Submitted by decayo t3_11qy0mu in newhampshire
About an hour into real snow, and the power is already out. I'm glad I have a generator, but come on. It's not like we aren't paying a premium. I've moved around a bit in my life, and I've never experienced this many outages that last this long. It's going to be a long 48 hours.
To be clear, I understand that is the source of the problem, but there doesn't appear to be any resiliency. It seems like every tree fall hits a single point of failure that wipes out huge areas. I get it; multiple trees fall, but looking at the outage map, I doubt 20 trees suddenly all fell at exactly the same moment and the fact that one or two falls led to this large of an outage is wild.
New England doesn't want to spend money to retrofit underground utilities. Instead, they want to pump massive money into spot repairs.
I drove home from work in the stuff tonight around midnight and it was already weighing down trees especially pines and only 2 hours or so in. I was worried about a tree or limb falling on my car.
This snow is particularly sticky. I wouldn't blame the grid with this one.
What area was this? Over in Claremont we have mostly rain mixing with snow and it’s not accumulating on anything yet.
Milford - Mont Vernon area. In Milford it was just starting to turn into a very wet snow around 11:30. Once I climbed in elevation it was a very wet heavy snow and coming down fast.
I hope the heavy wet snow stays out of the upper valley but the snow from the Milford area seems to be heading in our direction according to radar so I’ll probably be in the same boat in 2-3 hours
I was expecting rain until about noon (Merrimack), but I just turned around and came back home.
You’ll find that the most heavily wooded areas tend to have the most power failures. Some years ago some power companies around the country decided that they could lower their costs by doing less tree trimming, but it proved to be a penny-wise pound-foolish decision.
I don’t know how the power companies in New Hampshire balance that out. Years ago it seemed like power failures were quite rare. We had an ice storm that caught people by surprise, and we were the only ones in the neighborhood who had a generator. A few years later there was another major power failure, and our neighborhood was humming with generators and there were long lines at the gas stations that still had power.
I literally just watched it turn from rain to snow in the last 20 minutes in Dover. Nothing sticking yet, but man is it gonna be ugly once it drops a few more degrees.
This just isn't New England. I lived in south Florida for 10 years and all the older neighborhoods have above-ground wiring and the areas won't spend the money to put them underground, even though hundreds of poles and countless wires will go down with each hurricane - and the newer areas with underground lines are usually quick to get their power back since there's no individual repairs.
I’ve been in NH about 7 years now. The power has gone out more in the last year than all 7 combined. Glad we have a generator, best purchase we ever made.
Feeling very fortunate I've always lived on or near the hospital grid.
I think a part of this though is if we think about what's been happening to the trees recently. 2020 was a pretty brutal drought. 2022 was another big drought. The trees are whooped and these heavy snow and heavy wind events do a ton of damage to an already struggling population
Yeah left my house in somersworth this morning snd we had about a quarter inch already. I checked the forecast and they're saying that between just 10 and 11 am were supposed to get 1.5 inches of snow
Agreed. So far the ones near my house are fine but several have fallen in the woods behind the house this winter. And the severity of the power outage always comes down to what came down, the lines or the whole GD pole 😂
Fingers crossed, but haven't lost power in my area of Moultonborough once since at least October when I moved here. That said, I'm still putting in a generator.
Same. Power is flickering here, but when it goes out we usually get it back pretty quick.
Neighbor is the 1st person on the next grid over, so when I get my power back they're still out.
Old ass power circuits, lots of trees
The power just went out here in my neighborhood in Merrimack.
The battery in my backup generator was dead, but I have a jumpstart kit, so that was ready to go.
I have a pellet stove, and if the power is cut suddenly, the house fills with smoke. But I have a backup battery with a power inverter so it will do an orderly shutdown, and that kicked in long enough for me to get the generator running
We lost Comcast and my wife needs the internet so she can work from home, but we have DSL as a backup for Comcast.
