California Approves Wide Power Outages To Prevent Wildfires (nbcnews.com) 267
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: California regulators on Thursday approved allowing utilities to cut off electricity to possibly hundreds of thousands of customers to avoid catastrophic wildfires like the one sparked by power lines last year that killed 85 people and largely destroyed the city of Paradise. Utilities' liability can reach billions of dollars, and after several years of devastating wildfires, they asked regulators to allow them to pull the plug when fire risk is extremely high. That's mainly during periods of excessive winds and low humidity when vegetation is dried out and can easily ignite.
The California Public Utilities Commission gave the green light but said utilities must do a better job educating and notifying the public, particularly those with disabilities and others who are vulnerable, and ramp up preventive efforts, such as clearing brush and installing fire-resistant poles. The plans could inconvenience hundreds of thousands of customers while endangering some who depend on electricity to keep them alive. The precautionary outages could mean multiday blackouts for cities as large as San Francisco and San Jose, Northern California's major power provider warned in a recent filing with the utilities commission.
The California Public Utilities Commission gave the green light but said utilities must do a better job educating and notifying the public, particularly those with disabilities and others who are vulnerable, and ramp up preventive efforts, such as clearing brush and installing fire-resistant poles. The plans could inconvenience hundreds of thousands of customers while endangering some who depend on electricity to keep them alive. The precautionary outages could mean multiday blackouts for cities as large as San Francisco and San Jose, Northern California's major power provider warned in a recent filing with the utilities commission.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
In what sorry state of repair are you power lines when they are prone to causing fires?
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We need to rake the forests, they are very messy
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And when the electricity is off then you also lose the ability to spread information to a lot of people. Not everyone has a battery operated radio.
The result can be even worse than leaving the electricity on.
Also consider to at least bury powerlines and other utilities in towns instead of having them on poles. It will cost a bit but it will be more reliable in the long run requiring a lot less maintenance.
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And when the electricity is off then you also lose the ability to spread information to a lot of people. Not everyone has a battery operated radio.
The result can be even worse than leaving the electricity on.
Also consider to at least bury powerlines and other utilities in towns instead of having them on poles. It will cost a bit but it will be more reliable in the long run requiring a lot less maintenance.
Great opportunity for solar power businesses to rake it in! I'd give up my left nut to get a solar power system for my home if I had to put up with this nonsense. Hopefully be able to generate enough power for yourself to not need the electric company at all.
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
The last fires happened because brush had not been properly cleared (because of environmentalists bitching) and the transmission towers were in a decrepit state. The tower where the fire started was 25 years past its useful life and no maintenance was ever performed.
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but im sure Gov Jerry Brown will just blame global warming instead of taking responsibility for his utlity commission allowing the utility company to continue its practice of poorly maintaining their equipment. Its easier to blame something they know is never going to get fixed that actually fixing things they can. Its hard to raid the coffers if the funds get used up keeping things in proper well regulated order.
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but im sure Gov Jerry Brown will just blame global warming instead of taking responsibility for his utlity commission allowing the utility company to continue its practice of poorly maintaining their equipment
Aren't you guys the ones who claim regulations are unnecessary because businesses will do things like maintain their transmission towers and clear brush under them on their own?
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Uhm; The power companies are not being allowed to clear the brush, or its adjacent -- outside their property.
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Uhm, there's these things called "Easements" which are the only reason the power companies can put their wires there. They not only allow access, the power company doesn't even have to ask the owner of the property before clearing the brush.
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Uhm, there's these things called "Easements"
The brush would be outside their easements, and the easements don't override the government meddling by environmentalist groups [townhall.com]
, anyways
They make a point to stop even homeowners from using fire retardants or cutting brush, thinning; to protect their own property.
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3. And they detected a fault but chose not to cut power.
Not in the lines that actually set the camp fire.
4. See Colorado (which has massively dry areas and high winds) and their wildfire rates with insulated lines (which cost more money).
Where in Colorado are 115 kV lines insulated?
PG&E rakes in billions of dollars in net profit per year, but leaves their infrastructure to rot.
In California corruption is king.
PG&E will start cutting power and playing the black-out game to get more concessions from the CA PUC for infrastructure repair.
If they don't, they're idiots. It's what the incentive structure dictates right now.
It's what inverse condemnation dictates.
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because of environmentalists bitching
Citation needed. I read that it was just the power company being cheap.
