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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure.

Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote monitoring capability beyond whats detected at the line. Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid (again, due to older design considerations)

Now this part might get a little political, but these substations/transfer depots/etc... arent just old because the outage would hit a lot of customers at once, but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.

its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.

View on HN

I am a technician for xfinity in the bay area and NIMBYism a huge part too I would say. Huge portions of Mill Valley especially on and around Mt Tam had such bad poles and vegetation. Only the last 3 fire years did anything. But literally nothing gets approved besides exact replacement. Nothing gets put underground, or rerouted because (as I understand it) mostly NIMBY groups. And I believe ATT ultimately owns most of the poles, PGE maintains them + leases, and the rest (comcast, sonic, etc) just lease. Marin has the reputation in Xfinity as the worst maintained in the 9 bay area locales they work in.

Oh god...Marin NIMBYism is really crazy when it comes to that stuff. And there's a lot of conspiracy theory / 5G type stuff that goes on as well. Strange to think that many of the folks who live there are in charge of a lot of the companies on HN (or are senior execs there).

> Strange to think that many of the folks who live there are in charge of a lot of the companies on HN (or are senior execs there).

As someone who lives in Marin I’m not sure where you got this idea. Most people who live in Marin have been there for 20-30+ years and are retired.

They probably paid less than 300k for their home.

> Most people who live in Marin have been there for 20-30+ years and are retired.

64.1% of those in the county 16 or older are in the labor force. Most people living in Marin County are not retired.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/marincountycali...

Most of the homeowners are probably retired and bought it for <300k.

Which is related, but not totally, to who lives there.

The funny thing about this whole story is that this whole story has a much simpler explanation that doesn't involve any conspiracies at all:

"We told the California Public Utilities Commission of a 4,700-MW need through 2022 and that gap started in 2020. Despite all that, only 3,300 MW was authorized for procurement and none starting until 2021," Berberich said during a special telephone conference the Cal-ISO Board of Governors held Aug. 17, following a weekend during which the grid operator twice conducted rotating blackouts because of high demand and tightening reserves.

https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...

It's weird that none of the 'experts' in the news could figure this out and we've gone to blaming random homeowners, electric lines, 5G and everything else in this story without this information even coming up.

It's clear not enough is being invested in schools, in particular the science curriculum.

Enough is being invested, it is just being spent extremely poorly. No country gets less per dollar on education than the US. A good start would be supporting school choice so the public school's monopoly and cost structure can be challenged.

Literally every other country in the world has a fully public education that does just fine.

I think the only well known non-US private school system (off the top of my head) are UK commonwealth secondary boarding schools, and those schools are more well known for their abuse than their academic strength.

Pretty much any other country (for example, France, Japan, China, etc) are generally built on a system of publicly funded schools

Finland as well, we don't basically have private or boarding schools at all.

A good indicator whether public schools are good enough is this - the moment private schools can't compete, then public schools are good enough.

Private for-profit schools can use their money to get political influence and reduce public school funding in order to further its economic advantage.

All the countries you listed spend way less per student than the US.

Like the choice we all have in healthcare? No thanks

There is a lot of mysticism around electromagnetism, but I wouldn't want to live under a high voltage line either.

But that would probably be irrelevant for substations and you could isolate lines from populated areas with not problem. I think the issue is probably because there is little will for investments.

Well, they're not entirely wrong about the 5G. I understand many in this forum won't agree with me. From https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-have-no...

  > We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe

  > The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) found “clear evidence” that two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy replicated the key finding of the NTP using a different carrier frequency and much weaker exposure to cell phone radiation over the life of the rats.

  > Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.

About the author:

  > Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology.

>two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats

If this is the study I'm thinking of, it's suspect for 3 reasons.

1. First off, the study didn't test against 5G. It used 2G and 3G emissions. Even if you believe the study, it doesn't make sense to use it as a reason to stick with 3G instead of 5G.

2. The study tested male rats, female rats, male mice, and female mice. Only male rats were allegedly impacted by radio signals. If 3G is so universally dangerous to living tissue, why did it only impact one of the species tested? And only the males of that species? Sidenote- the mice were actually exposed to more energy than the rats

3. Even though the male rats exposed to 2G and 3G were more likely to get cancer, they also lived longer than unexposed rats. Male rats exposed to 3G lived nearly 10% longer than ones that weren't. If this life extending capability also applies to 5G signals, we should be accelerating 5G deployment.

> The study tested male rats, female rats, male mice, and female mice. Only male rats were allegedly impacted by radio signals. If 3G is so universally dangerous to living tissue, why did it only impact one of the species tested?

That's explained pretty well by this -

https://xkcd.com/882/

Not a great source. Science is based on evidence, not lack of evidence.

A rebuttal to that article appears in the same publication, and adroitly takes apart it's claims: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...

Thanks, I didn't know about this article. I'm not heavily one way or the other, but I think it's important to put all the information out there.

This particular feeling, of having a compulsion to share scary information without a strong knowledge base, and then retreating to this sort of position “I think it’s important to put all the information out there” is well described, specifically on this topic, by a recent post by Troy hunt.

https://www.troyhunt.com/lets-stop-the-5g-hysteria-understan...

Well, from me it wasn't a strong compulsion. However, for many reasons (especially about privacy) we ought not to implement 5G. And this wasn't an article about some conspiracy--it was from an expert who is advising we tread cautiously about what we do not know, and that is very good advice.

I don't think anyone can confirm or deny that 5G carries health risks. But, we do have evidence there are health risks with other cellular communication technologies, and we ought to use that as a basis for decision making.

1. it was strong enough for you to post

2. please try to explain the security issues that 5G presents that aren't present in 4G, 3G, etc.

3. a lack of information is not an excuse to promote doubt and misinformation. part of the reason we haven't been able to measure the long-term effects of cellular radiation is that it takes time to run those studies. please stop promoting lies and undermining trust in the systems that help manage our society

Hi, in response to #2, 5G allows for very fine resolution in location tracking. There are also concerns about the manufacturers of that equipment. I'll direct you to this link for more: https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-5g-requires-new-appro...