Glad I decided to take the day off. 😉
If we updated the grid to bury power lines we wouldn’t have to worry about trees.
At $2 million per mile, there would need to be an awful lot of spot repairs to justify that.
Not that it doesn’t sound nice; power lines and poles gone, ROWs clear and open. Just don’t see how the cost would be justifiable, especially given the likely effect on rates.
I live in the fire station and school grid. Everyone else's power will go out and I never have in 6 years.
I live near transmission lines. Eversource replaced the poles and lines about 5-6 years ago. They also come by every couple of years and trim back any trees and brush.
I lived in NH from 2009 to 2013 and only had the power go out once and it wasn’t weather related (squirrel ran into a transformer).
What’s going on there?
This isn’t super cost effective in areas with exceptionally rocky ground like NH.
It’s one of those things that are exceptionally region dependent. I lived in the Netherlands for example and all the power lines were underground due to sandy soil, power went out maybe once in the five years I was there. But I can tell you right now, NH soil sure isn’t like it was there!
As someone who works in the industry, it gets old hearing that we should just bury the lines. This works in dense areas, but for rural areas (like the vast majority of NH) it is extremely cost prohibitive. Installing buried conduit, manholes, transformer foundations, etc. is often upwards of $200-$300 per FOOT of buried conduit. Even more expensive if it has to be concrete-encased, or God forbid there is ledge (rock) in the way that needs to be hammered out (btw this is New Hampshire, the Granite State, there is ledge absolutely EVERYWHERE). And that doesn't even include the cost of installing (pulling, splicing) the actual cables and transformers themselves.
There are a lot of pieces to the grid and weakness in any of them can cause a power outage to your house. We have not had an outage of over two seconds since 2011 at our place. You can tell that there's a short outage when some appliances stay on and some don't. We have undeground wiring and the line in is on a main street. The power company does a great job keeping branches trimmed and adding support poles when needed.
So it could be a local issue or even an issue on your property. Or it could be an issue on your street or elsewhere.
I was as well. I was going to go to the gym this morning and there was 3 inches on the ground so I cleared it. I'm going out to clear more and then go to the gym.
This is the only year I remember where EVERY snow storm has been heavy wet snow. No powder whatsoever. Heavy wet snow and wind are perfect for outages
Yeah the $2m/mi figure is an average, and I suspect it would be more in many parts of NH due to difficult terrain and the prevalence of rock.
I've been thinking of getting DSL as a backup. We have had no problems with Comcast and power in Merrimack. We have another house in Boston if it were a problem and I think that they're getting much less snow.
I can always go to the Nashua or Merrimack YMCA for internet access - I do see people working there for a couple of hours from time to time. The Nashua YMCA has a nice room with desks and chairs outside the swimming pool which makes for a nice place to work. There's no privacy of course.
This entire winter has been above average temperature so almost every snow storm has delivered heavy ass wet snow that piles up on trees and lines. This isn’t typical.
It seems very reasonable that each house will have its own relationship with the reliability of the electrical grid. Many of us live on towns with one feed, on 50 year old side streets with grand arching limbs as a deep forest canopy, a chain made entirely of weak links. Others live in multiple dwelling units 1400 feet from aggregate supply lines under the street. Any two random people from this fine state can have completely opposite experiences during a heavy winter storm like this, alas.
It might be less money to put a human on Mars, than to trench the granite state.
Yeah, anyone who’s dropped a shovel In the ground here knows digging ain’t easy
Or sees those beautiful stone walls randomly in the woods! I always feel so sorry for those farmers.
Trees
A lot of it has to do with an unwillingness to do line maintenance now. Whether it’s the corporation or people unwilling to have trees trimmed because scenic historic character blah blah blah. Also has to do with the fact we get a lot more wet snow storms than we used to.
I grew up here. I can count on one hand the number of times we lost power in the 80s and 90s. It was an exceptional situation. I live across the street from my childhood home now so apples to apples comparison. My generator usage is far more common than when we first built our house. We didn’t have multiple mud seasons every winter.
