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Comment by melenaboija | Hacker News Reader

> The US uses a lot more smaller transformers, really one per street. while germany uses fewer larger transformers

I am from Spain and living in the US and something that was shocking to me about it is that here, at least where I lived, these last transformers are hanging from poles and every now and then I can hear an explosion and it is one of them blowing up.

I have no idea but, maybe being exposed like they are here in the US makes them more vulnerable to weather conditions and that makes them explode? Or maybe it simply is that in Spain they also explode but the fact of not being that close to residences makes it harder to hear it.

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Transformer explosions are rare. Unless you can produce statistics saying otherwise it is safe to assume they happen as often in both countries (per something, the US obvious has far more transformers given larger population and area, and thus should have more total)

Yeah near me they rarely ever pop, and when they do it's almost always lightning related.

"Rarely ever" and "when they do" suggests this happens more often than "I've never heard of this as a thing" here in Europe.

With higher voltages, fewer transformers are needed. Power lines are buried, and transformers are generally larger and not exposed to weather.

That was exactly my point, I have never heard that in Europe and I would say at least a dozen of them in US in a decade. Probably because there are more of them and exposed.

I am not criticizing the infrastructure but as European (and this is something others told me) it feels weird to see transformers hanging from poles and every now and then blowing up.

And I mentioned the weather because my experience is that it usually happens during storms, it might be lightnings or tree branches but that is what I have seen.

What the news covers is a.bad metric for deciding what is common. Commonplace things rarely make the news.

Is the voltage the reason power lines are buried in Europe? I do wish we would do so in the US.

Buried lines are invisible until you hit them with a shovel. The reason to bury power lines is mostly so you don't have to look at them.

For some statistics, "U.S. electricity customers averaged seven hours of power interruptions in 2021." [1].

At first I couldn't find equivalent European statistics, until I changed my search to "minutes", which is how Europe measures outages. The EU average in 2010-2014 was just over 2 hours, and as low as 29 minutes in Germany, or 20 here in Denmark.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=54639

[2] https://neon.energy/Neon_Data-quality_European-Commission.pd... (22nd page, figure 5)

That isn't the relevant statist. We are talking about transformer explosions not all causes power outages. Transformers do explode, but not very often.

Most power outages are broken wires. According to my utility underground wires break more often than above ground, and when they break are a lot more expensive to fix. (They are trying to make a point so this might need some salt, though i don't care enough to look up what)

Power outages in the USA are almost always weather or heat related. Snow/storm in many areas, heat droop or fire in others.

Buried power lines solve most of these.

It's the nearest statistic I could find — anything more is up to you.

You won't find the statistic you want for Europe, as transformers don't explode enough for them to listed separately to any other fault.

I don't think you will find the relevant stats for the us either, as transformers explode so rarely.

https://www.electricrate.com/power-transformer-explosion/

https://www.tdworld.com/substations/article/20964130/risk-eq...

They may be rare but I’ve witnessed or been within a block of two transformer explosions and one wire melting in the USA.

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