Centerpoint, the physical electricity provider in Houston, has said it would cost $2.5M per square mile. Houston is 640 square miles. Regulations allow them to claw back costs on the bills. (For example, repairs from past storms are often paid for over the course of several years in the form of a bond that is applied to customers as surcharges)
There are about 3844 people per square mile in Houston, so that's $650 per person, amortized over at least 20 years, which would increase the monthly power bill by about $2.70 per person (~ $10 / subscriber?)
I'd guess that's less expensive than throwing out everything in the fridge / freezer every few years.
It seems like a lot, but a few billions of dollars also seems like a good deal to secure against increasing risks for severe weather. What's the total economic impact of future storms? To put it in perspective a single Patriot missile battery costs about a billion dollars and a single missile costs $4M.
There actually are a few problems with underground power lines, notably that maintenance & upgrades are much harder and more expensive, they tend to get severed by construction, they tend to get severed by earthquakes, and bad things result if the waterproof conduit around them is punctured.
On balance I think they're probably worth it for areas prone to wildfire, but undergrounding all power lines is not a panacea, and there are a lot of hidden costs to undergrounding that become apparent only after they get old and you have to do maintenance.
True, I forgot about the earthquake in Italy that resulted in a bunch of seismologists being jailed and prosecuted for not predicting it.
Still, it seems like those parts of Europe (outside of Turkey, which isn't really in Europe) don't have large earthquakes, otherwise all those ancient buildings like the Coliseum and Parthenon would have completely collapsed by now.
Funny to think about these costs and the health of the national commons from a point of view of the Federal budget.
For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.
If we could lop off 1/4 of the DoD and intelligence budget of $1T/yr and dedicate it to infrastructure, we could pay for 125 Huston-scale improvement projects per year. And still have the most expensive DoD in the world! But that would be misguided for "national security".
Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed, where such value is incarnated via the wealth of the commons, where such wealth is most truly incarnated by infrastructure.
But for unknown reasons, such pragmatism is politically untenable.
> For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.
The State of Texas had a budget of $188 billion [1].
In 2023 they projected a surplus of $18 billion [2].
Maybe they can budget it in?
What the federal government versus state governments should pay for is a big can of worms, but I'm not sure why it seems so easy to just look at the DoD budget and says "there's money there let's use that" as if it's not doing anything or it's all waste. If anything (unfortunately) the DoD budget probably needs to be increased quite a bit given the geopolitical challenges we face.
The US dollar literally is constructed as needed. It's pretty darn close to free thanks to electronic banking.
However, like all magic, using it has severe (and generally predictable) consequences.
Unlike fictional magic, the consequences take 4 years to kick in like clockwork. That, and the US's two term limit meant that presidents get to print money without political consequence. Worst case, they lose the midterms, then run again while blaming the next guy for the problem they created.
Presidents don't print money. Congress approves stimuli in the form of spending. Spending is always inflationary in nature because it injects money into the economy.
The Federal Reserve, nearly completely independent (for better or worse) from the Executive and Legislative branches, prints money in the form of quantitative easing and controls other levers through lending and interest rate strategies.
It's free if you spend it on a durable asset that is as or more valuable than the cash was, which can often be true of infrastructure. Your balance sheet goes up not down after the spend then.
There are vanishingly few examples of infrastructure spending that don't turn into massive, wasteful boondoggles; perhaps the Interstate Highway system.
The national railroad system a century prior and even the Internet were nearly entirely built with private funds.
The interstate highway system is arguably a massively wasteful boondoggle - it subsidises trucks at the cost of the far more efficient and less-polluting rail.
I wouldn't say vanishingly few. Seems like the vast majority of infrastructure built before some certain point in the mid-to-late 20th century was cheap and easily worth it (and we built a TON of it all the time) and it's only since then there's been increasing issues. I don't think it's about infrastructure, there's something else causing the cost overruns and we should figure out what it is.
Railroads got massive subsidies in at least two forms: huge land grants, and the power of the U.S. Army to wage war on the native peoples who otherwise would have stood in their way.
The land grant thing is sort of weird though. Hard to think of it as that big of a subsidy when the land was so so low in value prior to the railroad and the railroad's construction is what made the adjoining land so valuable. I wouldn't call it a subsidy at all -- but rather an investment that turned nearly worthless land into much more valuable land and attracted much more investment dwarfing the original "subsidy"
How much should the states bail out mismanaged cities? How much should the Federal Government bail out mismanaged states? Budgets aren't "free money" as you assert.