In response to #3, I have not posted any lies, and anything that disagrees with your narrative is not automatically FUD. There are serious doubts of 5G on many fronts by many experts, and these doubts should be discussed. However, as I've noticed here, there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber. Anything that's not in-group is not allowed, as we see here, where an expert has a serious concern about untested technologies. I wish we were able to have an honest conversation about this.

    > It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Let's reverse roles: can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G? How about at the very basic of levels: why do we need poly-gigabit speeds for cell phones, and how could implementing it negatively impact people?

> why do we need

Why not? When we moved from 3G to 4G I felt like it was kind of useless, but now that I have it I definitely enjoy all the things that become possible with it (lower latency everything, mostly). It was the same way moving from ISDN to cable. It's never bad to have better stuff - you'll find a use for it even if you don't have one now.

> can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G

Frankly the only real and reasonable concern to have is that there are very few engineers that roll out 5G networks that aren't Chinese. I'm not opposed to China, but I am opposed to a country's entire infrastructure being built and maintained by another country (that may want to use that to exert political pressure some day).

> there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber

In this case I really don't think it's that, it's mostly that you posted information that's just wrong and then you retreated to a (frankly lazy) defense as to why you're spreading misinformation. It makes you come off as the kind of person that's really unpleasant to talk to, because the lies tend to be so sticky and pervasive. It's exhausting to have to revisit every component of what you know just because someone else couldn't be bothered to figure it out for themselves.

I think your comment is off-base. One, because I posted a link to Scientific American, where an expert in the effects of cellular telecommunication on human health wrote an opinion piece on why we should tread cautiously with the rollout of 5G transmitting equipment. I'm not spreading misinformation, I'm not claiming 5G to cause COVID-19, and I'm not saying anything that should be controversial.

However, I do think there is an echo chamber here, and I think that anything that cautions against the cavalier use of untested technology is not permitted, which I think is very dangerous.

What you think is a 'lazy defense' is really just a guy trying to subdue what he could already recognize as a geyser of vitriolic, and frankly wrong, comments. But, hey, this is apparently a place where everyone's opinion counts as fact, and no criticism at all of 5G is allowed.

I'm going to stop commenting now.

> this is apparently a place where everyone's opinion counts as fact

You post a bunch of cherry-picked nonfactual stuff about 5G and then complain that HN doesn't have enough fact-based content?

if you're not heavy one way or the other, than you probably shouldnt shill the the fake propaganda of one of them

Even if Moskowitz has a point, it is difficult to take him seriously when he associates himself with "Physicians for Safe Technology", a group which maintains the belief that Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a real thing. It is not.

It has no scientific basis and is not a recognized medical condition.

https://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/

High levels of RF exposure can of course do damage, in the form of burns. Any seasoned amateur radio operator at some point in the progression of their hobby can surely attest to the pain of being "bitten" by an energized RF cable.

But trying to promote the idea that cellphones are dangerous is just scaremongering. You'll absorb more energy in just a few seconds just by standing in a sunbeam.

All is not just about energy absorbed or burns. There are reports of the space between cells becoming larger (less inter-cellular adhesion) because of RF, and this led to the conclusion that the blood-brain barrier was weakened due to some kinds of RF. I've not dig too much in the subject, but I understand that a leaky BBB would increase inflammation in the brain and penetration of many molecules (including carcinogenic).

I don't know why all the rebuttals focus on energy absorption and absence of ionizing frequencies. Seems like the mechanism of toxicity, if any, has nothing to do with that.

A lot of the active RF spectra that people are concerned about don't penetrate deep into your body. They're either absorbed by the skin, the fatty tissue underneath or at the least, by the bone in the skull and ribcage. The reason your phone keeps working when your body blocks the signal is that the signal bounces of other surfaces.

Blocking signals with your body becomes more true as frequency (and bandwidth) goes up. 5G Wifi can't even properly penetrate dry wall, not even mentioning all that water and bone in your body.

Beside that, below the infrared spectrum, it is unlikely that much damage is done by common RF signals; the energy in a quanta from that spectrum is too small to effectively do anything but heat molecules up a tiny bit.

Photochemical effects, ie, things like chemical reactions being induced or cells reacting to the light, require atleast about 1Thz to work (low-end IR).

The heating occurs primarly for frequencies between 30 and 120MHz, which is actively used but not by B2C commercial things, it largely involves ham radio, air traffic radio, sea traffic, weather satellites, etc. Things you're likely to be closer to the receiving end of than the high powered sender.

Which also bring to the other issue; the energies in common RF close to you is too low. If you send with 100mW power, the power your body will capture, even if it's the phone right next to your ear, is likely below 10mW of power. Low enough that your native body heat already overpowers it easily.

Then 4G or Wifi may be worse than 5G. Experiments with inter-cellular adhesion were, among others, at 900MHz and 1800MHz, thus closer to 4G. However I don't know if other frequencies were really investigated (or with the same care, with different effects observed on male and female rodents, etc).

I appreciate that in your brief analysis you are considering several mechanisms of action besides just the heating. There may be many kinds of resonances, at molecular level, supra-molecular, etc. If very little 900/1800MHz suffices to alter BBB, then it is like a trigger to worse things, without the need of much energy. In the animals tested, the amount reaching the brain, at typical GSM levels, had already the observed result. Of course my tone is speculative here, but if the effect was confirmed in humans, it would not need much energy, and just the medium-to-weak signal reaching the brain could be worrisome.

There are not yet any studies on it, but if the effects of 5G on BBB were much stronger than with 900/1800MHz, it may also be the case that much lower signal intensities would still alter noticeably the BBB, even after the attenuation of the body traversal.

I am not a luddite at all, but I do hope that scientists working to certify that 5G is healthy are not hand-waving away the problem only by saying that the energy absorbed is too low or that the body is blocking its intensity. That would mean they did not hear at all about the effect of the mere frequency as a signal on the adhesion between cells.

I really would like to see some study elucidate the mechanism (or the absence thereof, and the flaws of the previous study), maybe some sort of resonance, soon enough to avoid to be in a situation were Wifi/4G/5G would be everywhere yet with dangerous long-term effects on health.

