I am all for utility companies cutting service to rural areas, for cost savings or otherwise.
Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive, but for the past 40 years or so all of the population centers of America have been subsidizing rural life. My parents live 30 miles inland in Florida and recently wanted their 5 mile dirt road paved, total cost would have been north of $2,000,000... Even if that was split among everyone living there you are looking at $133,000.
Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes.
Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619.
You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household.
Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year.
Meanwhile in a city, the amount each individual is paying is a tiny fraction, probably less than 0.01%. Sure a urban home is probably more expensive, but given that a rural home should incur a near $400,000 premium, you shouldn't have been able to afford that rural home to begin with.
America stands to save hundreds of billions if we actually force the cost of living in rural areas to be what it is, rather than subsidize it.
People who live in the country side already use wells for water due to the cost of water + sewage, why is it any different for power?
I agree that the marginal cost of providing those services to rural homes is higher than urban/suburban homes. However, I think you're vastly overestimating the actual costs incurred, as many (maybe most) people who live in rural areas don't have most of those things.
I live in a mostly rural county in north-central Colorado. The county maintains ~250 miles of roads of which only 39 miles are paved (the rest of the roads in the county are state and federal highways).
Outside the few small towns in the county, there's no sewer or municipal water. Everyone has a septic tank and a well on their property that they're responsible for maintaining.
Same with cable/fiber. Unless you live in a town, your options are ~1.5Mbps DSL or ~5Mbps fixed wireless (if you have good line of sight to a base station). Neither the county nor any of the ISPs in the area have any plans to significantly improve services, so I'm really hoping that SpaceX gets Starlink up and running sooner rather than later.
Considering all that, I don't think that your calculated premium of $400,000 per rural home actually applies in most situations.
Right, and I absolutely agree with that. When I bought my house, I had no expectation that utility services would be the same. While my neighbors and I have some complaints about the quality of our internet service, we're looking for 15-25Mbps, not 100Mbps, and certainly not 1Gbps.
But GP's first sentence was mainly what I was trying to address:
> I am all for utility companies cutting service to rural areas, for cost savings or otherwise.
If my electric and gas providers suddenly decided that I was too expensive to serve and cut me off, I'd be out in the range of $20-30k to install batteries, a generator (since solar might not be adequate in the middle of winter), and to convert my heating from natural gas to propane.
Thanks for the link! I've looked briefly at LTE internet service but hadn't seriously considered it because I'm just on the edge of decent cell service. While my phone usually displays 1-2 bars, it's not even enough to make voice calls. I think due to the topography in the area, my phone can receive signal from the tower but isn't powerful enough to transmit back. It looks like UbiFi also sells 4G signal boosters and external antennas, and that might just do the trick.
I picked up a signal booster, but ended up not needing it- I typically get 2-3 bars, but found a spot in the house where I get 4, and that's good enough for decent speeds that I never got around to setting it up.
Keep in mind that the signal booster isn't magic- it's just a relay with a bigger antenna than what your cell phone has. If you're brave enough, pop up onto your roof with your cell phone- if you get at least three bars up there, I'm guessing that the signal booster could do the trick.
I wish that AT&T or Verizon would offer these unlimited style data plans directly. It seems strange to me that something like UbiFi can contract out off of AT&T's network and offer a flat rate plan, but somehow, phone tethering and data-only devices like verizon's jetpack are always limited to 20gb and slow speeds.
If you really want to make it work you can get a router with an external antenna connector and mount a yagi and point it towards the tower. Might take some trial and error but this is definitely a solvable problem w/ LTE
> Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes.
Recently looked into this. New rural developments have to paid to get power lines run to the corner of their property (in western states, anyway). If your immediate neighbor has power (which they paid to run) this will cost the resident tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the distance. If you don't have an immediate neighbor with power, you're SOL.
> Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619.
Rural areas are predominantly septic tanks and well water. Paid for by residents. The only utility most rural residents get is power.
> You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household.
Give me a break. This doesn't happen in rural areas. Hel, go 15 mins/miles outside a densely populated area and your internet/cable options drop below third world standards.
> Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year.
Considering rural developments pay to have power run to them, this strikes me as a
pretty good deal for power companies.
Meanwhile, there is a trade-off here. In densely populated areas you're looking at complex/dense in-ground sewer, gas and electrical lines that likely cost a magnitude more than the rural equivalent. Sure at a certain population density this becomes economical, but many urban areas don't meet this standard. Take SF for example.
For example, a residential well can be drilled for ~$15k in my area. A septic tank large enough for a home would be ~$10k. When the well runs dry or the septic is full it's the resident that pays.
This is why my dad installed battery-backed solar in 2008. The power lines would have been 18k, whereas the solar system was 22k IIRC. Note that this quickly stops being a viable option for an actual farmer/rancher, it only provides enough power for a small hobby farm. Regardless, it's entirely feasible for the only utility to be wireless internet via RE, pripane/wood heat, well & septic. None of this is cheap though.
OH, and the reason the power lines were so expensive is his neighbor had paid 30k to run the line, which was within 1/4 mile of my dad's place. There was a period of maybe 10 years where any new customers connecting to the line would pay a portion, which would be refunded to the neighbor who originally paid.
> go 5 mins outside a densely populated area and your internet/cable options drop below third world standards.
You mention Western states - which ones are you familiar with? In NW Washington, there are counties with functioning fiber co-ops. It's very possible to get fiber to your property in some areas, economically, with functioning latecomers agreements.
I can't say how common it is elsewhere, but you're painting with a VERY broad brush in describing the rural US internet experience.
>It's very possible to get fiber to your property in some areas, economically, with functioning latecomers agreements.
You can't even get fiber in MOST of Indianapolis proper and there are still many, many, many addresses in Indianapolis on wells/septic, with 2000-era DSL speeds.
I meant to say 15 minutes (or miles). But what you're describing is the exception, not the rule. The western states I was looking at recently were CA, OR, NV, WY. But I also am familiar with WA and know that if you live outside King County your internet/cable options are sparse in most areas. Check out Broadband Now [0] for examples. Although I find their reported coverage for ISPs to not reflect reality on the ground in many cases.
