36 hrs sounds quite well suited for a i.e. 30kWh battery that you could charge it during night or whenever electricity is cheaper. Depends on your case of course, but it probably could be done like that.
Last winter snow pressed trees against the power line and it rook 36 hours for electric company get it fixed.
Mihies@programming.dev 12 hours ago
MrFinnbean@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I looked in to those, but for those to be effective you need to keep them always charged. Also cheaper ones need air conditioned space and more expencive ones were, well expensive.
I also need three-phase power for some tools away from the home and the convertor for the batteries seemed really expensive and not easy to use on the fly.
And biggest thing is that if something reallu bad happens i can easily get more gas, but recharging batteries would mean i need to go somewhere to charge them.
Another thing that somebody is going to say soon are solarpanels, but i live near arctic circle and during winter the operating time for them is so short i would need to make way too big solar farm for them to be usefull.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
Wouldn’t it then be better to have underground lines?
MrFinnbean@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
There are about 14 500 km of powerlines in my country and many of those go trough long unhabitabed stretches. Another thing is that where i live ground freezes and that makes the ground shift, sometimes enough to ruin foundations of buildings so there are some real problems to make long underground lines.
But yes. It would be nice if underground lines were easy to make.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
You know what, that’s a fair argument. Maybe those lines could use frost protection and insulation.
MrFinnbean@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Goverment is in fact widening the safe zones around many of the lines, but its expensive and slow as many of them go trough privately owned forests so there needs to be some recompence for the lost wood value. Many of the maintanence roads are also done for light vehicles or have been overgrown so heavymachinery has bad time getting where they need to go. As a one point i have heard, but i dont know if its true goverment may want to keep those lines somewhat overgrown to make it harder to destroy in case of war.
New lines are mostly made underground, but its expencive and just insulating the line does not matter if the ground around it moves yearly.
But generaly the infrastructure is getting better all the time. When i was young it was not uncommon to loose power many times a year and some time for long times. Now its not happening even every year and generally the down time is measured in hours or tens of minutes, not in days.
Cypher@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Underground lines cost 3 to 20 times more, have higher power loss, last about half as long and can’t be as long as overhead transmission lines.
Running a generator for a short period every few years when a line goes down will cost less and cause less pollution than putting in underground lines.