The issue is that the energy absorbed is literally too low to do anything. We're talking about heating your body up by 0.1 of a centigrade, so little that it is only visible when using extremely sensitive equipment in lab controlled conditions.

I'd worry more about standard heat given off by devices like laptops. The radio emissions aren't gonna do much but the 80C hot air out of the exhaust blowing into your lap is definitely going to do something. There is plenty of studies on the effects of overheating genitals in males.

But back to the topic; the energy is too small. If these radio waves had an effect, being out during a cloudy day would. The energy you get from solar radiation over a day is probably about the same.

Things like DNA breaking apart don't generally happen with this low frequency, largely because they require a bunch of energy to happen. Like ionization, even 1000W of 100MHz radio waves aren't going to make it happen. There is no amount of energy you can dump into a 100MHz transceiver that would cause ionization of atoms. It simply won't happen. Well, they will ionize but not because of the radio waves but because they've heated up enough that they're starting to undergo plasma formation. But that semantic difference is still important.

The sender in your cellphone or the energy you get from your wifi router are too small to be measured and by all acounts of physics, their effects are too small to be reasonably measured even in long term studies. We're talking literaly sub-milliwatt over your entire body. The entire body uses atleast 100Watts to stay alive. <0.1% change in thermal energy.

I admit that the more I think about your arguments, the more I lean to be convinced. It makes sense.

However, I really hope they find what was the flaw(s) that led to the surprising result on the BBB of rodents.

Anything that cites the Ramazzini studies is suspect. They repeatedly make major methodological errors and nobody replicates their results.

"so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. "

Quoting a US senator on technology is not exactly a strong argument. Like arguing about email security and quoting a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email.

https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-09-lindsey-graham-never-sen...

In many cases senators are the least possible informed people on a topic, and are almost certainly not focused on the pure science of an issue. Quoting one of them pretty much means you are trying to sway me by using their position, not research.

Also, nothing that you quoted about 5G actually says it is unsafe. Saying that 2G and 3G are unsafe and that we don't know what 4G does, and that government doesn't want to investigate 5G, and that tumors of a certain type 'may be at least partially attributable' to cell phone radiation, and all of the other slights, all of that doesn't add up to 5G is unsafe.

This is the direct rebut to the article you linked, even from the same site.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...

  > On the strength of epidemiological evidence, cancer fears are dangerously misguided: While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008, there has been no indication that glioma rates have increased proportionally in the same period—a nonrelationship replicated by numerous other studies.

About the author

  > David Robert Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and John Maddox Prize–winning science writer. He is based at Dublin City University and is a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford. He advises, across Europe, on the public understanding of science, particularly on vaccination policy and combatting cancer misinformation. His first book, The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World, is now available from Simon & Schuster UK.

Hmm, I was selling and installing a lot of Cell Phones in Silicon Valley in 1983 (C-Tell Cellular, Santa Clara), and we had an office in Sacramento that was doing even better than I was sales wise.

To characterize the nearly ten years of cell phone growth as "virtually zero" makes me seriously question the authors fact checking and thought process.

To whit: "While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008"

That's anecdotal evidence. My anecdotal evidence is that I lived in a suburb of a major city on the east coast, and no one I knew had a cellphone until probably the mid-90s.

> a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email

Senators who don't send emails don't do so because they don't know how to send emails -- they do it because they're doing seriously fucked up stuff and don't want a paper trail. As the fictional drug kingpin Stringer Bell says in The Wire -- "is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"

Coulomb barrier - how to overcome it with radiation like that? Exactly, not at the energy levels a cell phone user is subjected to. Why isn't that the end of the story?

It's like with homeopathy; it's effect cannot be measured beyond base background noise, but plenty of people believe it affects their bodies anyway.

> Nothing gets put underground

That is too bad, I grew up in an desert locale that had all its power lines buried and I only experienced one power outage in fifteen years. Then I moved out to a coastal area where burying the lines wasn’t really feasible and pretty much every time it rained someone would hydroplane into a utility poll and knock out the power for a couple hours, and it rained at least once a week. If the climate permits them to bury, they should go for it.

How does climate interfere with burying power lines? Germany's bad weather is only slightly less of a stereotype than the lack of humour and <you know what>, and all residential power lines are underground. Even the long-distance lines are moving underground lately.

I think more than climate it tends to be 1) what does the current construction look like and is it feasible to move lines underground, 2) what is the soil like, and is it stable enough to bury cables, and 3) are current property owners willing to accommodate the disturbance to trench and replace the old cables.

I grew up in an old (for the US), hilly east coast city and nothing was underground. Because it wasn't very dense and didn't have gridded neighborhoods, it would have been quite expensive to run utilities underground. I subsequently moved to a newer part of a different city and all the new construction had underground utilities. It still doesn't prevent outages at the substation or high voltage transfer line layers.

UK as well, we bury all (well technically damn near all) our sub-station to residence cabling and we are a wet country.

Power outages are a once ever few years or more thing.

(I don't have any professional background in this) I believe in general above-ground lines are "less durable", but they're much easier to install and repair. Below-ground cost significantly more for both. They're also susceptible to different things; wind and tress for above-ground, earthquakes? high water-table? rock vs sand/clay? for below grown.

For a few years I lived in a neighborhood that had above-ground lines, but further down the street they were below ground because that neighborhood was significantly richer. Our power went out fairly frequently. The neighbors told me it was because of the transition from below ground to above ground, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if NIMBYism kept older equipment in service.

For the last 30 years I've lived all along the Mendocino coast, and every time one of the towns I lived in had a vote to underground the utilities, the NIMBY's killed it because it would cause much disruption, yet when the power went out due to weather related issues, they complained about the power outages.

Man, I can't imagine anyone NIMBYing new power poles lol. Old poles get scary, especially when they start leaning over. And then when AT&T was mounting giant ass DSL VRADs on poles too lol.

I'd be out there cheering on the linemen for replacing the old junk. :D

Depends. New poles proposed often carry not just electricity, but also a cellular station, 2 or 3 cameras, 'smart' blazing bright led street lights going on and off at irregular times and 1 or 2 sizable led advertizing displays constatly adapting their messages to perceived passers by.