> I explicitly brought up wells and septic as an example of having to source your own resources, why is it any different for electricity?
Well rural residents pay to have power run to them and it's only feasible if they develop next to a property that is already wired for power. This means that you can't go move into the middle of nowhere and expect the power company to come to you. Your rural utility options will be limited to what your neighbors already have and any future expansion of the grid will be incremental and paid for by developers. So the claim that urban residents are incurring unjust costs at the hand of rual residens is largely a fiction.
But yes, considering rural residents have largely sourced their own resources, it is likely only a matter of time before rural residents are going off the grid as well. I've certainly seen this trend in many rural areas and as long as the price of solar/propane continues to go down I expect it to continue. But it won't be due to the supposed undue burden they place on society.
Is it really not clear why electricity is different? You can pump water out of the ground pretty much anywhere using very simple and stable technology. Running and maintaining your own power plant is an order of magnitude more difficult and expensive. That's why it's different.
To be fair, country living also subsidizes the population centers, in that New York and San Francisco are not self-sustaining in terms of food production, not to mention the strategic value (to both the coastal cities involved and the country as a whole) in not having undeveloped wilderness in between major population centers. It seems unfair to say that there is some immoral wealth transfer from urban to rural.
The definition of subsidy is "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive."
How does that fit in this context?
The fact that farmers get paid little is due to supply vs demand. Agriculture has been optimized to a great level but food transportation is expensive.
1) The so-called "Farm Bill" provides hundreds of billions of dollars in what is essentially farmer socialism, incredible sums of money to protect farmers livelihoods from the free market. Prices too low? Government will pay you to not grow anything to inflate prices. (This doesn't include Trumps tens of billions in more farmer socialism to help protect them from his trade wars)
2) Welfare in general, generally speaking blue/liberal states and cities pay astronomically more into welfare programs (food stamps, unemployment, social security) than they draw, while red states/conservative states draw astronomically more in benefits from the federal gov than they pay.
So in two hundred-billion-plus ways, the liberal cities subsidize the rural farmers and their farms.
And then we buy our produce from central and south america anyway...
All of those farms are just one season away from producing food no matter who we pay transfer payments to. Considering many of those fields are left without any crops anyway, I think you overstate how reliant we are on them
Australia mostly leaves food to the market, in the sense that it has some of the lowest agricultural subsidies in the developed world, and it's a net exporter of food with no famine and no civil unrest.
I'm not sure that subsidies are the best government intervention, either. Strategic grain reserves are probably more useful and less distortionary.
You might be right that strategic reserves would be a better policy. I'm definitely not a fan of what corn subsidies have done to the food supply.
Interesting re: Australia. I was mostly looking at the history of the US before the subsidies. There were a few extremely tough times for farmers. And in other countries' history, most revolutions seem to start with a bad year or two for crops.
> most revolutions seem to start with a bad year or two for crops.
This is the main thing. The farm subsidy can be considered an exorbitant, market distorting subsidy. But food is too important to the very fabric of society, that it has to be available at reasonable prices at all times.
Many are, and many of those who are not are working to support them. Farmers need things like gas, clothing, housing goods and raw materials, foods they dont grow, mechanical services and other goods and services too.
Less than 10% of people living in rural areas are engaged in agriculture.
It seems like a ridiculous way to spend money, when good education and health facilities can be provided at much less expense near or in dense urban centers.
Although we actually have quite a bit. Federal land is about 28% of the area of the US. Some of that is military but a lot is National Forest etc. and that also doesn't include state and local parks and conservation lands. (And private land owned by logging companies, etc. that allow various recreational use.)
Don't disagree with the general point that having wilderness areas is good (especially areas that are particularly useful for wildlife and/or recreation) but there's a lot that is not particularly constrained by people living in less populated areas.
I am all for farmers cutting off food supply to urban areas.
Living in urban areas where there is no place to grow food - food should be in short supply there.
And while we're at it, oil rich parts of the country need to stop supplying parts of the country where oil is scarce. Do you know expensive and unsafe it is to transport fuel?
We're all in this together, and different areas have different strengths.
Sounds great, and all of the urban areas can import their food from places where it is cheaper to grow and where they do not need to pay subsidies to farmers in the form of price floors and subsidies not to grow. You could empty rural America and let it go back to prairie and the cities would do just fine.
> Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive
I don't quite understand this...I have always been able to live in the country for cheap. Doesn't matter if I'm moving to a small town in Wyoming or literally being an Oregon Trail traveler. It takes very little to subsist, especially when the efforts are distributed across a family or small village.
I’m not sure about power lines, but that’s certainly not true for roads. A large portion of road maintenance is paid for by state and federal budgets out of the general tax funds, with the amounts varying based on where we’re talking about. Local drivers pay for some of their road coast in the form of gas taxes, but in no state does this cover even half of the cost road maintenance.
In Georgia, cities pay to maintain all of their local roads and onramps w/ property and sales taxes. The state gas taxes go to state and interstate highways; presumably the Federal gas taxes go towards interstate highways -- but they also just print money since the gas tax hasn't been raised in nearly 30 years.
That would be a good argument if many states weren’t also dependent on the federal government to maintain their own budgets. If you’re a tax payer in Connecticut, you’re absolutely funding the infrastructure of states like New Mexico and Alabama, albeit indirectly.
On the other hand, rents and home prices are already unaffordable in many urban areas. If building infrastructure outside the most densely populated areas becomes a purely private responsibility, it will exacerbate these issues.
I agree, but "building cities" is essentially synonymous with subsidising infrastructure and providing building permits around existing towns and villages.
Investment in cities' infrastructure isn't a subsidy, its seed money to get the economic engine humming. Once it is, Governments reap in the benefits of increased tax receipts.
Whereas, subsidizing rural and semi-rural populations, outside of those engaged in the primary sector, has no such benefit. In fact, they require more and more help as time passes with no benefits in tax receipts at all.
Perhaps, but you may not always know ahead of time which one it's going to be if you let towns grow organically to become cities (or not).
