Oh, I just watched that episode of Serial Experiments Lain.
Not as bad as cars everywhere
Overhead transmission lines are so 1950s.
Invest in your country.
Japan is earthquake country so they get a pass.
India however…
Are they really safer in an earthquake though? Those poles could fall over and people could get caught under the cables, worst case while they’re still under high voltage…
Japan is slowly burying all their overhead lines into the sidewalks. A lot of urban streets look so much nicer now than they did 10 years ago.
It’s probably no worse in an earthquake than the water mains, which would inherently be a lot more rigid than cables with intentional slack built into every segment.
Afaik, the problem with buried cables is that in case of a flood or tsunami they might break, get exposed and electrocute someone.
Is that less likely to happen if the pole is knocked down instead of the line dug up?
No idea, that’s what I’ve been told, but Japanese engineers usually know what they are doing.
Yes im encouraged by seeing them use those machines to put things in the ground. I had not realized how effiicient it had gotten. May be cheaper than the poles hanging now.
Still about a 10x cost difference, plus (particularly on transmission lines) there’s issues with extra capacitive loading.
so 10x more expensive for buried? if so I am really surprised because those machines seem like less than having the cherry picker and such. Granted though I think it only really works were you have long spans of soft soil. If its all concrete your not going to be able to do it. I would hope in the concrete thing though that tunnels would be available for this infrastructure.
Boring through rock is super slow and expensive, plus now your tunnel needs to be big enough to walk & run machines through, and needs aircon to keep it cool. It is done, but usually only in CBD areas where you need lots of cables and room for future expansion. Google ‘cable tunnel’ and you’ll find lots of examples. Trenching machines go through very expensive consumable digging teeth whereas bucket trucks are just a fancy forklift, burning fuel and needing hydraulic & engine maintenance.
With high voltage cables, the (really thick) insulation gets really expensive, plus you need more conductor (copper/aluminium) because the insulation needs to stay cool. Aerial lines are directly air cooled (better cooling), and can run hotter, because the limit is the metal getting too hot and sagging, not the plastic degrading. Glass insulators are only needed at every tower and can be easily replaced.
Because keeping the conductor small is important, you need to use expensive copper rather than cheap aluminium for cables.
You also need regular joints which are very labour intensive, because they have to be perfect and you can’t make a cable the full length because you can’t ship a drum that big.
If a cable fails, fixing it is much harder than fixing an aerial issue. There was a cable fault in LA in 1989 that took 8 months of round-the-clock work to fix. When a tower falls over (usually because of slope failure or undermining), temporary structures are usually up in a couple of days.
Digging trenches under roads is much more invasive than pulling cables over roads, and rivers are even worse to deal with. It’s very common for underground cables to be converted to overhead when they cross a river before heading back underground.
The Western HVDC Link between Scotland and England was built as an undersea cable because it’s so hard to get planning permission and land rights to do major projects in the UK, as High Speed 2 found out.
So what I have seen is these machines that push them through earth. We do get a lot of commercials in the area telling people to call a number before they do any digging on their property. They come out and mark where the cables are. We did end up having a condo thing where power was knocked out because the guy mismarked the area. He actually came back after and tried to put correct markings in. I heard he got fired.
Yeah, directional thrusting is a thing. It was used a lot when contractors were installing NZ’s new fibre network about a decade ago. I don’t think it’s in as widespread usage for power because power cables tend to have much wider bending radii.
This sorta surprises me as I would think the fiberoptic would be worse than copper. I guess the thing ones could roll up pretty good but we had to be much more careful with them than the copper internet at least.
Investing on your country would be connecting more people to electricity not make the sky look better
The sky looking better is just one thing. No more blackouts when there’s winds or thunderstorms or just stray branches is the real perk.
Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.
The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.
Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface.
I’m 4 meters below sea level. We don’t have basements because the buoyancy of the empty space would cause the houses to literally float on ground water. But we do have buried power lines.
You are being lied to.
Slab on grade crew!!
Thanks for the idea, but have you considered spending it all on bombs instead?
There are benefits of overhead lines. They are cheaper to install, maintain, and repair. Diagnosing problems are much easier as well. They’re certainly uglier and easier to damage but you don’t have to dig up the road to fix them.
Newer cities shouldn’t install overhead lines but to have old cities with overhead lines switch to underground ones is very expensive and takes a lot of time, something smaller cities likely don’t have the budget for.
You don’t have to dig up the roads to fix buried power lines any more than you have to tear up your walls to replace power lines in your house: you install a conduit (basically a pipe) under the road once and if the cable somehow gets damaged and needs to be replaced you can just run new cable through the existing conduit by simply pushing it in on one end and pulling from the other.
Transformers and other non-cable equipment are typically housed aboveground in little boxes or built in to the house, so they’re actually easier to maintain than if they were installed aboveground on a pole since you don’t need a cherrypicker to access it.
Obviously in a less wealthy small town with existing overhead infrastructure it doesn’t make much sense to move it all underground “just because”, but if you’re already trenching under the road to install water/sewage/gas mains, it won’t cost much extra to throw down an additional one or two smaller conduits for running power cables or telephone/cable/fiber lines.
My entire factorio server looks like the second photo. India style.
Would be a nice QoL update to adds underground poles lol
Somewhere. Somewhere Japan
It me, in somewhere Japan a couple days ago
Me somewhere Japan yesterday
If I’m gonna be entirely honest, I think power lines are really nice looking. I even have them as my phones wallpaper. Maybe it’s just because I have a interest in infrastructure or something, idk
for real though the second drawing is way nicer than the first
me too! I love em, but that’s just because I hate all the new stuff we have got. So I like to find comfort in the old things, that are still used everyday.