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Little of both. The power company is cheap in all the bad ways that cost more long term. The green prevent proper forest maintenance in general, leading to vulnerability to uncontainable wildfires.
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In what way is performing forest maintenance an environmental concern?
It looks a lot like logging, given that you're removing dead trees and fallen branches (along with all the other stuff you do to keep fuel from piling up), which confuses stupid people.
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That inability to recoup actual costs from the people causing those costs to be incurred, is what creates the incentive to skimp on m
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Ah, Flintstone style. I get it now.
Except not barefoot. We have Tevas.
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Hanson says opening the forest canopy lets in more sunlight and wind, drying out the understory and making it more likely to burn.
As someone who has been around forests for a very long time, I can tell you that the "understory" is quite able to dry out without an "opened" forest canopy. The issue with thinning forests is not the loss of canopy, but the slash left behind by the logging operations. In case you never looked closely at those log trucks on the highways, you would not have noticed that the branches and twigs are never part of the load. The logs are cleaned before they are loaded, and guess where the leftovers wind up? You o
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The US infrastructure hasn't had much improvements in over 50 years.
When ever there is need for an infrastructure upgrade it gets voted down because it is too expensive, which the current infrastructure deteriorates more, to bring it to cost more on the next vote.
While we want a improved infrastructure. We don't want to pay for it. And we don't like the idea having Shady 3rd party contractor companies ripping us off. Or having a "Socialist" mass hiring of government workers to rebuild. There will be loser
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You're first comment is we vote it down because its too expensive than you say we object to socialst mass hiring of government works. You know we'd have to pay those workers right? That is one of the big reasons it would be too expensive. But lets be really really honest here the problem is the public utilities commission let this happen. This is very much a failure of government. The PUC in their zeal to "protect consumers" forced the utilities to charge rates for transmission below what would allow the
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I know that! I live in the sticks my neighbors are farms! I am arguing probably against my own interests here but that is what you do when it comes to state wide and national policy if you want to be responsible.
here is the thing - like I pointed out its not 1930 any more. A hand full of people now work 1000 acre farms. Huge numbers of small municipalities and such across the nation are struggling to deal with that reality. Where there were once 100s of workers there are now 10 and its hard to justify th
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The US infrastructure hasn't had much improvements in over 50 years. When ever there is need for an infrastructure upgrade it gets voted down because it is too expensive,
I can't recall EVER seeing a vote on whether to upgrade the power company's infrastructure, or a tax that was intended to pay for it. Every place I've lived the power infrastructure was owned by the power company and the power company was expected to pay for upgrading it.
I HAVE seen charges on the bill for such upgrades, however. Never got to vote on them -- other than "voting with my feet" by cancelling my power service. If you expect people to "vote" like that, well ... I don't think any upgrade has eve
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There will be losers for any upgrade, such as burring power lines underground means ripping up some peoples property
Methinks you don't know just how expensive it is to bury high-voltage transmission lines. There's a reason those really big transmission towers are still used everywhere, even in pretty dense cities. Air is a very effective and cheap insulator. And ground has the unfortunate habit of getting wet regularly.
Plus you still have to maintain those now-buried wires. If the company is failing to maintain the easy-to-get ones in the air, they're sure as hell going to fail to maintain the ones underground.
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It's funny you should mention that. I would expect that a competent, privately owned power grid would be very interested in maintaining their capital investment. Interested parties would surely want to make sure they see their long-term return on that expensive infrastructure.
In this hypothetical libertarian situation, I don't think they could realistically count on some kind of government intervention bailout. No, they're going to have to take responsibility for their own stuff. Why would they leave it
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At least diesel generator manufacturers will be happy.
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... because shutting down parts of the grid is cheaper than maintaining it. And hey, we got government write-off on it, so suck it, customers!
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
In what sorry state of repair are you power lines when they are prone to causing fires?
It's not the state of the power lines, it's the state of the trees around the power lines. PG&E is contractually obligated to cut them back. There are a couple of places where people have fought legal battles to prevent them from cutting them back severely, and opinions differ on whether those places should be cut back as far as PG&E wants to cut them or not, but none of those places are where PG&E-"maintained" lines have caused fires by contacting/being contacted by trees, so they can safely be ignored for the scope of this discussion.
