What's wrong with below-ground power distribution for metropolitan areas?
Centerpoint, the physical electricity provider in Houston, has said it would cost $2.5M per square mile. Houston is 640 square miles. Regulations allow them to claw back costs on the bills. (For example, repairs from past storms are often paid for over the course of several years in the form of a bond that is applied to customers as surcharges)
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/cen...
I'd guess that's less expensive than throwing out everything in the fridge / freezer every few years.
For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.
If we could lop off 1/4 of the DoD and intelligence budget of $1T/yr and dedicate it to infrastructure, we could pay for 125 Huston-scale improvement projects per year. And still have the most expensive DoD in the world! But that would be misguided for "national security".
Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed, where such value is incarnated via the wealth of the commons, where such wealth is most truly incarnated by infrastructure.
But for unknown reasons, such pragmatism is politically untenable.
It's amusing and a bit scary that someone thinks the federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed.
However, like all magic, using it has severe (and generally predictable) consequences.
Unlike fictional magic, the consequences take 4 years to kick in like clockwork. That, and the US's two term limit meant that presidents get to print money without political consequence. Worst case, they lose the midterms, then run again while blaming the next guy for the problem they created.
Hypothetically, of course.
The Federal Reserve, nearly completely independent (for better or worse) from the Executive and Legislative branches, prints money in the form of quantitative easing and controls other levers through lending and interest rate strategies.
The national railroad system a century prior and even the Internet were nearly entirely built with private funds.
The State of Texas had a budget of $188 billion [1].
In 2023 they projected a surplus of $18 billion [2].
Maybe they can budget it in?
What the federal government versus state governments should pay for is a big can of worms, but I'm not sure why it seems so easy to just look at the DoD budget and says "there's money there let's use that" as if it's not doing anything or it's all waste. If anything (unfortunately) the DoD budget probably needs to be increased quite a bit given the geopolitical challenges we face.
[1]. https://everytexan.org/2023/11/03/the-2024-25-texas-budget-t...
[2] https://abc13.com/texas-legislature-2023-state-budget-surplu...
How much should the states bail out mismanaged cities? How much should the Federal Government bail out mismanaged states? Budgets aren't "free money" as you assert.
The largest municipal fiscal crises in the nation so far have been NYC in the ‘70s and Detroit. There is also the case of Puerto Rico, although one could argue the feds have more culpability there since its status as a non-state subject to federal laws makes a lot of avenues for resolving crises illegal.
On balance I think they're probably worth it for areas prone to wildfire, but undergrounding all power lines is not a panacea, and there are a lot of hidden costs to undergrounding that become apparent only after they get old and you have to do maintenance.
There might be costs (checking before construction for example) and it being normal it helps.
Still, it seems like those parts of Europe (outside of Turkey, which isn't really in Europe) don't have large earthquakes, otherwise all those ancient buildings like the Coliseum and Parthenon would have completely collapsed by now.
I think $2.5 million is the high estimate, my city is estimating $1 million per mile.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...
https://www.centerpointenergy.com/en-us/corporate/about-us/c...
https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/64650dded34ec179a83...
Most of the wells they sampled are > 100 ft above the water table. Some are as low as 12. The lowest is 2.83ft. Here's the relevant bit of the schema XML document for the CSV the produced:
<attr>
<attrlabl>DTW23</attrlabl>
<attrdef>
December 2022 through March 2023 depth to groundwater in feet measured
from land-surface elevation referenced to NAVD 88
</attrdef>
<attrdefs>U.S. Geological Survey</attrdefs>
<attrdomv>
<rdom>
<rdommin>2.83</rdommin>
<rdommax>453.97</rdommax>
<attrunit>feet</attrunit>
</rdom>
</attrdomv>
</attr>Christchurch gets earthquakes instead of hurricanes: http://db.nzsee.org.nz/SpecialIssue/44(4)0425.pdf
No country is nearly as wealthy as the USA, but the USA can't afford to build a bullet train or replace decrepit bridges that randomly fall down.
Maintaining underground infrastructure can be very difficult.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/9/16/repairing-under...
They are not talking about Greater Houston.
For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area)
It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle".
It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same.
Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle".
Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle".
Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best.
To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily.
It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level.
Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world.
Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel.
In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country.
The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.
Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.
"No we can't have a transcontinental railroad because the US is gigantic and mostly empty" (which is the entire reason we wanted a damn railroad across the US!)
"No we can't build an interstate transport system because the US is mostly empty"
"No we can't dam nearly every mid sized river in the country because the US is too spread out"
It's just fundamentally wrong on all levels. We can build a Burger King in the middle east in a week, we can build a system of levees around a swampland that is actively under the waterline that, when they failed due to design deficiencies, we decided to build even stronger ones.
We fucking COULD do massive amounts of high speed rail criscrossing the country and connecting all of us for reasonable prices without even taking your shoes off. It would be even easier if we just stop it at the Californian border
The quip is that two things made Houston possible: oil and air conditioning.
Groundwater (especially for coastal cities) and people drilling holes would be very problematic too.
Power lines that are rated for conduit burial (which implies indefinite direct submersion in water is fine -- conduits leak, even if they're not supposed to) are readily available and not particularly expensive vs. above ground lines. Most of the cost is in the conductor, and that's the same either way.
If memory serves me right, you need to trench 6ft (which is usually done with a backhoe that has a narrow bucket and straddles the trench), then place a PVC pipe to act as conduit and fill the trench. The last step is using a (typically) pickup-truck mounted cable puller to pull the line through the conduit.
If the wire fails, you can pull it out and put a new one in without retrenching.
When you bury the conduit, you also bury a piece of warning cloth about one foot above it. If you see that while digging, then you should stop digging. (Also, call the "call before you dig" number before you dig.)
There are also trenchless systems that I've seen used for fiber optic cables. It's basically a tiny little boring machine (like they use to bore holes for tunnels) on the end of a cable. One person steers the boring machine, and the other stands above ground with a metal detector that tells them where it is, and how deep.
In the transmission (long haul) part of the grid, there's already a lot of redundancy. But not as much in the distribution (last mile) part.
If you increase redundancy, you should be more resilient to e.g. trees knocking out power lines because there are multiple paths in more parts of the network.
I doubt full redundancy (two lines to every customer) would be realistic, but an increase in redundancy seems like a more practical way forward than just starting over completely with underground lines.
Source: https://www.khou.com/article/news/news-explainers/the-why/ho...
All of the existing distribution conductors need to be buried either by trenching or directional boring, all of the pole-mounted transformers need to be replaced with pad-mounted transformers , and all of the customer service drops need to be converted from overhead to underground.
In another post, someone said about $2.5M per square mile, which isn’t actually all that much money. If you figure half labor and half material costs (fairly standard for electrical construction) and labor costs of $100/hr (IBEW 66 journeyman lineman), that’s 12,500 hours of labor, or a 6.25 person crew for one year to convert one square mile, and Houston is 637 square miles.
~4,000 person years of labor, 400 full time linemen could do the whole city in 10 years.
Underground electric is quite widely used in the Midwest and is cost effective vs. overhead lines even in sparsely populated rural areas.
Add in the fact that you no longer risk trees taking down lines when they are unkempt and ice-covered and it is probably much cheaper.
I wonder if anyone has started an environmental impact statement about burying lines. For example squirrels, possums, etc use them as bridges over streets, birds use them as observation/socialization spaces, especially some flocks of migratory grackles (maybe?) that have a giant winter rookery on the lines around a grocery store.