Germany has overengineered and expensive utilities, but I'm happy sometimes that all power and telephone lines are underground.
And, it's a minor, minor thing, but as a bonus, having lines out of sight is very nice.
Really weird seeing complete darknesss to the south with just a march of flashlights coming uptown to charge their phones in Duane Reade.
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/10/29/16560706/hurricane-sandy-an...
That is not the comeback you think it is. New York was unprepared for that and intra not designed for saltwater flooding because nobody had ever expected that kind of weather to make it up here. It triggered a lot of changes now that New York knows it needs to be ready for serious hurricanes and saltwater flooding
Also I never heard the term SoPO before. We called it hurricane sandy.
Undergrounding costs are around $1M per mile. The US has millions of miles of lines.
There’s NEVER 1M customers per mile in a distribution system. There’s only going to be a few thousand per substation. Half of the line miles will have customer counts in the tens or ones.
Houston has a higher density than say Magdeburg
...but... that's like, uh, how projects like this actually get financed. On a per customer (which I know is distinct from per person) and per monthly bill basis, capitalized and amortized. Why would I use a lump sum unit when that's not how it's going to be paid for, or a per distance unit when pieces of dirt don't pay money, people do?
Pal, this is just how basic corporate accounting works, something you might like to look into if you are interested in opining on what units are best for comparing capital costs.
You’re also completely wrong. Utilities do not get to pass on costs to specific customers. It is, at best, just a compelling point with regulators to build it into the rate case for capital spending.
The point is there's no technological barrier, just made up paper barriers.
> the colonists who arrived in the New World from Europe during the seventeenth century and found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish.
Any Texans wanting to talk about their special case can have a look at Iberia and its meteorology, for example.
The notion that North American weather is anomalistic is false.
>The volatile weather in the eastern United States differs from the more moderate climates of western Europe because it is largely controlled by eastward-flowing air masses that approach over land instead of air masses that arrive from over the ocean and cause temperatures to shift more gradually.
Europe doesn't have hurricanes. Europe has 1/4 as many tornadoes as the US.
Which part of Iberia's weather are you referring to?