Building entirely new government planned cities on the green field is extremely difficult to get right. You're not just building infrastructure, you're effectively designing a social environment. What if it doesn't attract the right mix of people? What if it collides with democratic and legal rights of neighboring communities?
Perhaps people could move to the cities like Detroit that have lost significant population first before building a new city on some empty plot of land. Especially because, to a first approximation, none of the people campaigning the loudest for urban living will have the slightest inclination to move to a new centrally planned city in the middle of nowhere.
I really don't want to live in a city designed for cars first, Detroit being one of the poster children of that. But it's actually kind of hard to find a reasonably priced city that's not swamped with cars and car infrastructure, so we could use some new cities that are designed with the realization that cars don't really belong in city centers. I would absolutely move to a well planned new city, especially if cars were banned to the periphery, as in some Dutch cities. I imagine that I'm not alone in that.
Even in the Netherlands, vehicles are not really absent from the city cores although there are more bikes in particular than in many other places.
I'm not sure you contradict my basic point though. Plop down a centrally-designed city that severely limits cars and I think you'll have a lot of trouble attracting either residents or employers.
Certainly not absent from all city cores, but some cities have banished them.
My point was that there's at least one resident who would be interested, and I don't think I'm unique in that. Maybe unusual, but there are a lot of people in the US, so maybe high enough in absolute number.
Not disagreeing that more urban centers would be a good thing but I don't think it would solve this specific problem because population would just grow to fill the new city until the same economic 'pressue' is reached again.
I don't understand the reticence in engaging in city building activity on a massive scale. That is what happened when America was explored, wasn't it?
More people == more scientists, engineers, lawyers, artists == more universities == more scientific breakthroughs. Eventually colonizing other worlds will become a possibility, and then humanity will expand there too, finally becoming free of Earth.
It's potentially cheaper for a lot of these places to have off-grid infrastructure.
+ Solar + batteries for a home that uses a modest / conservative amount of electricity should be under $50k.
+ Water + septic should be under $25k, assuming you have a well
+ Gas can be installed for well under $10k, you have a large tank in your yard
+ Internet can be done using long range wifi. Takes the whole town to cooperate, but these days everyone wants internet, as long as someone spearheads it you can get an ISP out.
That pretty much just leaves roadways, which you definitely have various qualities of roads that you can build, but I don't see a cheap way around this.
edit: further research has revealed to me that lots of electric appliances can be replaced with gas powered appliances. So if you are primarily depending on gas for things like your refrigerator, you can bring the cost of a solar installation way down.
If as a society we stop thinking about electricity reliability as a binary issue, we'd save a lot of money. We can achieve 99.999% availability with extraordinary safety in fire-risk areas, but it's very expensive. Would some consumers accept 50% off if if they had (only) 99% reliability?
As a regulated (natural) monopoly, price is supposed to be determined by the cost. Fixed-costs are a factor of geography (including density), reliability, and safety. While marginal costs are driven primarily by when the electricity is used. Electricity use coincident with system peak is very expensive, driving marginal generation, transmission, and distribution capex. While marginal costs of electricity use coincident with system trough is very inexpensive, and perhaps negative.
Depending on where you live, power outages can be fatal in extreme cold or heat, especially to the elderly.
I abaolutely am comfortable with my current electrical bill if it means not risking an outage when the temperature is -40 or over 100 degrees F outside. In fact, I may install a backup power generator for the home anyway, but the cost of it running is not trivial and I would be happier never needing it.
In such situations having a backup power such as a generator for critical systems is common.
The electric grid is designed to be cheap not nessisarily dependable. 27,000 x ~500$ generators = 13.5 million which is likely far less expensive than upgrading the grid.
Also solar + battery is (very roughly) only double the rate cost right now, so you aren't really stranding people. I've been to farms with solar + battery only and it's totally fine.
Back in the 1936 (rural electrification act) it was electric line or nothing, you were upgrading from candlelight.
And it's $20,000 for a solar + battery system versus rate payers subsidizing (using your numbers) $95,000 for an electric line. It seems a bit weird.
So it sounds like because they've been held liable for presumably setting up their power lines in an unsafe manner, they're turning off the lines rather than, yanno, fixing the problem.
Hopefully have delivered some chunky UPSes and decent support SLAs to those with medical equipment.
Could see this backfiring if eg people start using lots of generators instead...
There is an important point here. They aren't being held liable for setting up their power lines in an unsafe manner. The way California fire liability works, even if you set up your power lines according to best practices, if your equipment happens to have caused the initial spark that causes a $25 billion fire, then you are liable for that entire amount.
It isn't clear that PG+E did anything wrong in maintaining power lines. That just isn't how liability works here. There is always some chance that power lines cause a small fire, and recently the costs of a small fire have grown massively, as it has become more common that a small fire expands into a large fire. PG+E is facing rising costs, and they don't really have many ways to lower fire risk that they haven't already taken. They are not legally allowed to stop serving this area. So they are forced into measures like these.
(They also just went bankrupt, so it's not like PG+E investors are making a killing while underserving their customers.)
With all due respect to PG&E and the CPUC, no, they did not.
The best practice is to install substation equipment that prevents enormous current from flowing through a phase-to-ground fault. Petersen coils and similar devices do this, and they appear to be reasonably widespread in Europe.
Heck, suppose PG&E turns off power during high wind events. Do they even have the required equipment to avoid starting a fire if a line fell and is still on the ground after the wind stops when they turn power back on? This type of equipment exists.
once the wind dies down and the humidity rises, a fire becomes much less dangerous. The problem with these recent fires is when you have like sustained 50 mph gusts and 5% humidity. When I first moved here in 89, I never heard of a fire crossing a freeway (though no doubt it happened sometimes) because the conditions weren't typically so bad. Now it is commonplace.
> When I first moved here in 89, I never heard of a fire crossing a freeway (though no doubt it happened sometimes) because the conditions weren't typically so bad
The Laguna fire in 1970 crossed over I8. [1] (Be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the article, it's really interesting.) I know you acknowledge that it probably happened, but the reason is didn't happen more was due to the location of those fires, not characteristics of those fires. Most wildfires don't happen near freeways, so the data will show that fires jump freeways more frequently now. That may be true, but there are also a lot more freeways now. Interstate highways didn't even exist before 1956 and freeways were also rare at that time, so comparing freeway-jumping between then and now isn't really saying much about fire intensity.