I can definetly see how replacing a lowly old pole with one of these annoyance towers can lead to strong opposition even for those not having 5G scares.

A lot of power poles have been replaced recently in my town and surrounding area. Most of the newer poles are a bit taller. Some of the A shaped towers were replaced with giant poles. Some giant wooden poles were replaced with towers. For the most part, the changes were aesthetically pretty minimal. Not a single one of the new towers has cameras, a smart LED street light, cellular stations, or sizeable advertising displays.

Most of those other things, I have seen, but on different projects lol. Like the LED street lamps have been phased in on most streets out here over the past few years. They also upgraded the light-up street signs to have LEDs and replaced the yellowed, cracked, faded glass with shiny new glass.

All of those things were super solid improvements though.

Of course, we could just act like the town is evil, defund everything, and then have them sell the rights-of-way to companies that would almost certainly squeeze the blood out of the infrastructure and place advertising on it.

Maybe they'd put cameras and use machine learning to determine which streets are the busiest, and find out more about the demographics of people who walk the street, so they can decide how long to leave the lights on - oh and sell that data to further profit lol.

Burying the cable like every other country on this planet with decent infrastructure does, will not create "a cellular station,2 or 3 cameras, led street light and advertising displays". How would these even work underground?

> Burying the cable like every other country on this planet with decent infrastructure does

I take it you've never been to Japan

Hence a "with decent infrastructure", though I should have narrowed it to "with decent power infra" to be more clear about it.

I don't think the poles are the issue. They're a proxy. The issue is: what happens when you upgrade such infrastructure? The area become more desirable, there's more development, and more "outsiders" move in.

Yeah but presumably that would increase land prices.

Obviously, not everyone values money over peace and quite, and peace of mind. Not everyone loves strip malls and other "mod cons."

Because that requires new permits and new permits require impact studies and approval which must go through the public. Which makes it impossible in areas like that.

Just replacement to exactly what was there does not require that approval.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid

I have worked as an executive in a risk department at a telco and can say definitively say that NIMBYs don’t influence these decisions.

I worked with our government relations, legal and comms teams and was in charge of risk management.

There’s no profits to be gained in fixing most infrastructure issues and most times NIMBYs provided us cover for service issues.

“Yes congressmen we’d love to upgrade our infrastructure and provide better service but those damn NIMBYs”

I have family in Mill Valley in that area. They've seen PG&E helicoptering in new polls in residential neighborhoods. I assume it was because the streets were too narrow but also likely that the community didn't want heavy machinery in their neighborhood.

I would love to see PG&E shame residents by showing PG&E customers how much their bill increases (both individually and in aggregate) because they have to work around NIMBYs.

Cost recovery fees in areas where they were blocked by NIMBY groups? I'd love to see that, but skeptical that the regulator would approve.

I do think the recent fires have nudged things towards more undergrounding. I'm familiar with some of the dialogue in similarly rural/affluent peninsula towns, and it's mostly a debate about safety versus cost to underground.

There's an effort to underground the utilities near Foothill College by tapping into Santa Clara County Fire's funds for improved fire safety, since they're allowed to use these funds in that specific location.

The justification is that there's a particularly high density and quantity of wiring around that fire station (one of two for LAH, IIRC) and that Moody is a major access route for emergency services and evacuation. A giant bundle of wires coming down across the road would strangle a response.

A simplistic napkin math computation says that the cost delta in electricity between what Santa Clara pays and what PG&E customers pay, times the amount of electricity that LAH residents consume would pay for the entire undergrounding in 5-6 years.

So to my mind, it seems like a simple argument in favor of a municipal power utility that charges PG&E rates until it pays off its infrastructure, and then charges a more reasonable rate thereafter. Of course this assumes that LAH could achieve Santa Clara levels of cost efficiency, but it doesn't seem crazy either.

Makes sense -- Moody Road is a pretty dicey road for access and there's a decent number of homes that could easily be cut off there. Presumably in such a situation the opposite side access from Page Mill Road would be jeopardized as well.

Too bad the deadline has passed for nomination for LAH Town Council. You should run next time ;)

I've kinda wondered this for a while -- why is SVP (Santa Clara) cheaper than PG&E?

SVP isn't weighed down with debt from {the Erin Brockavitch lawsuit, the San Bruno gas explosion, the Paradise fire} incidents (among other, less infamous ones).

More likely, though, is that smaller and newer utilities are likely to be more nimble than the big behemoth that has lots of tech debt and internal and external bureaucracy.

I also wonder how much of it just comes down to serving a small dense area vs a large varied one. If you can focus on the cheapest customers to serve and avoid the overhead from needing to cover a large area it should be at least a little cheaper.

As far as I can tell it's a cost-plus model. If PG&E wants to grow its revenue, it has to do something that costs more. They have a perverse incentive to make everything as expensive as possible.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/how-rates-w...

I can't imagine what makes someone object to moving cables underground.

The work itself requires construction and any additional maintenance work may require construction (eg. digging a trench in the road / sidewalks). There's always some maintenance needed and I suspect vocal NIMBY people just don't want to tolerate any minor inconvenience, not simply any change.

Then again, maybe it's the same demand for power and independence that we are seeing with "Karens", masks, protests, Confederate statues, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, etc. As individuals feel more powerless, they will almost certainly lash out at anything they can, including local utilities disrupting their life/convenience.

I doubt it’s anything too sophisticated, old retired people simply don’t like change.

They under grounded the utilities in my neighborhood. Took them about 3 years total. I'd wake up to the sound of guys jackhammering outside my window. For a couple of months contractors were using the spot in front of my house to stash their metal plates.

I think it was worth it. But there are crankypants types that hate any change because it's change.

Rocks. Frost.

Not all locations are amenable to underground cables.

Here is a white paper that lays out all the tradeoffs and includes some costs. New construction costs can differ between overhead and underground by 2-10x. Conversion costs aren't negligible either. https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/unde...

