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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

There are many long term economical effects of burying electric, not only does it reduce exposure to liability (you caused a natural disaster), it also reduces maintenance cost, failure rates and so on. Both customers and providers prefer buried cables, all things being equal. The only issue is that they're more expensive to actually place, so maybe them causing wildfires has finally pushed companies to put the cables where they belong.

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As a corollary - maintenance of buried power lines is more expensive due to all the digging which has to be done. Power line inspection is also trickier.

I also wonder if the unions representing linemen have a strong influence on "bury" vs "overhead" since most of lineman's job involves work up a pole rather than a tunnel.

Lastly - burying anything in the ground in areas where the ground has been known to move (California is the "Earthquake" entry in the Bingo game of "choose which natural disaster" that is the continental USA) is liable to be a non-trivial endeavour, one which will require ongoing inspections and the like.

There are lots of good reasons distribution companies don't like cables in some situations (especially rural). Connecting new customers and network alterations is much more expensive, changing to a higher voltage is not possible, upgrading capacity requires a whole new cable which is more expensive than replacing the conductors, cables only last about 30-50 years. Finding and fixing a cable fault usually takes much longer than overhead (although there are probably less of them per mile). Without wild fires, I seriously doubt cables are more economic in rural areas.

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