Almost all of California's largest fires have had human causes.[3] There is a tendency to blame climate for wildfires increasing, but the real reason is that there are just a lot more people in the state. More structures, more people, more irresponsibility at scale. There is also a lot more misguided policy. For example, bans on cutting trees, reduction of logging activity and various other policies designed to "protect" the environment but fail to acknowledge unintended consequences. (To be clear, I'm not advocating mass logging, but bad policy is definitely contributing to fires.) [4]
> The problem with these recent fires is when you have like sustained 50 mph gusts and 5% humidity
As far as I know, none of the recent fires were started by events like that. The ones a looked up were single phase faults where a line hit something other than a different phase conductor due to wind or mechanical failure.
Unfortunately a 90% solution only stops around 40% all wildfires. We need to do it, yet, but California is still going to burn. People are still not going to follow best fire prevention practices, both because of ignorance and poor regulation. People are still going to build in the wildland urban interface.
The places that don't burn now are just saving up more fuel for bigger fires in the future. The idyllic mountain cabin surrounded by large pine trees and ladder fuels is lost. Roads with brush up to the lines are death traps. Housing developments in box end canyons are the definition of insanity. Climate change is making large fires more frequent. Sparks from fallen lines have killed hundreds, just wait till we get a deranged but gifted arsonist that understands meteorology.
The first place for an excellent start begins at your home. It's going to take the power company years or decades to retrofit. Push the brush and trees as far back as possible. Start a neighborhood preventative fire group. Demand your city and country cut brush back from roads.
> The first place for an excellent start begins at your home.
The 99% Invisible podcast did an episode on this [1]. There is strong evidence that even very intense forest-fires won't cause buildings to burn if they take well-known preventative measures.
I don't know how much of the financial damages from the utility companies are owed to homeowners, but it certainly seems like homeowners aren't absolved of responsibility if their house burns when they've ignored preventative measures.
The dark side of this is, what if it's not economical at all to service these outlying customers? What if the cost of retrofitting those lines is greater than the total future amortized profit from servicing those customers during wildfire conditions?
I don't think there's a law on the books requiring that everyone have access to electrical service (like there is for, say, USPS service).
Maybe beefy solar setups with battery banks and ability to run off-grid will start becoming the norm there. It is California, after all; it's a great place for solar. Heck, it might easily be cheaper for PG&E to subsidize the installation of these systems vs committing to maintaining all those lines properly in perpetuity.
What if it's not economical at all to service these outlying customers?
This is almost definitely the case. Consider that PG+E just went bankrupt from fire costs. If you split PG+E into two parts, the "safe utility" that served urban areas, and the "risky utility" that served rural areas, the fire costs would almost all go to the "risky utility". If they were allowed to, PG+E would be better off simply dropping every customer more than 60 miles away from San Francisco.
But it just doesn't work that way. PG+E is technically a public company, but the customers they are required to serve and the prices they are allowed to charge are so heavily regulated, it often seems more like it's a complicated extension of the California government.
Pretty much all of California urban areas have fire danger so no area is really "safe". The Santa Rosa and Oakland fires come to mind, along with all of the LA hill blazes that threaten the city most years.
Do they though? If I build a new house in the middle of nowhere, is the utility required to spend tens of millions of dollars to build out new infrastructure to serve just me? My understanding is they aren't.
Without looking up the specific California laws, a typical way such obligations were implemented was to require regulatory approval for discontinuing existing lines. So it’s not symmetric for new versus existing lines.
If you want electricity, you may be required to pay them to extend the infrastructure to your house in the middle of nowhere (at your cost) and then they are required to provide you power and maintain the infrastructure (and assume the liability). If other people begin using the infrastructure within a set period of time, you will receive partial refund for the upfront expense.
> it might easily be cheaper for PG&E to subsidize the installation of these systems vs committing to maintaining all those lines properly in perpetuity.
With how liability works in California, I'd be really curious to see.
Maybe this is just another sign that people should stop building in the wildland urban interface. Not that they will. We as a country feel quite entitled to build in unsafe places.
> The dark side of this is, what if it's not economical at all to service these outlying customers?
PG&E is a regulated regional monopoly with a universal service mandate within it's service area that has huge piles of money to throw at political fights to stop having public power retailers take over some of it's service areas, so it can just suck up the cost of dealing with uneconomical rural customers as the cost of the privilege of being allowed to own profitable urban and suburban customers it is willing to fight for.
From what I can tell of the notice PG&E sent me in the mail, they're not turning off the lines permanently. They're temporarily turning off the lines for a few days so they can fix the problem (trimming trees near power lines, performing maintenance on substations).
By my read, after two consecutive years' of fire lawsuits being judged against PG&E and going bankrupt, someone decided to listen to the engineers and technicians on the ground.
Devil's advocate: Utilities are for profit orgs but rates and (kinda) by extension profits are all heavily regulated. You say that they should bury lines or spend a gazillion improving them, but what if the state balks at letting them increase rates to cover expenses? Where should they get the money for that? I guess that building in th middle of nowhere and expecting power at $0.xx kwh and safe power lines in all terrain and weather might be a dream.
I am genuinely curious why in a rich country like the USA, wires aren't dug down. I realise using my own country - Denmark - is an unfair comparison, since it's much smaller, but all wires leading to houses are dug down here. Even out in the rural countryside.
However, even a small state like Rhode Island has plenty of overhead wires, despite being a tenth the size of Denmark.
But surely a rich state like California could dig down wires in areas where it would significant benefits. The benefits are everywhere, obviously, but some areas would gain more benefits than others.
Can a state/country really be considered rich, if it cannot afford to dig down electric wires?
There are certainly places where underground power lines are feasible in the US but not in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. If you saw where the lines in question span you'd be in awe of the terrain.
