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Comment by Dangeranger | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it one of the largest concerns in AU are the wildfires damaging circuits connecting the disparate grids. There was some conversation about replacing some of the network poles with fire resistant poles in order to try and avoid the high number of outages caused by fires during the dry season.

I'd be interested to know how that project went, and if it was successful.

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Not so much bushfires damaging electrical infrastructure as electrical infrastructure starting fires. A large portion of Victoria's worst day of bushfire was sparked by a faulty power line and the electricity distribution network (22kV and below) is responsible for a good portion of fire starts, especially those lines that utilise a single wire with an earth return (SWER). The recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Black Saturday fires in regard to the electricity network are available at http://royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Commission-Reports/Final-R... and contain a whole lot of background information. Suffice to say that the recommendation (27) of the wholesale burying of thousands of kilometres of SWER line at the cost of billions of dollars haven't gone far.

Fire resistance is one of those complicated things. Its not necessarily true that wooden poles are a worse risk than other ones. Steel loses structural integrity under fire heat (ok.. please do not talk about jet fuel and planes...) so for some forms of fire, a wooden pole can survive.

I think most references to fire risk with electricity distribution are actually arguing for underground wiring in the longer term.

Dry season is very much a northern part of australia concern (for now. the dry\wet cycle is moving south quite rapidly). The summer (which is the wet in the north) is when the bush fires happen.

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