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Also: I her there was a group of "environmentalists" who organized a company that contracted with PG&E to do some of the tree trimming, then ran off with the money (to use for other tree-hugger projects) and didn't actually trim the trees. PG&E didn't inspect their (non) work, so it wasn't discovered until the wildfires were investigated.
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And like many things that you "hear", it isn't true. But it does do an excellent job of reinforcing your preconceived opinions.
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It's not as bad as it seems. It's a balance of probability and severity of fault.
Looking at the sheer amount of infrastructure out there and the amount of time that passes between faults, it's is exceedingly unlikely that existing electrical infrastructure will cause a fire.
However, compounding a single fault with massive amounts of uncut brush and California's seasonally dry air and heavy winds makes a single fault exceedingly dangerous. The result in liability suits is so extreme that California was very
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A: Electricity.
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In what sorry state of repair are you power lines when they are prone to causing fires?
This is all about California politics and expansive views of liability not a reflection on the state of power lines.
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I would trust the power company a lot more than I trust people who know zero about electricity creating "widow maker", male to male electric cords and plugging them into one of their mains circuits. There are safe ways to keep the circuits fed with electric, be it a circuit breaker interlock, a transfer switch (manual or automatic), or using a whole-house UPS. However, there are a lot of people who will just do a fail cord into their main box and then wonder why linemen gripe at nearly being electrocuted
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Um in my state the power company comes around and trims trees to keep them out of the power lines. In fact if you call them and tell them you have a tree in the lines
That's nice for the populated areas, but the wildfires that cause the big problems are in the large national and wilderness forests where there are a LOT of trees and not a lot of people calling the "power company" to deal with them.
We're talking large distribution lines, which are supposed to have clear cut areas under them, but there are also a lot of small feeders that have been put in to the "backwoods", too.
I'm wondering who came up with the part of this story that says that cities like San Fran and
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I'm wondering who came up with the part of this story that says that cities like San Fran and San Jose are going to be subject to these shutdowns. I wasn't aware that either was located in a large forested area that would be burning.
The cities are surrounded by mountainous areas that are not nearly as densely populated (not as much for San Francisco proper, but the other cities that surround it)
Though the power company should be able to figure out how to turn off those areas and not the city proper, so there's still plenty of fearmongering in the statement.
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Seems to me that the only truly equitable solution is to cut power to everyone when anyone has to have their power cut.
And - just think of what sort of environmental impact and carbon footprint reduction you could achieve!
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Seems to me that the only truly equitable solution is to cut power to everyone when anyone has to have their power cut.
Why? The people who decided to move to the relatively rural areas did so knowing utilities, road access, and everything else were going to be less reliable. That's a big part of why they moved to these areas.
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That would imply that there are personal consequences to personal decisions.
That is not the California Way!
(Of course, I didn't think that a snark tag was needed above - I find this entire situation to be ludicrous. But that's just me...)
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Of course, I didn't think that a snark tag was needed above
I felt a serious response would better point out the stupid of your pretending-to-be-a-Californian response.
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Because of inertia... Companies [bizjournals.com] and people [businessinsider.com] are leaving California by record amounts. California in the 30s to the 70s, and into the early 80s was a good place to live and do business. In the last 30 years, that's changed. The success that it had (back when it rose to economic prominence) is dissipating, and people are moving. Right now we're coasting on the inertia built up over that 50 year span. But other States - Washington, Texas, Florida, heck, even New York - are starting to grow. NY and WA have
All I've got to say is... (Score:2)
...what he said [battleswarmblog.com].
Re:Shit Hole (Score:4, Interesting)
people are leaving California by record amounts.
That's true, but yet California's total population continues to grow (by 186,807 in 2018).
But other States - Washington, Texas, Florida, heck, even New York - are starting to grow.
Washington, Texas, Florida, yes. New York, no. Last year, New York lost 48,500 people.
NY and WA have higher GDP per capita, and Texas isn't far behind.
No, here are the numbers:
Rank: State per-capita-GDP
1: New York 85,746
5: California 74,205
6: Washington 74,182
-: United States 62,390
20: Texas 61,167
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Glad you like it! Please, stay there, and whatever you do don't come to Texas. We have all the California ex-pats we need..
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You can have all the money in the world and if it's poorly managed you can still live in a shithole. An poorly managed is a polite way of covering California economic problems. But the main problem with California is the refusal to recognize that they have a problem.
Small list of problems that California refuses to recognize or blame it on other people and ignore it.