Perhaps we are rich because, in this and a thousand other small decisions, we are not forced to make the economically inefficient decision? Cables are underground where it makes sense (higher density neighborhoods where you have to dig during construction anyway) and above ground where it doesn’t (lower density rural areas).
Every time people are forced to make an inefficient decision, the cost is multiplied a thousand fold over time throughout the economy. Money spent burying cables isn’t available to invest elsewhere; a factory goes unbuilt; it doesn’t produce material wealth; it doesn’t hire a young worker into an entry level job; that worker never has a chance to grow and apply their mind to solve new problems; he doesn’t build a new, better factory or tech company one day.
I don't think it is fair to toss all infrastructure in the same bucket but for infrastructure projects where there are US federal dollars involved, the Davis-Bacon act is one reason why costs are high.
TL;DR Labor rates are above market rates due to the legislative requirements.
Burying is more expensive, but you eventually earn the money back. Density is so low in the country it could be 50+ years before you pay it off.
This is part of the trillion dollar sprawl problem we have. We have built a massive amount of infrastructure as cheap as possible, and now we cant afford to built it correctly. People would have never built houses in many places if they had to pay the actual costs.
Something I was reading recently claimed that total operational costs on underground lines also higher in the long run - dielectrics break down, faults are much more expensive etc. Found it counterintuitive, but hard to counter.
It would be interesting to see the cost comparison between an urban distribution line and one that is going through the Sierra Nevada mountains. Each has it's own challenges.
In Denmark, it appears to be about US$800,000 per kilometre.[0] The article mentions, that 17 billion DKK has been invested to dig down 3,200 km overhead wires. It further notes, that 5.7 billion DKK of the budget is spent on buying the cables from the regional owners, before they can be dug down.
The article further talks about people outraged by the amount spent on digging down these cables, as they are generally high voltage cables, and not those that actually reach houses. So I'd imagine regular wires cost less than the above calculation (which includes the 5.7 billion for purchasing the original wires).
3,200km is very little distance in the context of the USA and it's rural town sprawl. 3,200km might get you from coast to coast in a straight line, but 3,200km probably wouldn't even service every town in California once you take the landscape and numerous dotted towns.
Edit: A commenter further down noted:
> PG&E has 81,000 miles of distribution lines
So that's 130,357 kilometers. So at the same cost per km as Denmark, 5,312,500 DKK /km, that's 692,521,562,500 DKK or $105,117,847,971.88 USD, ($105.12 billion) USD.
Not considering how many miles of that is actually through mountain ranges and the extra cost of doing highly remote work.
I don't deny that the US is far bigger. And its density far lower, even in individual states. I'd imagine that does raise costs. But the US is also proportionally richer than Denmark, per capita ($62k vs $52k), not per square km, mind you.
That being said, I do get an impression that more money is lost in bureaucracy/company "fees" in the US than in Denmark.
Because doing infrastructure well - as opposed to holding it together with bubblegum and bailing wire - means spending money. And every dime spent is one dime less for shareholders.
As the saying goes: this suboptimal outcome is a feature, not a bug.
Building infrastructure well means telling people no. We have a problem with that in the US.
No. You cannot build in the floodplain.
No. You cannot build in the wildland urban interface.
No. You cannot build on a mudslide prone slope.
No. You cannot build in the surge zone.
We just don't do that. Instead we have a system where elect people to give us what we want without paying for the long term consequences. Simply put, we can't fix California, we don't have the money to. People in at risk areas need to be charged for the expense they add to the system, no new customers need added to the system.
If you wonder why the US doesn't build densely, it's because we don't pay for the true cost of our sprawl.
No that’s not how utilities work. Utilities are compensated for the approved capital they invest in infrastructure in the form of higher customer rates.
The upshot of this is that every utility in the country would love nothing more than to underground every overhead line in their service area. The reason this doesn’t happen is because public service commissions, who approve capital plans, aren’t willing to saddle customers with the astronomical costs of undergrounding lines (which runs $2-$3M per mile on distribution, depending on rock content of soil).
Let's say you want to bury a line 30 miles long. The upper end of your estimate is $90M. If the line services 50k customers, that's an average cost of $1,800 per customer. Charge an extra $50 on people's monthly bills for a period of 36 months, and your underground line is paid for.
It makes sense at the current rates. Solar can replace the entire grid. And instead of using large HVAC transmission lines, small communities can form small grids to help share battery stored energy (while still metered so the power usage is fair) or a resident could opt out of the community grid and do fully off grid solar as long as the had the ability to handle a few cloudy days.
PG&E has 81,000 miles of distribution lines. Even if they served all of California (they do not), that would be less than 15K customers for an average 30 mile segment.
>I am genuinely curious why in a rich country like the USA, wires aren't dug down.
Because if we catered to every "we're a rich country, why don't we" request across every subject we'd have a government financial situation akin to that of the USSR circa 1988.
Not to mention the fact that burying power lines across rural areas would be exorbitantly expensive. It's one thing to bury power lines in New Jersey. It's another to bury all the power lines in Wisconsin. For what it's worth, the power lines are generally buried in the more dense and rich (must be both, not just one) cites.
Unfortunately, there are too many places demanding money in CA, the Bullet Train, congested roads, teachers, homeless people, housing shortage, solutions to protect houses from wild fires.
They are dug down in many parts of the USA where it was found to be worth it. Chronic ice storms, high winds, etc. In California's defense, the risk/benefit equation has only recently shifted with the intensifying fire seasons & fuel buildup.
Newer construction in California are using underground wiring. With older areas the process is quite disruptives and expensive. You have to dig up the streets and private property. The state might be rich but then the labor cost of doing stuff is expensive.
A big problem with retrofitting above ground to below ground, especially in California, is the environmentalists aren't going to let it happen in many places it needs to. Especially when it comes to crossing creeks and dry washes, additional underground cable burying is going to cause a lot of land disturbance. And you're not just burying power in many of these places. Telephone and cable are strung along those same poles. Also many times poles to individual homes can cross sensitive areas because they are low impact, especially in very rocky locations.