The general problem states see is that metropolitan regions are more productive and produce more taxes, so in many cases the state cannot necessarily wash its hands of cities.
The largest municipal fiscal crises in the nation so far have been NYC in the ‘70s and Detroit. There is also the case of Puerto Rico, although one could argue the feds have more culpability there since its status as a non-state subject to federal laws makes a lot of avenues for resolving crises illegal.
There is no scenario where every mile of road is outfitted with buried power lines, especially considering not every mile of road has elevated power lines. What a nonsensical comment.
New Orleans and Houston are basically built on swamps. In New Orleans, you can’t even bury people below ground, so I doubt you can do much with power lines underground.
So this is weird, but I never saw people buried above ground in Amsterdam like in New Orleans. What the diff? Even if cremation is common now, it probably wasn’t a hundred or two years ago?
Swamp is a poor excuse IMHO. Plenty of my city Christchurch is built on swamp. yet it has slowly been replacing HV and LV power poles with underground cabling for about 50 years now, although there is still some remaining. We don't get hurricanes so I'm not sure of reasons for us using underground cabling. NZ is no where near as wealthy as Texas so Houston should be able to afford to do it too.
Most of the wells they sampled are > 100 ft above the water table. Some are as low as 12. The lowest is 2.83ft. Here's the relevant bit of the schema XML document for the CSV the produced:
<attr>
<attrlabl>DTW23</attrlabl>
<attrdef>
December 2022 through March 2023 depth to groundwater in feet measured
from land-surface elevation referenced to NAVD 88
</attrdef>
<attrdefs>U.S. Geological Survey</attrdefs>
<attrdomv>
<rdom>
<rdommin>2.83</rdommin>
<rdommax>453.97</rdommax>
<attrunit>feet</attrunit>
</rdom>
</attrdomv>
</attr>
I used to live in a neighboring parish to the west of New Orleans. If you dug more than 3 feet into the ground, you were hitting water. Driving pilings is a sloppy mess.
It's funny to me that folks counter criticism of Texas by saying lefty California also has outages. It's like, sure, they do -- so why not show that a right-wing government can do better? What is the actual point of the counterargument?
I think "vibes" is a new weasel word that subtly absolves the author from any responsibility to connect cause and effect. There's a whole lot more to writing than announcing what "vibes" you get.
Berlin, Germany is inland, with an elevation average around 34 meters above sea level. The ground soil composition in Berlin is primarily sandy, draining easily and lending itself exceptionally well to underground infrastructure development.
Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.
There always seems to be an excuse as to why America is exceptional and things accomplished routinely in other countries couldn't possibly work here. It's true to a degree. They absolutely cannot work here. But that's more about our political dysfunction than anything meaningful about our geographical situations.
"No we can't have a transcontinental railroad because the US is gigantic and mostly empty" (which is the entire reason we wanted a damn railroad across the US!)
"No we can't build an interstate transport system because the US is mostly empty"
"No we can't dam nearly every mid sized river in the country because the US is too spread out"
It's just fundamentally wrong on all levels. We can build a Burger King in the middle east in a week, we can build a system of levees around a swampland that is actively under the waterline that, when they failed due to design deficiencies, we decided to build even stronger ones.
We fucking COULD do massive amounts of high speed rail criscrossing the country and connecting all of us for reasonable prices without even taking your shoes off. It would be even easier if we just stop it at the Californian border
It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle".
It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same.
Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle".
Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle".
Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best.
To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily.
It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level.
Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world.
Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel.
In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country.
The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.
And thus their additional challenges are caused by their absolute neglect of urban planning. If only someone could have predicted that spreading single family housing over hundreds of square miles was going to create a maintenance nightmare.
As I understand it, the topsoil in parts of Texas is only a foot deep or less and then it's solid bedrock. This is why most homes do not have basements.
That’s not true in all of Texas for sure. I can vouch for it in Central Texas “hill country” 6-10”around my home and you will hit solid limestone. Makes a nice home foundation (provided it’s not too porous)but I would not want to pay for a pool or basement here.
Much more expensive to install and maintain, and while risk from wind and rain is lessened, you add the risk of any below ground construction accidentally severing cables.
True, but the cause is at least obvious. Underground cables can fail or be cut even without anyone’s knowledge. Then it becomes a matter of digging until the problem is found.
Power lines that are rated for conduit burial (which implies indefinite direct submersion in water is fine -- conduits leak, even if they're not supposed to) are readily available and not particularly expensive vs. above ground lines. Most of the cost is in the conductor, and that's the same either way.