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An there is the troll/flamebait mod that I was expecting. This just goes to prove my point. When ever anyone post something negative about California it gets modded down so no one will see it. This is a very example of the issues that California faces. The lack willingness to deal with the issue.
Everything on my list is a problem in California but you don't to address it. You want to just stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away. Well here is a something you can take to the bank. It will
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LOL!
Yes, Please Educate the Public (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, can we please educate the public that filling distribution transformers full of bullet holes is not good?
The Camp fires were caused by criminally-mischievous vandals shooting up a transformer, draining it of its cooling oil. Yet, this is somehow the responsibility of SCE since they have money and criminal rednecks don't.
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One wonders who that people that did that were. The idea that people might use rifles to shoot transformers and let the oil go has been on the counter terrorism folks radar for a long time. I remember talks about it back as early as 2k12 where there were real concerns about the lead time to replace those things.
So who shot them up. Was it MS13 guys who should never have been allowed over the border? Was it a bunch of offenders that CA decided ought to be let out of prison... Was it some political motivat
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It's rednecks for sure. There aren't enough terrorist and gangsters in the country to shoot up the number of signs I've seen with holes in them. It's not even like you have to go way out in the sticks to start spotting signs riddled with bullet holes.
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Signs with holes in them are not very useful for starting fires.
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But they are good indicators of pointless shooting.
Re:Yes, Please Educate the Public (Score:5, Informative)
The Camp fires were caused by criminally-mischievous vandals shooting up a transformer, draining it of its cooling oil.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is that the actual proximate cause of the fire was PG&E letting current flow through damaged hardware because they spent money putting smart meters (which often fail and overreport consumption, and sometimes fail in a way that they literally burst into flames) on people's houses instead of spending it putting monitoring equipment on transformers.
PG&E has very little intelligence on their grid, and they don't clear trees adequately from around lines or poles. They don't adequately maintain poles in general, in fact. A transformer should be designed and sited such that it won't start a fire if it bursts into flame, regardless of whether it is shot or simply fails. Even if the responsibility is shared by other parties, PG&E is clearly grossly negligent.
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They also had repair people out to the exact location of where the fire started just a few days prior. The owner had been calling reporting issues with the power.
I'm sure everything will be settled out of court with sealed documents.
Also, doesn't California has months of dry, windy conditions? Are they going to turn off power for weeks at a time?
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PG&E has very little intelligence on their grid, and they don't clear trees adequately from around lines or poles.
Kind of hard to clear shit with tree huggers in the way.
They don't adequately maintain poles in general, in fact. A transformer should be designed and sited such that it won't start a fire if it bursts into flame, regardless of whether it is shot or simply fails.
The camp fire was caused by transmission lines not people shooting at transformers.
Even if the responsibility is shared by other parties, PG&E is clearly grossly negligent.
They never can't be. In California thanks to inverse condemnation you can be in full compliance with all safety regulations and still held liable.
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The Camp fires were caused by criminally-mischievous vandals shooting up a transformer, draining it of its cooling oil. Yet, this is somehow the responsibility of SCE since they have money and criminal rednecks don't.
This is the first I've heard of that, but if it's true it's definitely the fault of SCE. Where was the bucholz trip on low oil? Where was the trip on high winding temperature?
This will be good training (Score:5, Funny)
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-no electronic devices over 100W
Quite illustrative how amazingly arbitrary you can be at picking things. Why 100W, and not 80W or 150W?
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I feel like people don't understand just how much potential energy is out there. A stupid amount of energy can be harvested from sunlight falling on Earth every day:
https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Energy/Sun's%20Energy.aspx
That doesn't even count other sources such as wind power.
We could build out a grid of solar panels and wind turbines such that everything we need could be powered directly when the energy is available, but we'd have more than enough excess energy to charge batteri
SF? (Score:2)
San Francisco without power for days sounds like a disaster.
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Generators (Score:3)
I bet the thousands of people that will fire up generators during those outages easily creates just as big of a fire risk as what they are trying to mitigate. But then the liability will be off the power company, which is the entire point of all this. Am I the only non-Californian that just sits back in disbelief over the decision making that goes on in that state?
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Am I the only non-Californian that just sits back in disbelief over the decision making that goes on in that state?
Well, I live here, and I'm dismayed as well. There must be some deep corruption in the CPUC.
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Not as bad as the carbon footprint of a wildfire.