Count your blessings. If you live inland you’re fairly immune to hurricanes. Odds of a class 5 making it here are low. Odds of forest fire are still statistically low compared to other regions. Tornadoes are still a rare albeit increasing occurrence. Low risk of significant earthquake.
Yeah, it’s almost like the weather affects the power grid or something weird like that. 🙄
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I don't know if this is typical for most folks but I've noticed a peculiar "bang" or loud "pop" outside and (from the sound of it) at a distance in tandem with most of the power outages in the past 12 months. At least one of these was in the late summer, on a day with no wind and clear skies, so I'm at a loss. Leaving aside Christmas Eve, which was absolutely tree-limb-downed-line based.
It's not the grid, it's the wet heavy snow breaking off branches and taking out powerlines.....are you a transplant?
It’s the trees. And burying lines is not particularly safe (or cheap).
Opposite here, my power would go out 3-4 times each winter. I bought a new generator last summer and it hasn't flickered once this winter.
Sunapee flicking
Maine, NH, and VT have the most tree cover of the entire country. That plus wet snow... poof.
Entire winter except for those 4 days in Jan.
The heavy snow will do that. We lost power for a minute just a little bit ago but overall the grid where I live is very stable. Very few outages and when they do occur it’s not for long thankfully
84% of New Hampshire is woods, it's the second most wooded state in the country, so anytime there's heavy wet snow, there's gonna be some limbs falling on power lines. Not much to do about it other than cutting down a whole buncha trees.
Has anyone mentioned that wet, heavy, sticky snow (like we are getting right now) on the lines themselves can take them down? That's just a fact and no amount of tree maintenance can do a thing about it
Welcome to NH, the exits are plainly marked.
Why can’t we just enjoy power outages?
Right?! It is one of my favorite parts of living in New England. I cannot even imagine having to dig up & move ALL those rocks in order to plant crops. I feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and gratitude whenever I see one
100%! Life must have been so hard if farming in New Hampshire seemed like a good idea. The only shocking thing to me is that people didn't say "eff that" and move to Ohio and the like much earlier.
New Hampshire is simply a hard place to make electricity work. If you put power lines above ground, you expose them to trees, of which we have a ton, that blow over onto the power lines. If you put power lines below ground, you get even more problems. For one, not every area even has smooth enough ground to do this, and in the areas that do, you often have to deal with our higher water table which can flood the underground lines and ruin them over time, and when they break it takes like 10x as long to fix. In addition to that, underground power is too expensive and isn't cost effective for most areas, considering this is a rural state.
For both systems, you also have to realize that they're both more likely to be damaged by nature in this part of the country than really anywhere else. Utilities need to keep crews available for issues like this, but keeping too many line workers on hand would cost an insane amount of money just to bring power back a little quicker during a storm. That's why we often get crews coming up from as far south as Florida to work on our power when a storm comes through. It just takes a lot of time and a lot of people to fix the power once it breaks.
The nature that we enjoy so much here in New Hampshire is also the reason our infrastructure is more unreliable. It's not anybody's fault, just simply the environment we live in.
And below is me being pedantic:
It's not necessarily the grid that's the problem, the grid is doing what it's supposed to. It's the local distribution that is the problem, being streetside power lines.
Agreed. The only time underground makes sense is in densely populated areas where utilities and ground composition allows it.
I agree with this statement. The past year has been unusual
Been in New Hampshire almost ten years. This is the first winter we haven’t lost power once. 🤷♀️
It's called the absurd situation in America that we have never muscled up and spent the money to bury the power lines. It looks so goddamn third world after you come back from a place in Europe. There has always been all sorts of whining from the public service companies, and politicians in a zillion reasons why this or that can't be done, but of course it is done all over the place and everybody benefits. It's a very expensive process to do initially but not only are the lines more secure underground, but then the roads are a thousand times more beautiful without them polesand then the constant problem of downlines every time the weather farts. It's amazing how advanced and how incredibly awkward America is in some things
Which is compounded by the need for land/homeowners to give permission to cut down problematic trees/branches.
