In reply to: Wow. What’s going on? * posted by mitquinn
on mutual aid arrangements with other utilities to allow the downsizing of in-house line crews.
Have their been proposals to bury the lines? Would it be a new tax? Certainly seems like an investment that would pay off in the long run.
Newer build developments definitely bury the lines, like you would see in Sun Belt tract housing developments.
The thing is, when you do it up front, it then becomes cheaper to do it for everyone at the same time. Up here, we have loads of legacy housing (my house is from 1926, for example, and not the oldest on the street), which is all strung together with a hodgepodge of wiring. You'll often see two poles right next to each other, and older shorter one, and a new taller one with more wiring (and unlit fiber runs, but that's loooong PB post I don't have time to write).
So to bury the lines, you'll have to redo every individual home's electrical entry point, do a full street at a time, and do it over years and years. It would be a monumental undertaking for small towns, which is essentially what CT is, excepting a few larger towns and smaller cities (Bridgeport is the largest in the state, and still under 200k).
Also I believe that the state has granted the monopoly to a few players. We have one town, Wallingford, that somehow built their own electrical grid in the late 19th century, and through incremental upgrades, was able ot weather this storm with very few issues.
There's also the issue of ground freeze, we'd need to dig some deep-ass trenches to bury conduit on account of frost heaves and whatnot, and the soil up here isn't exactly conducive to that. When they did my sprinkler system, which needed to go down exactly 2", they needed a carbide tipped street saw to get that far down.
But then we piss and moan about power going out, and say "well it's only happened once this year", and talk ourselves out of doing it.
And frankly, it's worse in the winter if you're far form the main thoroughfares. Ice in the evergreen trees adds twice the weight, and branches from those go down and take out power consistently in the winter months. My parents house had a near miss in the mid-90's when an ice storm took off a 70' section and it dropped in the backyard 5 feet from the back door.
Sorry for the rant, this is just something that's been going on so long and is frustrating as my job depends on the availability of electricity, and I've experienced both this and Sandy and deal with CL&P often enough as a result.
In NJ the only areas that have buried lines are those that were built after the 60's - which isn't that many. My house boarders up against the next town, that section has buried lines and mine doesn't. My power goes out 2x a year (on average), theirs doesn't. Just in my small town it would probably cost $100M to convert. I'd love it if they converted, but it's not going to happen.
The best solution is a portable generator. All in with the generator and getting a transfer switch installed you're looking at $500 or so.
I'm hoping to get nat gas run up my street by next summer, then will be swapping out a lot of power gear for solar when I redo my roof.
Until then, I'm at the mercy of Eversource.
I will say we had a tree randomly go over in June that took out my entire corner of town, so when they fixed it up, they rationalized a lot of the wiring, which is likely why we held firm during this one for the most part, but it still would be nice to see some wind/solar initiatives around here really take off. Maybe combine it with some cell towers to limit the footprint or something.
Guy down the street from me has solar and geothermal. I considered solar, but I don't want to be locked into a 20 yr lease. If you can still qualify for the subsidies then purchasing is the way to go.
That area of the country has the least compelling reason to do so because high winds are so rare since hurricanes are usually severely weakened, tornados are rare, and the mountains usually weaken normal thunderstorms. Combine that with Yankee stubbornness, and a belief that the way it’s been is good enough and you have your reasons.
But see my post, I feel winter is far worse for this sort of thing, with wet winds coming off the water and icing up old trees and tipping them over.
During this storm, my buddy who has a 300' long driveway lost two massive trees that took out the lines to his house, on account of the root structure was trying to hold into what's essentially a glacier-smoothed rock outcropping.
The root ball that popped up was over 15' high when it was on its side.