Unregulated growth wherever people want to build isn't going to be an affordable problem, no matter how much money people think California has.
The challenge is that they need to run on a budget and so buried cables in a earthquake prone area may have been prohibitively expensive. Not a great situation to be in.
The rural area around Paradise isn't very earthquake-prone. It's just pretty large and sprawling, which is what makes burying all those cables so expensive.
I think this presents an interesting case for permanent "grid defection" in rural areas.
The theory goes that as solar panels and battery prices drop, it will eventually make sense for homeowners to produce their own power, and "defect" from the electrical grid completely. Obviously this isn't a perfect solution: for example, the homeowner is now solely responsible for fixing their own power supply issues, instead of the collective "insurance" the grid operator provides by fixing grid issues for customers.
I think that rural customers in wildfire prone areas provide one of the best use cases for grid defection. The power company can save money in two ways: by not having to maintain relatively long power lines which serve few customers and by reducing their exposure to liability for wildfire damages. It might even be in the utilities interest to subsidize rural customers defection, to focus on more urban customers. Grid defection relies on low-cost solar and batter technology, and I think we will have both in the next decade. This is something that was not even possible in years past: extending the grid to rural areas was a great example of government sponsored economic equity that market forces alone may not have provided.
Two things that would help aid the transition: (1) Holding grid operators liable for wildfire risk (or at least part of it) and (2) forcing rural customers to pay a greater price for their power, reflective of the greater cost to provide it. I know (2) won't be popular but I think it does align some economic incentives correctly. I would also advocate implementing price increases only when solar+battery is very close to grid parity, so customers actually have a reasonable choice.
> The theory goes that as solar panels and battery prices drop, it will eventually make sense for homeowners to produce their own power, and "defect" from the electrical grid completely.
I think it already makes sense in California (given the amount of sun we get).
A Tesla solar install of 8 kW solar production + 2 PowerWalls (27 kWh capacity) has a loan payment of $188/month, which is probably lower than what your cost would be from the utility company for an equivalent "level of service".
The only tricky part is to figure out the answers to "what size panels + storage do I need so that, given elements (weather mostly), the probability of my storage being depleted any point during the day is less than X%".
Solar companies probably already know the answer to this given the data they already have, but the other part of the equation is changes to the owner's consumption (buying an EV? new child on the way? changing your range/dryer/heaters from gas to electric? etc)
That's the real pain point (it can be mitigated with a generator, but that gets complicated), which leads to a certain amount of oversizing, and as a consequence, waste (since you can't feed it back to the grid).
Also the occasional failure in your own infrastructure could lead to blackouts that could be more frequent than if you were tied to the grid (Mean Time To Repair is higher with your own infrastructure for obvious reasons), although I have to admit that the grid hasn't been very good in that respect. A solar system is generally maintenance free, but failures do happen.
Still, I think it's worth it (that's why I took the plunge a few years ago).
You can do a lot cheaper than a PowerWall. But you can also depend heavily on propane if you are off grid. You can get propane based central heating, propane stove tops, propane refrigerators, propane freezers.
Going to propane also helps with the overbuilding, because that's more or less pay-as-you-go instead of having to build a finite supply all at once.
It will almost certainly be necessary to significantly overprovision both panels and batteries in order to avoid running out of power or needing to add more later. Hopefully the cost decreases will reduce the financial headache of this... time will tell.
I think there is an unrealized business model out there where a company builds, installs, and then maintains (incl. emergency fixes) solar+battery installs for a monthly fee, just like what you pay to the electric utility today. Such a business would hopefully achieve some cost savings by buying parts in bulk and be able to quickly fix issues by using similar system designs. It would be a bit like the electric utility, but they wouldn't own any grid or power plants.
A PowerWall has a 10 year lifespan, where they guarantee that batteries will have 70% capacity or better during that time. I take this to mean you'll need to size for a 30% capacity drop, and plan for battery replacement in 10 years.
Does your loan factor in installation costs, which can be significant?
Since the goal is to reduce the chance of fire, what would the probability of starting a fire be with thousands of powerwalls installed all over the place be in comparison?
I think each powerwall can draw 5 kW continuous and 7 kW peak.
> A PowerWall has a 10 year lifespan, where they guarantee that batteries will have 70% capacity or better during that time. I take this to mean you'll need to size for a 30% capacity drop, and plan for battery replacement in 10 years.
Well, it has a 10 year warranty, not life span. Yes, for sure there will be some degradation with time (although for my car, a Model S, I'm surprised that after close to 5 years and 25K miles I barely "lost" 1% of range). It depends on how you draw and charge.
> Does your loan factor in installation costs, which can be significant?
I believe it does, and also includes the rebates/credits. But you can answer those questions yourself by going to their website and doing a "pretend order" - that'll give you a bunch of knobs to play with and see the various options between buy cash vs loan.
> Since the goal is to reduce the chance of fire, what would the probability of starting a fire be with thousands of powerwalls installed all over the place be in comparison?
Well, the goal isn't just to reduce the chance of fire: it's also to offer availability at reasonable cost.
Some will also like the "independence" aspect of it, like "stick it to the man" - but that isn't particularly important to me.
But back to your probability question, I frankly have no idea. I imagine we'll learn it from deployments, like we are learning about "spontaneous fires" that have been happening with electrical cars.
It's certainly a tradeoff, but one of the interesting things about this technology is that a hot environment is generally the time when you can produce good energy with the panels, which you can use to cool the infrastructure that needs cooling (batteries for example).
That being said, there is no 100% safe system. We're dealing with Kilowatts of power moving across a bunch of lines, so we have to be humble and realize we can't control everything to a zero risk environment.
What we can do, however, is measure, learn, and get it safer iteration after iteration.
The tricky thing with paying for grid defections would be holdouts. If a group of 8 neighbors take a payout to leave, but #9 doesn't, suddenly the utility lost most of its revenue but maintains most of the same infrastructure.
And the holdout might need really reliable electricity for medical devices or similar.
I wonder what "fair" mechanism could be employed to handle things optimally?