Too hot, too dry to pay the bill (Score:2, Interesting)
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Wait...do you not pay by the kWh?
We pay for maintenance of the lines including tree-cutting, and our paying for power delivery is predicated upon the existence and maintenance of the lines. If they can't be arsed to do the contracted maintenance, then they need to let someone else do the job.
Or how about... (Score:2)
Maybe practice some forest management? Learn that it's not a crime against humanity (or nature) to cut a tree down? Controlled burns?
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Maybe practice some forest management? Learn that it's not a crime against humanity (or nature) to cut a tree down? Controlled burns?
Even in California, in most places it's super-duper easy to get permission to cut down a tree, if that's even required. Only a few species are protected, like coast redwoods. People in California often fight over the disposition of trees on public land, but relatively rarely on private turf — or duff, as the case may be. I live next to a business that cuts lumber on its own property, and saws (and planes) it on-premises, then uses it to build homes in the local area... and it's in Mendocino county, it
But ... (Score:2)
Goverment paper on Underground Transmission Lines (Score:2)
https://psc.wi.gov/Documents/Brochures/Under%20Ground%20Transmission.pdf [wi.gov]
If we are going to have this discussion, then having an unbiased reference point to work from would be nice.
EASIER solution (Score:2)
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That undergrowth in CA is various species of plants that are designed to grow incredibly fast during the relatively short rainy season, and then die and thus turn to tinder.
So, in other climates you clear out the undergrowth and you're good for a few years....and what does grow back is relatively wet. In CA, you're only good until the after next rainy season. Which is why companies like PG&E were doing such a shitty job controlling undergrowth.
STOP ALLOWING PEOPLE TO BUILD IN AREAS OF KNOWN FIRE CANYON AREAS
We call that area "California". The ecology of almost the
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I don't recognize those lyrics.
Re: Fires Happen (Score:2)
But when it's a utility company, the company is liable for it. Until now, that company was not allowed to turn off the power to avoid liability. It's a matter of fairness.
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Until now, that company was not allowed to turn off the power to avoid liability. It's a matter of fairness.
That's what being a utility is about. Their job is providing power safely and reliably, because modern society depends upon safe and reliable delivery of power. If they can't manage that, they should sell off to someone who can.
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or at least require said homes to be independently powered from local renewable like solar/wind/geo .. they would have to repeal the rural electrification laws in order to achieve that however.
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Or just bury the power lines under the ground where they can't cause fires like most of the rest of the developed world.
Re:Stop building in forests (Score:4, Insightful)
This is that long haul miles and miles and miles type of powerlines those don’t get buried. This is not suburbia. These are those high frequency high tension very tall type powerlines. I’m not even sure it’s safe to stick something like this in the ground without having environmentalists up your ass. When you drive past mountainous regions in the Appalachian, you will see a path like a reverse mohawk pointing where those powerlines are running. So if you take an arid climate like SoCal, add a heat wave, dry tender, poorly maintained equipment, in the middle of a forest, you’re just asking for it.
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Yes, I've seen those big wide cleared swaths for the power lines- all throughout suburbia too.
I'm a huge advocate for burying lines, but I have to agree- the very high voltage long-distance lines would be nearly impossible to bury, and the area would have to be guarded.
I don't know enough about large-scale power grids, but I'd rather see more smaller generating stations, and no high-tension lines. And solar on every roof. And wind generators where practical.
You mentioned "high frequency"- do you know this
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I was referring more to the EM and electric field those high voltage lines resonate. Current carrying conductor, magnetic field, creating EM (RF). I wouldn't want any of that buried just 3ft under me. A decade ago /. discussed this breakthrough for power distribution...
https://newatlas.com/sapphire-... [newatlas.com]
Im just wondering how long till we see this sort of thing
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That's cool- thanks for that link. Some things would need to be resolved- mainly the cooling, but it certainly makes sense.
Again, not expert in HV power, but I know some are DC. I'd want underground lines to be DC for many reasons. DC would not radiate any EMI, well, unless it's "dirty", which would cause losses, so hopefully carefully controlled and capacitor filtered. And the lines themselves would have lots of distributed capacitance between themselves and ground.
I would also not want HV DC (or AC) l
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Not sure which "poster" you referred to, but thanks for the info. I know we use 60Hz in USA. For a long time I've heard about HVDC but I've never heard any actual information on what's used where.