For those curious why the power outage numbers are skyrocketing across the southern Monadnock Region, consider:
Its called the granite state for a reason.
Plus buried lines means Jim Bob deciding to put in a fence, pond, or just dig for the hell of it, results in power outages and possible dead people.
Buried lines ARE NOT the answer for a state as rural as NH.
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The answer is home owners allowing the utility to trim and remove trees that will cause issues with the lines. Most outages are caused by preventable tree limb damage. If the utility was allowed to go after home owners that declined to have the trimming done, it would get better fast.
Why do you think Verizon ditched NH in the middle of the Fiber Upgrade?
Underground wasn't feasible and above ground has issues with the trees.
NH seems to be getting the kind of wet, heavy snow/mix that we used to get on Long Island 20 years ago. Now we just get rain. So another 20 years and you might not have to worry much about this. :D
I remember years of light, fluffy snow that "crunched" underfoot lasting for weeks when I was a kid. Guess those days are over.
There’s a quote from George’s Washington’s visit to NH. It’s something like ‘their corn crop is ok. The apples are nothing to write home about, but my god the stone walls are beautiful and bountiful!’
What do you want to power company to do?
Are you suggesting they have the ability to power EVERY house from multiple directions?
The cost to do that in rural areas is prohibitive.
If you have an issue with outages, get solar, get wind, get a propane or natural gas powered generator. Chances are it's cheaper than the grid power anyway. Heck, a decent gas generator might be close to reasonable with the electric prices right now.
Europe is MUCH more dense than most places in America. I don't think many have a grip on just how massive this country is, and how spread out people are. Burying lines in NH is just untenable. My full-time residence is on Long Island, which is subject to hurricanes, and even though the population is VERY dense (almost 8 million) the cost here to bury lines is *still* prohibitive.
Overhead power lines run around $100K per mile, but burying them can cost ten times that. With NH's already crazy energy prices, I think most people will deal with getting a generator for the occasional outage vs. stomaching a dramatic increase in rates.
I would imagine Vehicle-to-Home will become more and more popular in rural areas, where you can get solar and if you have a storm, just use your solar and car to power your house and say "eff you" to Eversource.
As someone who's gardened in NH for decades, there's a fresh crop of rocks every year!
I think the issues in NH are very dependent on where you live as well. We very rarely loose power. I bought. My generator 5 years ago and have 1.6 hours on it. Sure the power has gone out a few times since then but never long enough to justify hooking up the generator.
What I'd like to know is why UNH loses power so very often. Parts of the Durham campus lose power 6x as often as towns in the same county do. Some times on days with no wind to speak of and no snow or rain.
🤣 you must be jacked! And have a lot of dented up shovels
It would be an incredibly long term investment- you're not going to see an ROI for likely 20+ years. But it would pay for itself long term. And in the mean time it would provide residents with far more reliable service.
Transmission lines need to be improved to make the infrastructure more secure and reliable. We're vulnerable. What does that vulnerability cost? Far greater than the cost of a one-time effort when you think about the problem in terms of decades, or even centuries, not years. It's never going to get less expensive to upgrade the grid than it is right now.
Less centralized, evenly distributed power generation via strategically placed renewable energy sources and energy storage facilities could be a viable option for NH as well.
The solution is obvious: make the utility poles out of granite 🪨💪
yes and with the proper labor force/investment they can be pruned so there are not nearly as many branches. I grew up in Northern Vermont on an island and had much more reliable power than in the lakes region of NH.
Are you willing to pay $1000/month to carry the cost? I’m not.
Jim Bob lives everywhere. In fact, dare i say our baseline intelligence skews much higher than the national average.
Its all about the granite legde, granite rock bullshit!
Do you notice they are waist high on a 1850s average height man? Some walls in Dunbarton are over 4 feet wide.