From the paper it seams that overhead cables are also >10x more frequently failing, so I think that'll balance out easily.

Where I live, 99.9% of power is delivered via underground cables, I get power outages like once every 5 years. Brownouts are more often but usually not related to cable issues. America needs to catch up to the rest of the world there.

I think that also depends on the location. Might be true in places with lots of trees. Not so true in other locations.

It is complicated, as are most things.

It's not complicated. Burying a cable costs more upfront and is cheaper int he long run. End of story.

You're being too simplistic. If it were that obvious there would be no need for white papers and it would have been done already.

The actual cost of construction and maintenance are going to vary from place to base based on geology, existing infrastructure, weather, labor costs, regulatory oversight, cost of capitol, etc. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

There will be a dirt pile in their morning landscape view from the east wing of their estate.

Around here? Price tag. That's all.

You're telling me that there are people who have above-ground wires to their home, who oppose efforts to put these wires underground?

That's incomprehensible to me... and then these same people complain about outages? Wow.

NIMBYs have almost nothing to do with blocking wire undergrounding. Parts of Manhattan Beach, for example, are undergrounding wires. The homeowners opposed to it don't want to pay "an average of $42,423" for the service.

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/01/08/a-third-manhattan-bea...

That underground lines are objected to is hillarious by east coast standards where NIMBYs frown upon power lines heavily. Especially the EMF whackjobs since the earth between it would insulate it but those types are so wilfully ignorant they would think it causes earthquakes or "poisons the earth" somehow.

Why would even a NIMBY not be in favor of burying power lines? Power lines & poles don't exactly add to property values, and you'd think that underground you would get less electromagnetic 5G corona cancer rays implanting microchip vaccines too. But I guess trying to apply logic here isn't going to work...

Some NIMBYs I've met just don't want any change at all if there's any amount of immediate inconvenience they would face as a direct result regardless of how small. In these worst NIMBY cases there's often no particularly compelling arguments for why because it's all just flimsy justifications to avoiding dealing with any change. Logical argument about costs and benefits tend to go nowhere with these people. Sometimes framing things in terms of reducing future hassles and change can get things moving.

Not just substations, but the conductors themselves. The more current you run through a line on a hot, non-breezy and sunny day, the more it sags. Which leads to more resistance, which leads to hotter lines, more sagging. It’s a positive feedback cycle.

How does line-sag lead to increased resistance?

My understanding is that the mean-free-path of conduction electrons in even OFHC copper is quite short -- scattering on impurities is the dominant loss mechanism, not the boundaries of the conductor. Is the theory advanced above that the morphology of the wire matters, or is there another mechanism at work?

The resistance is not constant and is in fact a function of temperature [0]. Line sag is a proxy measurement for line temperature, since things expand as they heat up. From [1], most materials have positive alpha coefficients so the resistance increases with temperature.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...

1. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chp...

The statement referred to heating driving sagging, which increased resistance.

The increase of resistance with temperature is well-known -- I was curious if there is some effect that is directly related to the wire sag (changing morphology, somehow-altered surface area/skin-depth, changing kinks at the connections, some subtlety with increased length (cross-sectional area also increases), etc..).

Theoretically I would thing the sag itself should increase resistance since resistance increases with both length and smaller wire diameter. When the line lengthens the diameter should decrease (similar to stretching a piece of gum or putty).

It's not being stretched by an external force, though. It's expanding due to heat. The diameter would also expand some negligible amount I think.

I don't think it should. Heat expansion should slightly increase the diameter.

Not if the length increases to counteract it.

It doesn’t ”counteract” it. All dimensions increase based on the same coefficient. Same percentage increase on all axis.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion and check the coefficient of expansion.

My thought is that after each expansion/contraction cycle, contraction is never exactly back to its previous state.

Like bending a piece of metal back and forth, it weakens each time.

Just FYI, transmission lines are aluminum not copper. Also, both copper and aluminum have positive temperature coefficients of resistance.

My thought was that the gauge of the wire goes down as it sags. The same weight of wire across a longer distance.

Maybe I’m wrong and this kind of wire stretching doesn’t impact resistance?

The volume expands as it heats, so it's not a given that the diameter (gauge) goes down. But the length is longer and that does increase the total resistance.

I think sag means voltage sag.

One of the more impressive things I've seen with electricity is watching a transmission line into a local neighborhood turn orange and stretch to drape itself across a pickup truck parked in the wrong spot. Took a minute to realize what I'd just watched.

You glowing orange from heat?

Yep, only thing that made sense. There was a heavy storm going through and I was driving by at night, during the day probably wouldn't have been visible at all.

In this case sag is meant literally.

https://www.atcllc.com/blog/why-do-power-lines-sag-on-hot-da...

Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid

You certainly know more about this topic than I do, but according to the article, it wasn't the operators that decided to cut back on power, it was ordered by the Independent System Operator.

From what I read, Edison, PG&E and SDG&E just did what they were told, and for some reason the ISO told them to cut back earlier than was previously necessary. That's why the experts are "stumped."

If I'm missing something, please let me know.

> Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.

Serious question, why is the answer to this not a slightly-but-not-much-more-polite version of "That's ridiculous, be quiet." and moving forward?

The US legal system allows a great many delaying tactics if you can afford filing fees and base your case on statements that cannot be proven with certainty. The legal system is often set up to require either certain proof or expensive multi-year reviews to overcome such objections, and they are used with great success by coordinated groups of NIMBY folks.

Laws could be passed to sidestep all of this and support infrastructure growth, but those laws would trigger the same attacks from coordinated groups NIMBY, who happen to often be wealthy single-family homeowners, and thus more often than their competition have captive lawmakers to resist any effort they disapprove of.

Not enough people are willing to spend time at city hall community hearings and make the voice of reason heard whereas these other people will show up to make demands. Same thing happened here when the city wanted to install free wifi in public parks for students, all the nuts flooded the meetings making ridiculous claims and demands but none of the people who would benefit bothered to show up so they canned the idea.

And the council members are so incapable of critical thought that they believe that the loud nutjobs who show up are representative of their constituents?

