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In addition to cost (as everyone else said), work and worker qualifications. Working on underground lines requires special confined spaces training and certification, because it is more dangerous, could deal with not just electricity, but potentially hight temperatures, water, sewage, toxic gas, lack of oxygen, etc. There are even fewer people willing to do that compared to riding a bucket to the overhead lines.
Source: Worked for electrical utility
Because then all the phone calls would have sounded muffled.
Couldn't you just yell a little louder into the phone to make up for it?
Very very expensive. For fiber, though, it’s starting to make sense economically.
Ask New York City. It's expensive af every time a change needs to be made underground because you have to dig everything up, and once you're down there, it's just a nest of wires in conduit so knowing which one you're supposed to work on can be a challenge.
Underground wires have to be insulated to prevent short circuits to ground. The longer a wire needs to go, and the more power it needs to carry, the thicker it needs to be. Since insulation goes around the outside, this increases exponentially and the cable quickly becomes mostly insulation in many cases, which is expensive and inefficient.
Also, there's only so much ground you can dig up before you hit bedrock. So, in some cases, power infrastructure expansion is limited because there's nowhere to bury the wires.
In many places it's easier to let the damage happen and repair it cheaply.
fiber optics solve most of this for comms. clearly doesn't help for electricity.
In australia buried lines are fairly common. It's more expense and harder to do maintainence, but it's also way better and safer.
Perth started burying their lines in the 90s. It was supposed to take 30 years. Last I heard, they're about half done.
Yeah i was in high school in perth in the 90s so i remember poles disappearing.
Perth has expanded massively in the last 10-15 years, i'm not surprised initial estimates were way off. Or even less surprised than normal since i believe every single infrastructure project in history has been late and overbudget.
There were supposed to be five pyramids at Giza. Cutbacks...
j/k
Bet the power stays on more during storms and shit as well.
Poles get knocked over, struck by lightning, trees, blah blah.
There's 3 answers.
In the city i live in (Victoria, BC) the wealthiest part of town has buried lines. Everywhere else, they're on poles.
In Australia our power lines are mostly aerial, but telephone/broadband lines are mostly underground.
$$$
Which would have saved a bunch of money from upkeep and accidents?
That's highly debatable. Putting something in the ground instead of the air just adds a different set of factors eating away at the cables. Accidents happen underground as well as above. Excavators or farming equipment regularly cut cables buried in fields or at construction sites. The deeper you bury cables to avoid that the higher the cost gets. Also maintaining a network of buried cables has its own problems: Want to know where an overland power line was cut? Just look where the cable dropped. Want to know where a buried line broke? Start digging up the whole strand between the two transfer points.
Overall: Overland lines are cheaper and easier to maintain.
There are devices that will measure how far away a break in a cable is.
We used to insulate cables with basically waxy paper, not exactly the most waterproof of materials, and if you want to bury lines long term you need to enclose the sections in some kind of corrosion resistant waterproof pipe so you don't have to dig them up completely every time you need to do maintenance
So this really wasn't a practical option until petrochemicals came onto the scene, but also the improvements to metallurgy and grid technology were probably necessary to really make this feasible
Imagine trying to track down shorts underground constantly...
That’s not exactly true. The first undersea transatlantic cable was laid in 1854, well before petrochemical coatings. Admittedly, it didn’t last long. But the third cable in 1866 did last quite a while.
The cables were coated in gutta-percha.
This is undersea cabling, not underground, but saying we used to coat them in waxy paper is what I would disagree with.
In areas prone to severe weather they tend to get buried.
Especially after multiple event trash pole mounted ones.
I use to live in Huntsville Alabama. Between the tornadoes and ice storms Huntsville utilities just gave up and started burying them.
I’ve lived in areas where they aren’t underground BECAUSE of potential severe weather. The powerlines run through miles of wilderness and are serviced by helicopter. Which doesn’t come out when the weather’s bad. But if they were buried (which would be massively more expensive) they’d tear up lots of wilderness and flood/break regularly due to soil movement and tree growth.
Plus, running conduit through rock is a lot harder than drilling a few holes to mount a pole.
Where I am now? It’s all in conduit under the street beside the storm drains, except where there hasn’t been new development to pay for it. Seems like they have to service the conduits a lot more than the poles though, and fixing a pole line stays out of the way of traffic and takes a couple of minutes, where fixing underground shorts involves blocking off a lane, snaking the cables, and bringing in specialists — takes up to 3 hours for a similar repair.
The poors get overhead lines, the wealthy get underground
Where I am, way cheaper for upkeep to have on poles. Some jackass is trying to force my entire neighborhood to underground our power lines for no reason other than aesthetics and they say it'll cost the average homeowner here $50k each. If it goes through I'm thinking of Molotov cocktailing the fucker's house.
do it anyway just to send the message.
My street is the only one in my area that has buried lines. I suspect because a politician lives on it as well
Before hydraulics digging was hard AF. And it's still cheaper to put them on poles.
There are probably lots of different reasons. But they will all boil down to whether it really made financial sense in the long run.
In my area there’s a lot of rock. So burying lines can have a much higher expense even in the long run.
And I’ve also lived in some areas with a lot of hills/mountains. Burying lines in areas like that means you need a lot more line than if you just stretched it between poles or towers over the valleys.
Both in New Zealand and the UK (the places I've lived), many copper POTS lines were underground, same as fibre. Out of the urban area it actualy makes more sense to go over head for cost and repair.
For HV power lines I believe that heat retention is a major factor in underground, and there are plenty of 'last mile' that is underground - but that is not HV and a lot less load
Some one with better answers will come along and explain it better I'm sure
Australia also has most of its telecommunications cabling underground
This is just a guess, but I think it might be because not everyone needed or had a phone at first.
They only connected a few important buildings at first, and then started tying in more. If they had started underground, they'd have to dig up the streets every time someone bought their first telephone.
That's exactly what's happening where I am. Wildfire danger is so high they have to shut down city power every time there's serious wind, as there aren't enough fire services to cover all the potential fires from downed lines. Now a good chunk of tax dollars are going to moving lines underground, though arguably it'll take some time.
In addition to being higher cost, buried lines aren’t great for long distance, high power transmission. That’s part of the reason off-shore wind uses high voltage DC rather than AC power
It is expensive as hell to bury anf maintain.
OP I get you, i lived in a placed that buried them and it was great. We never had outages and it looked great. I wish everywhere did it.