Doorknobs at that house were pocket height.
New England potatoes lol.
In the late 90s, a climate report said by 2020 NH would have the climate of Rhode Island / Connecticut and it'll be apparent in our snowfalls and that seems to be playing out here.
The “tree huggers” aren’t environmentalists. They’re your neighbors.
“OMG you can’t cut the trees along the road! I love that shaded rural lane feeling when running or walking my dogs!”
The Emerald Ash Borer has rendered most of those trees into would be firewood. Standing dead for now, falling on power lines soon. Eversource has “trimming contracts” out right now. What it needs (as does your town) is felling contracts, removing ALL of the trees within the defined Right of Way.
Likely resulting in lawsuits from landowners and environmentalists. Meaning it won’t happen, despite a clear authority in the Right of Way grant.
New developments can and certainly have put their utilities underground since they're already putting in roads and possibly drainage/sewers. But these eventually lead back out to power lines above ground. That's the case where I live, and I know if we lose power there's probably quite a few who have also lost it.
Wow. Yeah, does seem to be the case. For the last couple of years, my dad (still in NH) has hired out his snow shoveling because it's mostly turned into heavy wet stuff and he's 80.
I don't remember that report, but I remember like a 2050 report that says NH will be like Miami by then. Hard to imagine, but it looks like if the 1990's report was correct, it all might still be on target.
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I drive down the same roads every day and see the same trees, hanging over the same wires, contact Eversource over and over again, yet see nothing changes for months and months at a time, yeah, it’s easy to understand why it is our power fluctuates, blinks, etc., every GD time the wind blows.
My Dad always called them that😂 and then when I moved from MA to NH I learned that allegedly the very first crop of white potatoes ever planted & harvested in America were grown right here in our town by the first Scottish settlers! Life always comes full circle. There are so many rock walls around here!
There are white ceramic devices on most branch circuits acting like fuses. They pop free from contact when a short circuit occurs. The sound is like a firecracker, or shotgun blast. Feeder circuits are protected by a “recloser” that will typically pulse two-three times before shutting the system off.
Oop! Oh! ☠️ crap. 🕯️
I’m not saying change is bad lol. It’s obvious our existing system needs help. I’m saying that better tree trimming and maintenance, and more resilient above-ground infrastructure is almost always going to be a better and more cost effective solution for NH than burying cables will be on a large scale.
THANK YOU that describes what seems to be going on perfectly.
Now I'm left to wonder why we've seen so many of them. I think I've reported 5 outages to EverSource since last summer (excluding the Christmas snowpocalypse).
France has a landmass similar to Texas. Belgium is 1/3 the size of Maine.
So the “OMG an ENTIRE COUNTRY can do this!!” argument for everything European is moot.
Put the saws to the trees within the road and power Right of Way and solve 90% of the problem.
Gotta love the downvotes from climate deniers.
As I’ve said elsewhere, trees and local opposition to clear cutting within the Right of Way. The Halloween snow storm forced the issue when I was in Canterbury. I wager that neighborhood hasn’t had much for interruption since.
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To each their own - today was the first time I've lost power for more than 2 minutes in several years. It's back after 3 1/2 hours. I'm in a fairly rural small town , not near a hospital or fire station anything that would get line priority. Luck of the draw!
Sounds like you're in a bad spot in terms of lines / trees / alternative power routes.
Sure. Since you aren't using any electricity during the outage, you won't be charged since you aren't using the electricity that isn't there.
I've lost power in nh 5 times this year. Before this year it's been once
Lived in Portsmouth 33 years. Comparatively many power outages. Live in Kittery Me. Since 2018. 2 outages. 1 for an hour, one for 4 hours.
