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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

What is your suggestion? By and large, society has gotten farther than folks realize by advantage of cooperation and a shared goal of peers. It has always been somewhat trivial to concoct a major threat to a lot of folks. Your local library has a ton of these ideas in the fiction section.

The expense of making things sabotage proof is substantial and hard to really accomplish completely. Even massive feats of engineering, such as the moon landing, all would have failed had a single actor been a saboteur.

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In any case, the cause of most power outages is still squirrels. We'll be in real trouble when the squirrels learn to pilot drones.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2016/06/17/squir...

http://cybersquirrel1.com/

We need a WAR ON SQUIRRELS.

Ladies and gentlemen:

I would like to summarize for you the meeting that I have just had with the bipartisan leaders which began at 8 o'clock and was completed 2 hours later.

I began the meeting by making this statement, which I think needs to be made to the Nation:

America's public enemy number one in the United States is nuts dependent. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.

I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of nut supply, as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad, wherever they are in the world. It will be government wide, pulling together the nine different fragmented areas within the government in which this problem is now being handled, and it will be nationwide in terms of a new educational program that we trust will result from the discussions that we have had.

Together nuts and there users can be defeated.

In all seriousness, this would probably lead to a higher ROI than the war on terror.

I guess that's why this Marvel character still reigns undefeated, having even once defeated Galactus:

http://marvel.com/universe/Squirrel_Girl#axzz4jY4M6FVc

I agree with your point that terrorists aren't a real concern. I love this essay, Terrorism is not Effective which goes into much more detail on this: https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

However sabotage is a real concern against rival nations. Iran basically lost their nuclear program because of sabotage. In world war 2 the Nazis were constantly set back by sabotage in many different areas. There are probably many more examples we don't know about because this stuff is usually top secret. The victims sometimes don't know it was caused by sabotage or don't make it public because it embarrasses them.

Apologies, I did not mean to minimize it to the point of not being a concern at all. I do think these are concerns, but it isn't like they are being completely ignored. Rather, it turns out these are very hard problems.

I agree with all of this, but would add that even the federal government describes power infrastructure with sentences like, "aging and ... being pushed to do more than it was originally designed to do" (https://energy.gov/oe/services/technology-development/smart-...).

I'm not a power grid engineer. I don't have the knowledge to make useful, specific suggestions. I do live in an area with semi-regular power outages, whether caused by demand (summertime AC usage), thunderstorm, falling tree branches, vehicle vs. pole accidents, and other major component failure (the occasional transformer light show or squirrel suicide-by-transformer). In every case, PG&E appears to be coming out and replacing failed equipment with ... identical equipment. To their credit, they do it fairly quickly.

I seriously doubt though that the current situation is the best they can afford to do, especially with the current political focus on infrastructure.

See one of my sibling responses. Is it the best we can afford? Maybe, maybe not. There is a good chance, though, that the cost of dealing with semi-regular outages is not above the cost of replacing the system with one that is immune to them.

I say this, of course, as someone that doesn't live in a place with regular outages. I think I've experienced 4 in the past decade. And a couple of those were following a massive wind storm. The street was out of capacity longer than the power was.

Here is my suggestion. Remember the $850 billion President Obama spent on nonexistent shovel-ready jobs? If we simply buried the nation's Powerlines as they do in Europe with that money this kind of thing would not happen nearly as often.

This is presupposing a lot.

  * How often do you actually think it happens?
  * What is the actual cost of it happening?
  * What is the actual cost of fixing it?

I'd be surprised if the rate of occurrence times the cost of occurrence is actually much (if any) higher than the cost of "fixing". Note that I, sadly, don't actually have numbers to play with here. If you know where to look, I'd be willing to dig some for them.

Europe can afford to bury the cables in some places (definitely not all of them) because the population density is high enough that the extremely expensive underground high voltage cables (true marvels of materials science) make economic sense. This is something that would be very hard to replicate across large chunks of the US, the distances across which power is transferred are much larger. In some ways the situation would get worse, naked high voltage cables tend to dissuade people from trying to steal them or accidentally digging in to them with all manner of equipment.

The location is within a city, so the cost should be comparable to Europe, especially as this looks like a light industrial zone.

The only power lines I see nearby 200 Polaris Avenue look fairly normal voltage, the type the supplies the 'last mile' to homes and businesses. But, I'm not used to seeing cables above ground (except above railway tracks) so maybe I have the wrong assumition (see [1]), and this is actually a medium-high voltage.

In either case, these cables are routinely buried in urban areas in Europe. You'd need to go somewhere rural, very poor, or with weird geology for them to be above ground.

(Even the mid-sized village my mum lives in has buried cables; the last power interruption to the NAS I have there was 9 months ago.)

Polaris Avenue: https://www.google.dk/maps/@37.3981048,-122.083163,3a,75y,27...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#/m...

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