If memory serves me right, you need to trench 6ft (which is usually done with a backhoe that has a narrow bucket and straddles the trench), then place a PVC pipe to act as conduit and fill the trench. The last step is using a (typically) pickup-truck mounted cable puller to pull the line through the conduit.
If the wire fails, you can pull it out and put a new one in without retrenching.
When you bury the conduit, you also bury a piece of warning cloth about one foot above it. If you see that while digging, then you should stop digging. (Also, call the "call before you dig" number before you dig.)
There are also trenchless systems that I've seen used for fiber optic cables. It's basically a tiny little boring machine (like they use to bore holes for tunnels) on the end of a cable. One person steers the boring machine, and the other stands above ground with a metal detector that tells them where it is, and how deep.
Isn't there a third option: redundant overhead power lines?
In the transmission (long haul) part of the grid, there's already a lot of redundancy. But not as much in the distribution (last mile) part.
If you increase redundancy, you should be more resilient to e.g. trees knocking out power lines because there are multiple paths in more parts of the network.
I doubt full redundancy (two lines to every customer) would be realistic, but an increase in redundancy seems like a more practical way forward than just starting over completely with underground lines.
What I've always heard whenever this subject comes up in Houston is that A) burying lines is expensive (and Houston is very large), and B) Houston floods a lot.
There's nothing wrong with it. But it would take lifetimes of money and time to retrofit a city like Houston to move all power infrastructure underground. And there is no way consumers would ever sign up for the cost to do so. It would be akin to building the Hoover Dam today. It would probably be one of the largest public works projects ever attempted.
Lifetimes of money, really? What is that measurement? Someone above said 2.5 million per square miles. Catastrophic damage from larger storms is often in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, so it feel like it would be in the best interest of most parties to embark on this project, even if it happens slowly.
The poster above misstated the cost. Its $2.5mil/mile. That number actually comes from PG&E in California, so its possibly not relevant to Houston. I couldn’t find that Centerpoint has actually done an analysis for Houston. Just to get an idea of scale, Centerpoint states on their website that they operate ~33,000 miles of above ground power lines.
Putting power lines underground wouldn't mitigate very much of that damage though, would it? I was under the impression that the vast majority of those multibillion dollar figures is water damage to buildings, cars, and other equipment.
Just one anecdote. We lived through the deracho in Iowa, one of the places hardest hit. Huge swaths of the city was without power for weeks. In our house, in the middle of the most damage, was without power for under 24 hours. That's a massive difference. I don't know how much the calculations take into account physical damage versus all up damage including lost productivity. But many of the folks working at the local company were back "in the office" working from home because the business was without power far longer than most of the employees. I have no idea how the overall damages are calculated.
It’s not lifetimes of money, but there are substantial costs.
All of the existing distribution conductors need to be buried either by trenching or directional boring, all of the pole-mounted transformers need to be replaced with pad-mounted transformers , and all of the customer service drops need to be converted from overhead to underground.
In another post, someone said about $2.5M per square mile, which isn’t actually all that much money. If you figure half labor and half material costs (fairly standard for electrical construction) and labor costs of $100/hr (IBEW 66 journeyman lineman), that’s 12,500 hours of labor, or a 6.25 person crew for one year to convert one square mile, and Houston is 637 square miles.
~4,000 person years of labor, 400 full time linemen could do the whole city in 10 years.
Underground electric distribution is considerably more reliable than overhead lines. Animals digging up the wire is much more rare than an outage created by an animal crawling up a pole and grabbing the line/transformer.
Underground electric is quite widely used in the Midwest and is cost effective vs. overhead lines even in sparsely populated rural areas.
Below-ground power distribution is cheaper in sparsely-populated rural areas than overhead lines because utility companies can trench the lines directly through anyone's field or in any random ditch - there's no directional boring required (until customer delivery possibly.)
Add in the fact that you no longer risk trees taking down lines when they are unkempt and ice-covered and it is probably much cheaper.
Source? The grid was far more reliable where I've lived with underground than overhead lines. Kind of hard to believe. Sounds like that would only happen if your city cheaped out on the conduit material.
Been thirty years since I lived there, but when I lived where there was a coop electric they had data showing underground was overall less reliable. Maybe things are diffarant now.
> Moles, mice, things walking/driving over the top
I wonder if anyone has started an environmental impact statement about burying lines. For example squirrels, possums, etc use them as bridges over streets, birds use them as observation/socialization spaces, especially some flocks of migratory grackles (maybe?) that have a giant winter rookery on the lines around a grocery store.