It won't be like Miami lol, that's a huge difference from RI/CT
Oh my god but we're talking about New Hampshire and New England, nor do we do in Texas, or any other manageable location... and you do it one mile at a time. Perhaps where there's barely anybody it would be a lot cheaper to do , just as we built roadways or not do it at all. I'm driving the strip right now as we talk in Kansas.. much of Texas the same The wide open prairies the same with California. But we don't do it anywhere except every now and then in a part of a city center or here and there are village.. It's a cannot do attitude
It's this same mentality can't do can't do to expensive oh my God that has left it the way it's been since it's inception. Jesus Christ even Poland has most of its line buried when I go back to visit the family
It's simply takes a will and allocating the funds to do it. This is what Germany did after world war II 1 km at a time and the same could be done in New Hampshire but no no, always the scare tactic
I guess we'll see, won't we? If I recall correctly, they were mostly talking about hot, humid summers. Certainly the last decade of summers in NH (especially June/July) have been MUCH more humid than anything I remember from my childhood (1970's). We used to get maybe a three or four day stretch during the summer where it was uncomfortable with no AC and we'd have a couple 90 degree days. That's very different from what I've experienced the last 10 years or so in NH over the summers.
Damn.. George took a stab at our apples?!? Low blow
Parts are dense and then there are sections that look just like New England only without utility lines lol. Of course even in the dentist areas we don't bother to bury the lines and it makes a tragic mess. I remember in Manchester during the ice storm , perhaps 2012 ? the city was out on one large part of the west side for two complete weeks because trees took down the lines. Not to mention how ugly they are. Anytime you go to a town center south of the border the difference is immediately apparent in the town center or the main roads where the lines are buried.. It's just a matter of will and appropriation, one little stretch at a time
You wanted the quiet country rural life up there,well you GOT IT!!! Enjoy the beauty of winter. And it snows right into April. That's the best part of NH, a late messy spring and then the snowturds start coming back. I never take power for granted.
I lived in Alaska. The power lines were buried. I did not live in a heavily populated area. There is so much ledge in Alaska! I never lost power the 4 years I lived there and we got a lot of snow.
Wow! So accurate it’s scary
I still have power
The utilities have an absolute right to take trees that threaten the lines. The answer is them actually doing their damn job instead of cheating out on maintenance and pocketing the difference.
Blame snowstorms as well as trees. When snow falls when temps are +32f, it becomes wet and heavy. Reason 1: trees have already begun to warm up, so sap is running, making it super dangerous. Sap makes the tall trees very flexible, bending over &snapping off. Utility poles get pulled on by the snow-covered wires and eventually, the pole and wires all fall. Fences that were built 40+ yrs ago, also fall. Don’t forget days and days of rain- the ground gets soft and comes down like a Calif landslide. Homeowners seldom check if the fence posts need replacing! Another poster mentioned getting your tree limbs cut- absolutely. It may not be your house that is damaged, but if it falls on your neighbor’s house, you are liable.
We had trees back in the 80s and 90s. Never lost power as often as we do now. The reason is because PSNH was proactive all year in pruning and clearing potential hazards. In the last two decades, profit became priority over safety and the decision-makers determined it a better strategy to do minimal preventive work and increase spend on reactive work.
Moving a stone wall is illegal in NH. These are actual boundary lines, in many cases. You can rebuild a stone wall that has failed with building permits, et al.
In my neighborhood, all the side roads have utilities underground. However… the main road which serves everyone, the lines are above ground. Never fails we loose power, going on 7 hours now and Eversource has no idea as the crews have not been out to evaluate.
The only way you are preventing this is to cut down every tree within 100 ft of the power lines. It's literally the only way. And eversource doesn't own the trees. Landowners do.
they can't charge you if the meter isn’t running
Native Americans bro.
Why do I believe they did? Well, as a tiny ISP trying to sell competing DSL on wholesale Verizon copper in 2007 (and failing at it because of their monopoly), the joke we made at the time was that Verizon was terrified a Democrat might win the 2008 election and do something nuts like mandate broadband for everyone. And Maine/NH/VT were the fastest way to lose on that deal, so they sold them off and laughed all the way to the bank.
Don't forget servicing and flooding of those concrete tubes
NH has the highest average IQ* of any state!
