cost of underground ones with added complexity means it is actually cheaper to just repair current lines over and over again.
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