I feel like there should be a business model where the customer pays a monthly fee for service but the service is "install and maintain solar + battery". As long as it is a similar price to grid connection, basically just force all users who would be defecting onto the new business model. I think customers would protest a lot less in that circumstance.
As for medical devices and whatnot: the grid is already not 100% reliable. The replacement would need to be of comparable reliability, but I don't think the threshold is 100% reliable. If you've got medical devices critical to your continued existence, you need more redundancy than either the grid or solar+battery.
I don't see is a particularly fair model for stuff like this. Just a bunch of bad or worse options. Honestly I think once cost parity is achieved, a lot of these questions will evaporate.
I am currently in a mostly burned-out, warzone-looking Paradise (nearly all other houses around burned, and many tall trees have been resource-exploited removed without recompensing property owners) when PG&E cut the power at 9 pm last night and only restored it around 3 pm today. It seems like safety virtue-signaling because ground foilage is still green, humidity isn't low, wind isn't high and the temperature will be hotter in the next few days. If anything, it will happen again.
As an aside, all hardware stores in Chico were out of generators; we had to go to Red Bluff to pick one up. Should've done it sooner, proactively but I'm having to care for a disabled family member.
To serve customers in high-risk areas safely, it's much more expensive than to serve customers in low-risk areas. Insulated overhead conductors or buried circuits are expensive. Yet the current regulatory paradigm requires that the customers in both regions pay the same amount for electricity.
This seems to be more like a negotiating position. With the liability laws the way they are I don't see any way for private power delivery to be economical. When the costs of a single fire are in the billions only a government can insure that sort of risk.
In rural areas, power can go out and stay out for quite a while due to a storm. Cutting power preventatively is new, but it seems like if you should have plans for getting by when the power goes out in any case?
A generator must be maintained, tested, gasoline drained/conditioned regularly, etc ...
Many of the people I know who bought generators have been eyeballing battery storage very heavily. If the situation is so bad that you need your generator more than a week, you probably need to leave and go somewhere else anyway. And batteries are nearing the point where they can do what you need.
Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive, but for the past 40 years or so all of the population centers of America have been subsidizing rural life. My parents live 30 miles inland in Florida and recently wanted their 5 mile dirt road paved, total cost would have been north of $2,000,000... Even if that was split among everyone living there you are looking at $133,000.
Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes.
Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619.
You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household.
Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year.
Meanwhile in a city, the amount each individual is paying is a tiny fraction, probably less than 0.01%. Sure a urban home is probably more expensive, but given that a rural home should incur a near $400,000 premium, you shouldn't have been able to afford that rural home to begin with.
America stands to save hundreds of billions if we actually force the cost of living in rural areas to be what it is, rather than subsidize it.
>America stands to save hundreds of billions if we actually force the cost of living in rural areas to be what it is, rather than subsidize it.
So less government involvement in things? I assure you people in rural areas would gladly accept a higher cost of living if it meant getting the city people to butt out.
Unfortunately "we gonna tell the city people to fuck off" won't get many campaign donations since it aligns with approximately nobody's economic interest.
If you are rural you most likely have a septic tank, not central sewage. Water is either a local water district payed for by residents, or their own well, payed for by residents.
All I've learned from this thread is that a good portion of HN hates rural America. Apparently the privilege that comes from being well educated and working in tech isn't worth "checking" although I'm sure a lot of you would love to complain about how straight and white they are too. Who cares if a lot of them are poor, just cut off their power.
If an area is ready to burn, it's going to burn sooner or later from one thing or another. Going after the power company seems like the wrong solution?
If I was one of those 27000 customers I would be doing my best to never again be a customer of them. If I had to buy solar, gas generators or a giant hamster wheel powering my stuff I would because cutting off power in this manner for this reason simply is unacceptable in this day and age.
That would be fantastic for the utility. PG+E would love to just drop those customers entirely. The cost of fire risk alone is more than they make from this region. They can't because they're legally required to keep delivering power there.
So you're pissed that you finally have to pay the true cost for your utilities. You've been subsidized for the last 50+ years. It's time to stop subsidizing your sprawl.
So if the utility is on the line for wildfire costs regardless, then here's a thought: maybe they'll do the economically rational thing and "accidentally" trigger smaller fires every so often.
Wow, is this forever or only temporary? I know just a few hours or a day without power is a huge downside for me... Sounds horrible.
I guess they are forced to get a solar setup or move somewhere else... Which if no power, probably lowers home values so moving is a hassle. Plus you got to sell your house, finding another house that you like and is comparable, moving your things... Some people live paycheck to paycheck so moving right now would be a huge pain.
I got a friend in Florida and we were talking about solar a few years ago. Apparently in Florida if you set up your house for solar and make enough and store it to power everything... You are still legally required to pay the utility company to be hooked up or the county can condemn your house and kick you out. Sure you might end up using zero kilowatt hours, but still, all these other fees tacked on. Also required to get permission and inspection by that same power company too. So the sunshine state isn't friendly to solar, so ironic. I love Florida otherwise though, a bunch of nice places and things to do there.
I've been watching some full-time RV and digital nomad YouTubers on and off... Really makes me feel like minimalist and enough solar to be self-sufficient in an RV would be a great lifestyle. If you want to move you just have to put your things away, bring in the awning, slides, jacks then turn the key and go! I figured if I did it I'd try to stay in an area for a week or two though as I think moving every day would be annoying since I'd probably go for a bigger rig more home feeling. Probably private RV parks, national parks, state parks. Some cities and counties also have RV parks to try and attract tourists to their area. so mostly paid options, but then national forests and out west tons of BLM land to boondock on for free, however, some of these agencies do have some paid areas too.
Plus I kinda feel like you don't even own your house truly. Some places are so picky you even need a permit to install a doorbell. Then HOAs are even more of a pain, I heard in some if your mailbox paint is chipping the HOA can fine you and even take away your house at some point. At least with RVs, they are considered vehicles instead so the local building code guy has no power unless you are parked someone that disallows RVs. Then I remember hearing about an HOA who was harassing a veteran for flying the American Flag.