They are my favorite days. Calm, quiet, no internet... Lovely.
Yup. One of the boundary lines on my property is defined by a stone wall.
Oh please. I've lived in NH for close to 40 years. We've endured 4 and 5 days of no power. I've had my hot water pipes for heat freeze (and break). 48 hours won't kill you.
They had tons of time late winter waiting on spring… hahaha
Grow up, Suzy. It's possible to ask if a corporation that is gouging us for extremely high rates is doing everything they can to mitigate service impact while also not being in fear for one's life. I'll be fine, but hopefully someone is thinking about how to make these problems less common.
The only way you could have 'dropped a shovel in the ground here' is if you were already standing above a hole.
They don't have the right to remove trees or limbs from your property.
Just like you don't have the right to remove your neighbor's tree because it hangs near your property or "might" fall on your house.
They must get permission or they can get sued by landowners.
And why wouldn't they make it available in Maine, NH, VT?
Because of the feasibility. The profit just wasn't there.
Yes! I remember an ice storm 10 or so years ago and power was out for over a week in most of NH. The electric company got a big fine for that and for the next two years they were pruning like beavers. Now we have the same situation. "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I hope they get socked with a big enough fine to make remember this for a while!
They hold easements for their lines that permit them to clear on privately owned lands. These easements also permit them to ignore wetland and other environmental laws broadly and without prior approval.
Less to do with the grid, more to do with geography and environmental threat to above ground infrastructure.
Are you aware those easements don't cover the trees that aren't on the easement?
They aren't airspace easements.
If the tree is on the property owners' land and not on the easement, they need to get approval.
Don't get me wrong a lot of companies shirked maintenance. But they haven't been doing that for about a decade now. Every minute power is down and they have crews out working at double OT overnight for days straight.... they are losing MASSIVE amounts of money.
The math doesn't work out unless you are referring to super rural areas with only a few customers on a single line that covers miles and miles. But anywhere that has any density at all.... it doesn't make sense to not maintain it.
The power company isn't the internet company that charges you whether the service works or not. The power companies have a vested interest in keeping you connected and drawing power constantly.
The deal is that all the profits go to shareholders and is not invested back into reliability measures !
What's the cost per foot to trim trees, maintain poles, and respond to downed wires? You need to be able to answer this question in order to assert burying lines is too expensive.
Oh those pesky facts to aggravate the naysayers!
The savings on maintenance and repairs over the life of the facilities are, generally, much less than the difference in initial construction costs.
There are also maintenance costs associated with buried infrastructure that you are not acknowledging. Drastic changes in temperature, tree roots, flooding, damage from animals, damage from vehicles, etc, all cause damaged conduit and/or damaged cable, which is usually costly and disruptive to repair. Above-ground facilities are obviously way more exposed and therefore damaged more often, but the repairs are generally relatively inexpensive and simple compared to repairs of UG facilities.
Epic snowstorm reveals epic asshat OP who thinks the world revolves around them. When someone disagrees they go on attack. Got it.
And if you want to complain about a crappy grid system? Move to TX.
I'm intrigued by this. Not sure why you're being downvoted.
This is just speculation, but from what limited knowledge I have about Alaska, even though it is not densely populated overall people tend to live in villages somewhat close to each other, correct? Even if a town only has a couple hundred people, if they all live relatively nearby to one another in a village, buried lines would make sense.
Another possible reason, response to downed lines is probably much more expensive and time consuming in such a large and remote area, so the larger upfront cost to bury lines may pay off quicker than in a smaller state like NH.
Are most long-distance transmission lines buried up there? Or just the distribution infrastructure that goes from building to building?
I agree with you, but most in this thread imagine that improvement is just too hard and we should just accept things as they are and let our corporate overlords bask in their wealth while we just we accept days and days without power every winter.
Undaedalus t1_jc5pp88 wrote
It's not the grid, it's the trees. Falling branches from our trees take down power lines.