Why are these local power lines up in the air on such low poles? Shouldn't they be buried when in an urban environment? I've only ever seen power lines up in the air when crossing open country, and then 50m or so up in the air.
I am curious as to where you live where underground is the norm? I wonder if they build them differently than elsewhere..?
https://utilitymagazine.com.au/underground-power-upgrade-com...
That being said, in a typical neighbourhood it's still wires everwhere to the house. I even went as far to drop the little man in google maps and have a peek. Wires everywhere the eye can see!
It's very rare to see above-ground power lines in UK towns and cities. You do see them in more rural locations.
(Some UK towns do have broadband cables running on poles, installed in the 1990s/early 2000s and typically splayed out in star configurations to several houses from a single pole. They're very ugly!)
Many HV trunk lines (ie. tens to hundreds of kV) are buried as well, and those that aren’t, of course have wide buffer zones to avoid being hit by errant cars or falling trees.
In the countryside (of which there is a lot in Finland), overhead lines are much more common due to the cost of burying them all. Still, it’s increasingly being done because a few storms in recent years left thousands of rural residents without electricity for days or even weeks – and such storms are only becoming more frequent while our lifestyles are getting even more dependent on electricity.
Burying all those lines is of course expensive, and the expenses will ultimately be paid by the consumers. There has been some pushback due to this – transmission fees have gone up a lot in the 2000s and utility companies are accused of using the costs as an excuse to inflate their profits.
Power lines suspended on poles are common throughout North American and Asian countries in my experience, even in urban areas.
Burying power lines by default in towns and cities seems to be a more UK/European thing.
Retrofits in urban areas are especially expensive, because any good contractor knows there's gonna be unknown problems once you start digging.
Most places that have underground electric in the US have it either because it's mandated by local code or because the original developer was willing to pay for it.
Hypothetically, enough bad weather would make burying it economical, but I've never heard of any particular instance where that was the case.
That took into account what was cost effective from the perspective of large scale deployment, and then individual elements are designed from (and are intertwined with) everything downstream from that. So even if two cities (one US and one UK) were/are nearly identical, the resulting grid is going to end up being laid out very differently.
2. I don’t think so. But the way way people describe the geography here is weird. Usually people say it’s the southern end.
3. It’s pretty sprawly, car is king, generally the threat of earthquakes and nimbyism has resulted in low density. I doubt ‘thousands’ though I’m not clear on your units.
4. Highly doubtful. The super-rich mostly live in the suburbs or exurbs of SJ, where it’s cooler (temperature wise) and less urban. Los Gatos, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Woodside, Menlo Park, Atherton, etc.
It all results in fundamental cost differences, that were originally calculated based on density and distances, with US being low density/ large distance and the opposite for the UK.
I'm sure there's related consequences with line burial, but I don't know if that's the reason it's so common in the UK.
Wooden utility poles are made from a single piece of wood, usually the trunk of a pine tree. It's cheap to toss a bunch of them on the back of a truck and drive them to wherever, but they're typically longer than a cargo container, so putting them on a ship is annoying.
The forests in North America has lots of tall, straight pine trees but there are fewer forests in Europe and what forests there are tend to have more deciduous forests, where the trees are shorter, narrower, and ... squigglier.
You could have shorter poles and fit them into cargo containers more easily, but now you're stuck with short utility poles. Concrete or metal utility poles are a thing, but they're more expensive.
And anyway, Europe has plenty of farms pine/spruce forests. That Ikea furniture doesn't just appear.
Europe buries power lines because they're considered ugly.
Reminds me of the joke about cancer risk and lowered IQs and power lines - the mechanism of the damage is insidious - it doesn't act through radiation but through lowered property values.
From a friend of mine who was trying hard to get the “unsightly” utility poles buried underground - it was just a lack of interest and funds. Just not a priority here.
Almost all new neighborhoods have utility lines buried.
Undergrouding local transmission might increase overall risks of outages / cost of repair.