The concern is more how many of those people will show up to vote against you in races which can have very small numbers of voters, and how much of a hassle they'll make for your office. If someone decides that you're part of the problem, you'll be getting lots of contacts, public records requests, etc. The things which circulate on neighborhood listserves, Facebook groups, etc. can be pretty absurd but they might break down into the 95% who don't care and ignore them and the 5% who care enough to put a lot of energy into obstruction.

None of that precludes doing the right thing, of course, but if it's not an issue you care strongly about you might decide not to fight it. The best countermeasure is for everyone else to tune out local politics less, which is an area people oddly ignore even though it has the most day to day impact on your life.

Turnout can be pretty low in city elections, so the cranks may not represent their constituents, but be overrepresented among voters. For folks reading this: there are probably YIMBY or other pro-housing/infrastructure groups in your area that will tell you when to show up to meetings to fight back against this nonsense.

Great question, and I personally believe it's driven by modern American communities being unable to maintain their own infrastructure at any level. 100 years ago people worked for a living, with their hands, and would often have to build, install, and repair their homes, roads, and other infrastructure themselves. They understood the process, and what it takes to get something done.

These days, most households, especially the wealthy ones like in Marin, are helmed by people who do NOT work with their hands, do not respect people who do, and who have no interest in learning more. Even worse, infrastructure work is so heavily regulated and specialized that gobs of accidental complexity prevent anyone who wanted to from learning more about it, reinforcing the ignorance.

And truly, it's easy to have sympathy. The world is a complex place, and no doubt they have their hands full dealing with the technology revolution and palace intrigues at work; who has time to understand something as boring as infrastructure? And besides, if infrastructure fails, it fails for everyone so there's no real benefit to being informed or prepared (in that sense being informed about city infrastructure would be very similar to being a "prepper", in a weaker sense, which comes with it's own stigma).

So if you say "That's ridiculous, be quiet" you will offend sensibilities to the extent YOU will be banned, banned for having dirty knowledge, for shaming those that don't, and for tacitly asserting the value of having such knowledge! Plus, your views aren't in their news-feeds, so there's no emotional juice to them. Emotionally driven opposition is the inevitable retarding force in the hyper-connected, capitalist info-sphere, and ultimately leads to civic ignorance and paralysis. Good luck overcoming that in your city council meetings! (But you have my respect if you even try.)

Because the representatives with authority will get voted out by these folks. You have to dance around them, or find technical mitigations to the silliness (substation facades, suboptimal siting, more expensive underground transmission, etc).

It's why you're seeing a rapid uptake in battery storage by consumers in California; it's a hack around regulatory and utility failures (and you get a federal tax credit if it charges primarily from your rooftop solar, which is mandatory on new CA residential construction).

It is ridiculous, and people who are ridiculous must be negotiated with (unfortunately!). I don't know what the solution is besides applying constant pressure in the appropriate direction.

Disclosure: This information comes from my own research, as well as first hand accounts from electrical linemen friends in NorCal upgrading infrastructure.

At what point is it ok to throw in the towel and say "this is just a city/state reaping what they sow". Sure there's people who want to do things right but as evidenced by a result they're a small enough minority that their voice doesn't matter. It's not like there's lobbyists from BigWildfire(TM) distorting things. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Every time I think we’re there, it turns out we’re not yet there. I don’t know.

I looked into this recently in order to gather enough facts to educate an aunt who wasn't a 5g conspiracy person, they just asked "how do you know that it's safe?", which is always a fair question. I wrote a post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24103096

But the TLDR is that (in the example of 5G), the power levels were talking about amount to ~300,000x less power than what would be required to irritate your skin in a minor way.

Of course, it's always complex because sure, stick your hand in to a transformer and electromagnetism will do plenty of damage to you. Being against 5G or power stations because EMF "can do damage" is a bit like banning cars because jumping in front of a car "can do damage", except cars are _far_ more lethal and far less helpful than signal-carrying cables.

Because the people involved have political and legal power.

Please review the Epri document EMF and your health. Document number 3002016508. It's free on Epris website.

Because they can vote.

Yes, stupid people can vote. This is the main vulnerability of democracy.

Stupid people can also become a monarch or a despot, which is one of the problems of monarchism and despotism.

I think that what you've found is a flaw with humanity, not with democracy.

I think the key value of (our version of) democracy is the peaceful transition of power. For example from Clinton -> Bush -> Obama -> Trump. They all had very different views on what the country needed to do, but they all accepted that elections were how the future was decided and handed off power to someone they did not agree with.

In a monarchy or despotism, there is no transition of power by design. It is supposed to be difficult, because it is not wanted. So if you end up with the wrong choice it is very hard to correct.

A big part to this is that the voters have confidence in the result, hence they don't go around looting and starting civil wars.

Trump is scary. I am not of the US but: I fear if Trump wins. I fear the tantrum/insurrection of Trump if he loses in respect to a peaceful handover.

> you've found is a flaw with humanity, not with democracy

Well, yeah. BTW, I didn't say I have a better idea, I merely pointed out an issue.

[edit: retracted]

This is called sortition, and the only common use of it in the US today is for drawing juries.

To be clear, the US is a constitutional republic and not a democracy, and the constant use of the word democracy dilutes this fact.

This is a red herring, here is the definition of democracy: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."

The US clearly fits in here. The US is not a direct democracy, but neither is any other country in the world, including Switzerland that perhaps is the one I know of that comes closest.

Given the subtopic I commented on was bringing up NYMBYs and political process and the word democracy, I don't see this as a red herring, or an attempt to divert or smokescreen the argument; I simply stated the US is a constitutional republic, which some would argue further and label it a federal republic. It seems your quote is from lexico.com. How do you respond when someone asks you what type of government does the US have?

Here is what you said: "To be clear, the US is a constitutional republic and not a democracy, and the constant use of the word democracy dilutes this fact."

Here is what happens when you google democracy: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy: 1a: government by the people especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

dictionary.com: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.

You said the US is not a democracy, all definitions I can find says it is.

Except that the proposition system in California, and other states, is direct democracy.

The end result is that many state and local issues are resolved through direct voter action.

