The Biden administration announced Wednesday it will spend $95 million to help strengthen Hawaii’s electrical grid in the wake of deadly wildfires that swept through parts of Maui earlier this month. The fast-moving fires were the deadliest in modern U.S. history, killing more than 100 people on the island, forcing thousands to evacuate and destroying the historic town of Lahaina.
On Wednesday afternoon, President Biden addressed both the government’s long-term recovery and rebuilding efforts on the island, as well as the administration’s ongoing response to Hurricane Idalia, a major storm that made landfall in Florida on Wednesday morning.
“I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of a climate crisis anymore,” Biden said. “Just look around. Historic floods … more intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we’ve never seen before.”
It’s expensive as hell, but if we buried power lines, these sorts of disasters won’t happen. Also has other safety benefits, such as cars not running into live powerline poles, people not stepping on downed lines in an earthquake, windstorm, hailstorm, etc, and lines not clogging up sidewalks with the visual clutter of poles and lines.
Maybe its late in the day, maybe i’m losing it, but how is it more expensive to bury infrastructure instead of putting poles in and hanging it? Is it easements and right aways? It just seems like we bury plenty of other stuff. Its not like we’re running hour water system on poles because its cheaper.
Trenching (dirt/grass) and boring (road or driveway) are both much more expensive in comparison to just running it overhead with poles. You first have to add the surrounding conduit cost in to properly protect the cable from water damage compared to just hanging it up. Easements are about the same I believe between the two but I’m sure, depending on the place, those underground easements will have to deal with more obstacles such as existing water and waste rather than just throwing up a pole every 200’.
Then there is also the troubleshooting issue for line crews for if a cable faults out, you then have to dig out a much larger section to first find the issue then to splice it rather than just splicing the overhead line with a normal line crew and splice kit.
I can’t remember the exact numbers but I think the ratio for overhead, trenching, and boring was around $4/6/8 per foot making it over twice as expensive to bore over just throwing up some poles. Numbers can definitely vary, but most utilities probably won’t want to trench and bore unless they have to.
Right on. Thanks for that. Good enough for back of the napkin/ ballpark probably.
It’s easier to do when you’re starting from scratch, but much more expensive and difficult to retrofit underground power lines.