What is your solution?
Underground cables.
Underground works well for greenfields construction, where you can map everything out ahead of time and don’t have to deal with existing underground services.
It’s manageable on low-density streets where its really only three waters and maybe some telephone lines.
It’s a nightmare to underground existing infrastructure in dense environments. Underground is already full of three generations of critical comms, corroding gas, water, HV lines that will fail if you look at them wrong, and if you’re really unlucky, steam pipes too.
The EU has been burying their wires for a while, and new members are doing it too. Romania used to look like 2nd pic, not so much anymore. It works.
It’s manageable on low-density streets where its really only three waters and maybe some telephone lines.
Have you ever been to a german city? Underground power cables are the norm here, especially in densly populated areas. Usually only railroad power cables and high voltage long distance lines are above ground.
Yeah, we have lots of underground services here in NZ. It’s when you start getting to low population densities that you start having trouble doing it.
The municipality I lived in previously had a really interesting project where they were trying to improve the lifecycle of underground infrastructure.
Instead of digging up the ground, putting in/repairing something/whatever, and then covering it up, they were going to install a permanent ‘infrastructure tunnel’ which could have installations and repairs be done without digging up and covering.
If successful, this kind of seems like what the shipping container did to the shipping industry, an incredible efficiency play.
Plenty of cities have ‘steam tunnels’ used for far more than just steam pipes, and sometimes no steam in there at all. It’s an awesome solution where you have reasonable density, and especially for within a facility/campus.
I don’t think you’re going to see it happen in surburban streets. It’s the tyranny of the car.
Some forward thinking - which we all know is most definitely not a thing when it comes to suburban development patterns - would see these installed from the beginning to ultimately save money long term on maintenance and upgrades.
Since the suburbs are an unsustainable Ponzi scheme designed to cram as much money out as possible though, they will go for the cheapest up-front option, total lifetime cost be damned.
And that’s always the best solution? You see no reason for above ground cables?
This person makes really beautiful digital art that features a lot of power lines. I think it’s really cool. Example:
Thank you for uploading the full rez. Gimme gimme! <3
For over a decade every one of my wallpapers was an Aenami piece. They’re just so dang cool.
Wow, thanks for the link. It’s beautiful
I can’t find the exact shot, but I used to have a picture of the 220kV lines parallel to the Desert Road as my desktop background. Something like this:https://johnmathews.smugmug.com/Nov-18-Desert-Road-North-Island/i-CkSm5tK
Nice!
While they do affect the skyline, i find them kind of a great. Its like wind turbines, they serve a very easy to understand purpose and exist for everyone while having only little environmental impact and lasting a lomg ass time. Compared to infrastructure like starlink which will only ever serve a few people, obstructs the entire sky for everyone from any angle and will only function for a few(5) years before having to be replaced.
while having only little environmental impact
If they’re properly maintained… fucking PG&E!
I think the long distance transmission lines are kind of neat. They often become roosts for hawks and eagles here, gives you a chance to see some nature near the city.
The linked comic is ugly as sin though, that’s a high voltage rat nest. And I’m sure there’s a happy medium to be found with that sort of electrical pole, but it doesn’t give me the feeling of serenity that the high tension towers do.
Underground transformers seem to be the better approach for denser connectivity
!wallpapers@lemmy.ca material right there.
More like “Yes And”.
Power and telecom lines are one of the more organic and chaotic parts of an urban environment. I live somewhere that has loads of them, including trollycar lines. In some places it’s pretty thick.
I love it. It adds a layer of aesthetic that prevents the world from looking too minimalist, which is nice since that’s where most new architecture is headed…
ah, beautiful Québec :)
Yes
But
not getting power
Put it in the ground
Different countries have different needs. In the US you have hurricanes so it makes sense to.protect the power lines above ground, but here we just had a flood, do you want us to loose power for months everytime it rains a lot? It makes a lot nore sense to us to have it above ground.
I’M AN ADULT!
So many things
To put in the ground
Like this and this and this and even this
And have to dig up even more earth using even more big machines? If you did a 50ft power line underground, that’s 50 ft of earth that has to be dug up, not to mention what happens whenever something inevitably goes wrong and you have to dig it all up again. Then you also have to bury transformers, which means you need to cool them.
There’s many, many good reasons that we use power lines over burying them. Mostly, power lines are so significantly cheaper and easier that it’s not even comparable. I’ve seen the bill when a buried fiber line gets broken. It is crazy expensive.
i don’t know of a single town here that has overhead power lines in populated areas. those are for long-distance transmission only.
or, okay, i know of one. but that’s because there’s a steel mill and a hydropower plant there, and you don’t wan to bury lines that carry that around of energy.
Obviously you hire groundhogs and keep their sensory whiskers to the grindstone with the threat of mole scabs
PG&E has been having to cut off power for swaths of customers in California every time we get in a red-flag fire weather situation, because their power lines over the mountains sway and spark and have caused horrendous wildfires. Notably the Camp Fire that completely destroyed the town of Paradise, killing over 85 people and thousands of animals. It’s been pretty expensive for them. Of course, they saved money for decades by skimping on maintenance, but that all went in their executives’ pockets, so they’re having trouble with trying to get up to code and pay their court costs and fines
Grow up
The Lain aesthetics is just a regular day in Brazil.
Check out the photography by Alex Hyner for some amazing skies between the power lines
This was the first thing I thought of, but couldn’t remember the artists name - thank you!
The highways are even worse.