I'm pretty sure they use HVDC in China from the Three Gorges Dam.
In my area they're using 33KV for distribution- I asked the linesmen one time. At least that's what they told me. And maybe that's uncommon generally.
I think 13.2KV is used a lot- I know of a building that has 3 phase 13.2KV coming in- it's labele
Re:Stop building in forests (Score:4, Interesting)
The more common sense approach would have been to ban people building in areas of forest where you have to run power lines to supply those homes.
Yes. If people didn't live there, we could have more meaningful annual burns to keep wildfires controllable.
Of course California is a Mecca of incredibly dumb politicians who on a whim make policies that always end up bighting them in the end.
Not especially. Look at the midwest. They are getting fucking clobbered by flooding because everything is built on a flood plain. If you look at agricultural communities, the only houses that are standing from their founding days are on substantial hills, though not so steep that they can be wiped away by a landslide. We've simply put people in all sorts of inappropriate locations all over the country. A lot of these forest communities in California used to just be collections of hunting cabins. Take for example Cobb, which got wiped out in the last cluster of fires in Lake County. For a little while, I rented a cabin in Cobb's neighborhood of Whispering Pines which had been expanded from a hunting shack. Simply built on stilts and cantilevered out over the side of the hill, the bottom had been enclosed as a half-finished, half-buried basement. In any earthquake, the whole place would shake like a snare drum, and being right next to The Geysers (where primary treated sewage is pumped into the ground in order to keep up steam production for the geothermal plant) there were a lot of quakes.
Anyway, economic downturns make people lose their homes and move into their hunting cabins. Then civilization shows up and the property values go up, and then they sell them and can afford a home somewhere else. Lake County is now not just a bedroom community but actually a commute corridor for Napa county, because people are actually driving from that far away because Napa is a bedroom community for the Bay Area. And it's all because nobody wants to permit high-density housing to be built in their back yard.
Instead of hunting cabins turning into homes, in the midwest it's agricultural properties. And they are all built on flood plains. We have plenty of that here in California, but in the Midwest it's like a law or something. And now those houses are washing away in quantity. The ones that aren't washing away are being vacuumed by tornadoes...
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Additionally, in the midwest the economic activity generated by the agricultural property far outweighs the damage done by relatively infrequent flooding.
Very little economic activity occurs in cities, but plenty of them are located on flood plains because that's where it was convenient to run the highway, and cities grow along intersections of commerce.
WHOOPS (Score:2)
I've been using preview a lot lately, but I didn't use it this time. I meant to write that very little agricultural activity occurs in cities.
Since I'm leaving a whole comment here I might as well mention that there's room for a lot more of it, with vertical aeroponics on rooftops. It weighs very little.
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Which is why Venezuela is such a paradise, right?
Anticipating the next argument - yes, they "didn't do socialism correctly". No one ever does socialism "correctly" because the underpinning of socialism demands iron-fisted central control, and flies in the face of human nature. The individual must be forced to comply, which means someone has to force them. This is the definition of a totalitarian system, it has to and will always end up like that.
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Not going to happen. The power line that supposedly sparked the Camp fire is a transmission line. Not a local distribution line. It operates at a much higher voltage (115 kV or 230 kV vs 12 kV) and as a result is prohibitively expensive to place underground. Like prohibitive enough that PG&E might be better off ceasing service to rural areas altogether.
What would work is to get rid of hydroelectric and wind generation and replace it with small fossil fuel plants sited in the communities that they serve
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Mobile homes or less expensive cabins which can be sacrificed at lower costs would be more practical to enable people to enjoy the area but get out of the way of periodic fires some preventive burns.
Underground dwellings, RVs of assorted types, and compostable structures made from forest falls are the only things which should be permitted in forests. Anything else is a bad joke that demands unsustainable forest management. THAT part is California's fault, collectively.
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So wait, California has had wildfires, caused by power lines, since 2007, but for some reason hasn't been smart enough to actually FIX THE POWER LINES? So now as an emergency measure they'll just cut power instead.
How do you suppose one goes about "fixing" power lines so they can't start fires?
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How do you suppose one goes about "fixing" power lines so they can't start fires?
One way is with increased monitoring. Part of "PG&E's" (everyone is doing this) "smart grid" (it's not that smart) "initiative" is hanging sensors on the high power lines to detect current flow and temperature. You can also monitor the temperature of transformers.