I don't know where you picked up the meme of "the US is a republic not a democracy" but you might want to read up about the reaction against it:

https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democra...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s...

https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democrac...

I picked up the "meme" long before the word "meme" entered the vernacular in the sense that I think you are using it. I had the good fortune of attending a Jesuit HS in NYC when grammar was prescriptive rather than descriptive, you took two years of Latin, and studied world religions, and the preciseness of language mattered. Mr. Caruso, my sophomore year History teacher, asked the first day back to school, "Is the United States a democracy?". Like most I said 'Yes'. He then lectured on early U.S., and other types of governments. It was an eye opener for me, and taught me to question my assumptions, and try to be more precise in my language and arguments (logical ones, not emotional ones). My comment about "diluting" comes from people throwing the term about to a point that it becomes meaningless out of context. For a similar commentary, this quote in the Wikipedia entry for a search on "democracy", seems in agreement: " However, the noun "democracy" has, over time, been modified by more than 3,500 adjectives which suggests that it may have types that can elude and elide this duality."

Thanks for the links. I found the first link interesting and then disappointing, since I had worked at a bookstore in NYC in the early 90s that carried a lot of philosophy books, economics books mainly from the Austrian School, and so the mises.org link caught my eye. Ryan McKaken the author of the article basically dismisses the use of "we're a republic and not a democracy" when used as an argument in two cases of what he believes people are thinking. I was pointing out that we are not simply "a democracy", but more precisely constitutional republic, no more, no less.

How do you answer the question, "What type of government does the U.S. have?"

Thank you for that context, even if it mostly relates to your personal experience and back story. I agree that we should be careful how we use words, but I don't think you can easily argue that "democracy" has become meaningless out of context, while also imposing your own idiosyncratic context to claim that the US isn't a democracy.

As to your question, I would say that the U.S. constitution defines (indeed, guarantees) the country as having "a republican form of government" (at the state level, but this is maintained at the federal level), and that the processes and principles that it puts in place, such as representative elections, qualify that system as democratic.

I feel that's nitpicking. The values of democracy are constantly advertised in all political discourse in this country.

The values of democracy are touted in Hong Kong too, but that doesn't make it a democracy. Small groups with a NYMBY position, or large PACs depend operate on our current form of government, which is why I made the precise distinction in my comment. The 2016 election outcome was via the electoral college, and not the popular vote.

> as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure.

That's a nice story, except as the article notes it wasn't distribution but generation that was the problem. Not a shortage of installed capacity, but shutdown of four (one wind apparently due to conditions, and three natural gas apparently voluntarily by the operators) plants.

Plausible, but then why is it happening in California and not in similarly NIMBYist states? Electromagnetism obsessives live all over the nation.

My impression is that california uniquely empowers individuals to obstruct projects with myriad legal mechanisms that are easy to initiate but expensive to fight.

CEQA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Environmental_Quali...

Ever since it was passed, NIMBYs and other types of individualists have found more and more ways to use its provisions to block anything from happening that they don't want to happen.

Rumblings I heard had to do with too-aggressively retiring traditional power plants in favor of renewables, resulting in a lack of adequate baseload power.

But I have looked into it exactly zero.

> Wild claims related to electromagnetism

what follows is speculation, so you can grab your pitchforks if you want but it will be a hollow victory.

I've always been suspicious of the claim that EM fields have zero effect on human beings, especially near high-volts lines. It doesnt seem possible. Our bodies function based on electrical signals and many cellular mechanisms are mediated with ions.

do we have a list of all electrically-sensitive bodily processes? could we guess what would happen if their simultaneous activation changed by 5%? what about 45% or more? So much of the human body is not exhaustively understood in the general case, and certainly not in the individual case.

idk, i dont wanna go all tinfoil hat here. it just seems like circumstances are aligned for there to be large holes in our public understanding (accidentally or otherwise).

note: for whatever its worth, ive spent some time around the 8MW generators on Nimitz-class aircraft carriers[0].

[0]: https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/cvn-68.htm

Turn on your FM radio, all that noise you hear in all the other channels are EM fields from exploding stars hitting you constantly.

While you read this, over 100 billion neutrinos went through your thumb.

Another useful thing to understand is the energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier and contrast that with energies 10 cell phones in your pocket would emit.

Wouldn't we see those effects on the animals and plants that live around the power lines?

observational studies like this would be hard to craft.

we'd have to be doing the studies, first. second, we'd have to know what we're looking for. if the effects were subtle, generational, or multiple and confounding, it would be hard to see even if we were looking. also, im sure the sample size is small. not a lot of people/animals spend years 10 feet from high-volts lines.

also, people are generally pretty change-averse. if there were proof that our current way of life was harmful, not a lot of people would be interested in discovering, spreading, or changing due to this news, least of all the companies with a profit motive. saving the turtles is fine if all you have to do is use a metal straw instead of plastic, but ask people to inconvenience themselves (less TV, less air-conditioning, less hot water, etc) and you've got a different response.

So the deer I saw with two cell phones and solar panels taped to its head speed dialing Dial-A-Joke was a study animal? ;)

I've seen that claimed. And then attributed to chemicals used around and in the building of power lines.

Sorry no link found right now.

> its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.

ahh yes, seems like the "looking for toilet paper in all the wrong places" phenomenon where there's no lack of supply, but the existing supply lines head to the wrong places. (all the industrial/office stuff is idled, while rural locations are blasting AC in ways they've never seen before)

> but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.

Can you elaborate? A substation is about to start construction just across the (narrow) street from my child's elementary school.

I used to work in the contact centre for my country's radio spectrum regulators, we'd get numerous phone calls from people who were terrified of or complaining about the "radiation" part of "electromagnetic radiation" from power equipment or celltowers or radio transmitters.

I'd say 1/3 were reassured by my explanation of why non-ionising radiation isn't going to harm your unborn child/give you cancer[1], 1/3 decided I was a lying tool of the Establishment and They Knew The Truth, and the last 1/3 had a genuine mental illness - "No you don't understand, the Prime Minister has authorised the Police to monitor my TV viewing using radio waves and it's giving my family cancer".