If you decide to full-time RV since you no longer own a house or rent an apartment you can choose to be a resident in any state friendly to nomads, such as domiciling in South Dakota or Texas which each has their own list of pros and cons. Some people are even forced to change their residence anyways as their former state won't let them use a mail forwarder. Was reading someone who formerly lived in Michigan changed their license and reg online to a mail forwarder located in the state as they wanted to still be residents there, and got a nasty letter with like only 10 days to correct their address or face suspension of their license and registration. I guess in a way RV people are considered homeless even if you have a half a million dollar RV that costs more than the house it's parked in front of. I think states do this also to try to discriminate against homeless people's voting rights too.
So forced to change their domicile to another more friendlier state or use a relative address. But I guess if Michigan doesn't want full-time RVers to call them home, oh well as they can lose out on those resident income taxes since they no longer had a job in MI but being a resident still means all income is still taxable there even if they worked in no income tax Texas for a seasonal job they'd still owe back to MI even if they haven't been there in over a year as they still claimed MI as their domicile. At least with South Dakota, you can spend only 1 night there at a hotel, rent a mailbox and be considered a resident. Then can register your car and RV without bringing it with you if you flew there on a short notice as given little choice. SD even allows you to register by mail too unlike some states that require you to physically bring it with you to be inspected. if SD was like that then you'd have to pretty much drive straight to SD before that 10 days was up, hoping you still have time left by time you even got the notice. So if you had to change things on short notice, South Dakota is a perfect state if your former home state you lived your entire life in decides to make you a refugee.
So I guess living in an RV would work out if you made enough money remotely or retired... Probably someone who lives in a big city with a 2,000 a month apartment would save a bunch possibly. However, while it has it's pros, there's also cons and challenges too like the whole where do you live on paper.
I know people are into van life too, but I don't think I'd be comfortable in a small space, plus people try to just park and sleep wherever for free. Some are successful, some get woken up by the police at 3 AM in the morning. So wouldn't want that stress, rather have an actual RV, and a separate car to explore away from it. For example people with a Class A motorhome tow a car behind such as a Jeep - what people call a "toad" in the RV community. If you went with a travel trailer or fifth wheel, unhook and leave that at camp and drive your SUV, van or pickup around.
As you don't want to try and take the big RV to go shopping or checking out local attractions. Get the RV set up and don't move it until your reservation is up. Be a nice lifestyle! I'm not too happy with where I am now, and I feel like there's so much to do and explore around both the US itself and the world even that staying in the same area all your life from birth to death just sounds sad and is depressing.
Reading things like this just reminds me of how little control people have. Forced to have only 1 utility for power, for water, maybe 1 or 2 phones, tv and internet providers. Well, some areas 1 cable company, phone company offers fiber-based TV in some areas but of course, there's always around 2 satellite options... but then again some cities and HOAs try to prevent people from using satellite even though that violates the FCC's Over-the-Air Reception Devices "OTARD" rule. Some don't like how they look I guess, some try to limit the number of dishes, etc. I was randomly searching and found there's a bunch of cities that still have ordinances banning satellite TV completely... I guess due to giving the local cable company a monopoly as they profit from the franchise fees. Probably would win in court though due to the federal law depending on specifics as some restrictions are allowed to be regulated by the locals narrowly written such as not allowing changes to historical houses or drilling holes into the roof of an apartment building would be a no no as you don't own it, etc type of restrictions but still a hassle. You risk getting a misdemeanor criminal record because you didn't like the local cable company. I find satellite TV annoying when the weather is bad, but otherwise, I feel it's a better choice. Like the boxes, UI feels so much faster. As far as I know, Dish makes their own software and hardware, while the cable company just buys an off the shelf box and installs premade Java-based OS called OpenCable.
I guess RV you are limiting yourself to satellite tv, and mobile internet plans - which is a whole topic in the RV community itself. Certain providers people recommend, with cell boosters, wifi boosters and repeaters and creating your own internal wifi network yourself... So you can have all your devices connect to your own router and then point it towards a cell modem or repeat the RV's park Wifi. Useful too if you have like a TV, game console, and other devices... Can change the internet connection source without reconnecting them all to that new source individually.
Then some people bought a house in a rural area with their own septic system or well. Then when the city or county starts providing water and sewer you are forced to connect to their system instead of being self-sufficient using the existing systems you've already paid for and are maintaining.
For people thinking like robots on this, and not seeing the social impacts, i suggest reading city of quartz. Or if you don't like to read books, watch Chinatown.
Both will show you how the Water & Power's corrupt officials used aqueducts being artificially shut down, and then magically repaired at their convenient timing, to control price of land for their personal riches.
Also, that cost is paid by city, yes, because this initial work is what enable news cities to eventually came into existence, offloading the first city superpopulation problems. It is not done out of altruism, like limited mind people like to boast when defending such short sighted measures.
Before we talk about the social impacts of shutting off electrical service, maybe we should talk about the social impacts of two million acres of forest fires, over a hundred dead, and tens of thousands of people evacuated from their homes?
That's a very forced comparison. If you took that seriously yourself, you had to weight having a driver's license against the thousands of people run over by cars each year, because by your logic consequences of a bad case are inherent to all the cases!
The social impact is about the cost of doing it properly or not. Not doing it in a way that causes fires, that is something else.
I was suggesting to invest in solar panels but then I remembered that actually 99% of solar panels setups still require the grid to work in order to work :(
Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive, but for the past 40 years or so all of the population centers of America have been subsidizing rural life. My parents live 30 miles inland in Florida and recently wanted their 5 mile dirt road paved, total cost would have been north of $2,000,000... Even if that was split among everyone living there you are looking at $133,000.
Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes.
Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619.
You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household.
Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year.
Meanwhile in a city, the amount each individual is paying is a tiny fraction, probably less than 0.01%. Sure a urban home is probably more expensive, but given that a rural home should incur a near $400,000 premium, you shouldn't have been able to afford that rural home to begin with.
America stands to save hundreds of billions if we actually force the cost of living in rural areas to be what it is, rather than subsidize it.
People who live in the country side already use wells for water due to the cost of water + sewage, why is it any different for power?