Wouldn’t it then be better to have underground lines?
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.
You know what, that’s a fair argument. Maybe those lines could use frost protection and insulation.
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 5 months 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.