[1]Unless you're climbing a transmitter tower and exposing your womb to a focused microwave beam at a very close range for a substantial period, then the heating effect probably isn't going to be doing good things.

> Unless you're climbing a transmitter tower and exposing your womb to a focused microwave beam at a very close range for a substantial period, then the heating effect probably isn't going to be doing good things.

That's exactly what I'd expect from a lying tool of the Establishment.

If I were in your position, I would ask (privately, to avoid unnecessarily freaking everyone out) what their limits on stray voltage and stray current are outside the substation and what they do to control and monitor it. 60 Hz radiation doesn’t seem like a credible risk at all to me. 60 Hz conducted emissions, on the other hand, can very easily kill you — imagine crawling in hands and knees two feet from a downed powerline.

I would like to imagine that regulators and utilities have this under control, but making some effort to verify this could be reasonable.

(49 states permit utilities utilities to ground a current carrying overhead wire at utility poles, resulting in parallel currents in the ground. I’m not aware of this being a documented hazard to people, but it’s a documented problem for cattle. CA is the exception.)

the em waves produced by substations induce fear of decreasing home values via an unknown mechanism.

If you get the chance, watch "Better Call Saul" sometime. Jimmy's brother Chuck feels he is sensitive to electromagnetism and goes to extreme lengths to protect himself from the waves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTEmqJkCrDQ

Please review the Epri document EMF and your health. Document number 3002016508. It's free on Epris website.

https://www.epri.com/research/products/000000003002016508

Abstract This 2019 brochure is intended to explain the issues surrounding EMF. It covers the physical nature of EMF, our everyday exposures to EMF, the health research and its findings, and the conclusions reached by expert scientific panels and government agencies. It provides key updates to the review of the science that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) published in 2002 in a booklet entitled, “EMF: Electric and Magnetic Fields Associated with the Use of Electric Power – Questions & Answers.” The 2002 booklet contains very useful information that remains current, and that the reader of this brochure may find of value.

I would imagine with the amount of financial exposure these power companies have now regarding wild fires, it's not exactly in their best interests to try to push their infrastructure either.

I'm curious about how you became an apprentice then decided it wasn't for you? These are not easy to get into I've heard. What made you consider it and what made you leave?

I can't speak for OP, but one of my coworkers used to be a lineman. He saw the old guys in the job and didn't want to end up like them and also got sick of working outside in extreme weather and became a programmer.

> its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.

Do you think think the demand would be higher? In parallel, while many people are working from home, the businesses are closed, which I would think eat up much more electricity.

Its not just overall grid usage, substations have capacities as well. So the business park is going to be underutilized, but the residential ones are probably seeing more demand as people are at home and not turning up the thermostat during the day to save energy (since they are at home and want a comfortable environment, vs. letting the house sit at 80 when nobody is home).

The temperature on the AC at my house is set at 80F. At 80F with the air flow from fans and a dressing light, there is no reason most people cannot be comfortable. I think that people cranking the AC down to 72F like they do are selfish and do not understand the impact that everyday actions have on the world as a whole.

For me, 80F is well beyond "sweating even without doing anything", even if wearing nothing (which is, thankfully in this work-from-home era, easier than ever.)

I don't run my AC. It regularly gets up to 85-88F. With air flow from fans and dressing light, there's no reason most people cannot be comfortable.

I think that people who run their AC like they do are selfish and do not understand the impact that their everyday actions have on the world.

(I really don't run my AC. I do think people are overly dependent on it. The number of people I know who have their home cooler in the summer than the winter indicates many people really just do it because they can.

But also I'm not a judgey asshole, so I don't moralize about it to people)

Too late to edit or delete this post, but looking back on it a couple hours later, it was unkind and I shouldn't have written it.

That's all.

There's a good number of houses and apartments in the SCV with absolutely terrible insulation. The AC is the only thing keeping the interior moderately comfortable in 90°+ heat. If the thermostat is set to 80° The house will be significantly hotter than that.

Plenty of businesses are still open, and AC still needs to run to drive out building moisture so that they don't develop mold. Maybe not at human comfort levels, but they still need to run them for the whole building.

> AC still needs to run to drive out building moisture so that they don't develop mold.

Serious question: How was this handled in pre-AC times?

Is it just an issue because buildings are much better sealed than they used to be, or is there more to it than that?

Depends, some climates buildings were moldy.

But old buildings generally aren't even close to air tight. Under those conditions as long as they are heated even a little the humidity is mostly lower than outside. Mean the amount of water in the air as a percent is the same inside and outside. But since it's hotter inside the house the relative humidity is lower. In temperate climates you don't get mold.

It's actually modern air tight houses that have terrible problems with mold. Because they don't breath water vapor builds up inside.

Older, less insulated buildings, breathe better. The more your home "breathes" the more it transfers heat and humidity to the outside, which defeats most insulation, unless the breathing is done though a heat exchange.

As an update, as I'm getting a bunch of down votes for some reason (please comment!).

Newer homes and buildings have a vapor barrier beneath the outside cladding. This article on the Perfect Wall [0], explains the benefits and options.

Older houses, like the Victorian that I live in, didn't have modern insulation, which can deteriorate if it gets wet, so they were made to breathe, so that any moisture that got into the wall could be removed through air movement. Not to mention that fireplaces required a constant stream of new air to replace that which is pulled up through the chimney.

[0][https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...]

Building design has changed tremendously since the introduction of AC, the number of usable windows and ceiling overhead has drastically decreased in those regions traditionally needing them.

We're not in California, but while most people are working from home at my company, there are still 10 or so employees at the office. So as far as electricity usage it's basically business as usual. Most (80%+) of my friends work for similar companies where a small group is at the office so everything is still on, but a lot of people are working from home all day on top of that.

> Do you think think the demand would be higher? In parallel, while many people are working from home, the businesses are closed, which I would think eat up much more electricity.

At the level of the generation there won't be much change, but the distribution / "last mile" substations have never been planned for the duty cycle and load they have seen over the last months.

The issue is the offices are closed yet still running all services and most at home running all services....and in a heat wave.

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