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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Majority of power lines in many countries are above ground in the air.

Eastern seacoast areas in Canada and USA frequently lose power due to high winds - tropical storms or hurricanes making landfall. Similarly Winter blizzards.

Thunderstorm do sometimes hit power infrastructure as well.

North American grid is famously interconnected and fragile too. I am amazed at the crews that are rapidly dispatched for broken trees and downed wires and fix it pretty quickly. But if it's a big storm with many outages it'll take some time. In Nova Scotia for example it's not uncommon for some households to be without power for days.

And all bets are off if significant parts of grid are down and we struggle with startup sequences.

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Québécois here – we have nationalized our power company (it's actually province-scale), and by our current standards, residents having hours of outage is an emergency, and several days is newsworthy every time.

We have east coast weather, lots of empty land between villages, dramatic temperature changes, inhospitable terrain, etc. – we have most of the reasons power companies usually have for defending that days-long outages are normal.

It's possible to build a resilient grid, but not if profit becomes the only incentive (see Texas' issues). Hydro-Québec is steadily profitable, but not maximized for profit, which is key for utilities.

Nationalizing our power grid management would not solve these problems. Keep in mind the US power grid is more than 10 times the size of all of Canada in terms of production, and of course far far larger than in terms of distribution endpoints. The investment needed to do things like bury power lines would be hundreds of billions of dollar. The dollars could be spent without nationalizing the grid, but the problem is the money will not get spent. If we did nationalize, it would add another level of government spending and waste that would still not have the funds needed to actual fix anything.

Perhaps if we did less of the world's policing we could spend some of that money on infrastructure.

> Majority of power lines in many countries are above ground in the air

> I am amazed at the crews that are rapidly dispatched for broken trees and downed wires and fix it pretty quickly.

While power lines above the air are more susceptible to disturbances, they are also FAR easier to deal with.

Easier to fix is a real win.

Europeans laugh at our cheap 2x4 houses too, but being able to demolish a non-load-bearing wall in two hours and build a different one in a day or two means I can literally reconfigure my house when living situations change -- like the college kid needing a quiet room to study in, or closing off a new bedroom area for the sister-in-law needing to move in for a few months.

Non load-bearing walls are usually drywall on wood or metal studs in the Europe I know of.

They are probably as easy to remove as your (wooden?) walls, but I don't know anyone who would do it for just a few months.

Easier to fix is a lot more important when things are breaking all the time.

This reminds me of people putting water pipes outside the house to make them easier to thaw when they freeze, rather then inside the wall where they never freeze.

But when they’re buried they require access FAR less frequently. In cities with buried power lines, power loss pretty much only occurs when the entire grid is undersupplied or goes down entirely like in the 2003 blackout. And those situations don’t require access to the buried lines.

My city has areas with both buried and above-ground lines, and the above-ground areas see a week or two without power every year or so. Living in the buried-line areas, I haven’t seen an outage since ‘03. There’s one area of the city with buried lines that lost power a while back —- when an entire power plant went offline due to a bad storm. And again, they didn’t have to tear up the streets to fix that.

Palo Alto is like this. Northern, wealthier, part of the city got all the power lines put underground and then the money for the program "ran out" before they could get around to doing it for the southern, slightly less affluent, areas. Never mind that the whole city paid in to the program. Oh well that just how it goes.

So now, in 2024,the power still flickers every time the wind blows and goes down at least an hour a year.

And yet, despite all the money pumped into the northern part of the grid, there is still only one connection to the national grid and it's right under the flight path of the airport where a plane already crashed into it once. Whole city, north and south, had no power for 12-ish hours.

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