Yes
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
I know it’s totally backwards, but I feel weird when I go to a neighborhood that doesn’t have above ground lines.
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.
the motions of the electrons moving through those wires can be
How’s the serenity?
My entire factorio server looks like the second photo. India style.
Would be a nice QoL update to adds underground poles lol
Haibane Renmei (left), Serial Experiments Lain (right)
just needs a subtle background hum and everything is complete.
50hz120hz is such a soothing toneit’s technically not just a 50hz flat tone, it’s quite a complex sound for what should be a sinewave. Soothing nonetheless though.
I’m too lazy to go plot it in a spectrogram or something, maybe someone else will do it lol.
Huh. I didn’t really think through what the tone would actually be, I just assumed it was the same as Tokyo’s power grid. I put on a sample of the power grid noise from the show, and held my headphones up to my phone’s mic to get a peek at the spectrogram:
Buncha spikes at every multiple of 120, fading out around 1560hz
Interesting note, the very faint lone 120hz spike is just the ambient noise of my room, when I’m not holding my headphones up to the mic. New canon fact: SEL takes place in an alternate timeline where Tokyo (if not all of Eastern Japan) got 60hz power
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.
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.
Thanks for the idea, but have you considered spending it all on bombs instead?
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.
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.
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!!
My house has buried lines! …from the street to the house only… 🥺
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.
I know that a downed power line is very visible, especially if it’s live and touching water! I wonder if it’s underground if you might miss the signs
Only in backwater countries that still use those antique washing lines that break with every instance of bad weather.
It’s cheaper to repair them all the time than it is to dig to repair them occasionally
If you’re wondering why
Why not just bury a good length of conduit and just repull the line when it has issues?
The Lain aesthetics is just a regular day in Brazil.
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.
I expect structural life of the tunnels isn’t much longer than the services within them, especially with roads above.
And that’s always the best solution? You see no reason for above ground cables?
This but unironically.
Fuck appeals to nature.
I love nature. Termite mounds are nature, honeycombs are nature, spiderwebs are nature. Humans are a part of nature and our infrastructure is a part of who we are.
Carving out exceptions for human artifacts like this takes for granted that a bunch of arboreal primates figured out how to melt down the rocks themselves to extract their purest essence, then wound that essence into ropes that contain the lightning we learned to generate ourselves to power the many other artifacts we developed to bring light into our dwellings, communicate with primates on the other side of the planet, and automate the menial tasks of our lives.
While certainly selfish and misguided at times, everything we make is nature, just as much as honeycombs and spiderwebs.
Honestly, to me the ironic part is the power lines in this artwork are unappealing to me because of the artist not the subject matter. It seems they don’t know what all the lines are or where they go or how they work, so when I look at it and do know what it’s supposed to look like, this just looks like a mess that makes zero sense. The artist has created some sort of electrical fire hazard.
I’ve seen some polls significantly worse than that, but not in a developed country.
I suspect that came directly from irl
I know it’s a very unpopular opinion but I actually like the aesthetics of infrastructure and industry.
When I see a steel mill, an oil rig or powerplants like wind parks, hydro- or nuclear power I am reminded of the human ingenuity that went into it. How many people needed to band together to work on something bigger than their tribe. I am reminded of our awe inspiring power to shape our environment completely.
Of course with great power… You know the rest.
we have a “wind park” a few miles west of here. i get some of my power from it. slightly less than half of them are inactive at any given time. dunno if its intentional or a rotation scheme. never see any crew trucks around the dead ones
They have to shut off if there’s too much power in the grid, it might be that
Even though I hate car centric infrastructure, watching a new highway or bypass spring up out of nothing is an incredible testament to our ability to work together to achieve great things
I traveled across Southeast Asia drawing powerline tangles and run-down alleyways in a sketchbook. It’s definitely a thing.
