Pointing out a fault is not a need to relax, it is being grounded in reality. There are more solutions than the one of burying the lines, such as removing trees that encroach on the lines. One is exponentially less expensive than the other. Expense is a factor regardless, since costs will be passed to ratepayers. This isn't a decision in a vacuum. If it wasn't, why not say the solution is to develop wireless power or put a fusion reactor in every home?

I use a roof heater. I was getting ice dams so bad that it would rain inside my living room. I run the heated cable in a zig zag up to where my roof pitch changes. I plug it in at the start of a storm and unplug it after. Probably costs me $20 extra in electricity each month. Haven’t had ice dams since.

The question was why does NH lose power? The answer is because the power lines are not underground. The cost associated with fixing an outdated and ineffective infrastructure wasn’t part of the question. Or answer.

Relax.

Surf is nice. Watch people roll sushi and have a couple of painkillas. Nice view of the bridge from the dining room too.

I remember after the great ice storm of 2008 when people were without power for weeks and we had crews from all over the northeast come to NH to help and again 2 years later we had multi day state wide outages the reason given against burying the lines is the expense to dig them up to fix . But if they were underground, we wouldn’t have lost power in the first place. The cost / time to access an occasional power line issue in the ground is far less expensive and can be done faster than major wide spread outages and upkeep of old poles.

> Last I saw it cost around $11500/mi to bury lines- not cheap by any means, but it could be covered in <10 years by a 1c/kwh increase statewide. Additionally, most new construction already has buried lines, no reason not to make that the standard.

Where did you see that? Because if it cost $2/foot to bury lines, the power companies would have buried all of them years ago.

The absolute cheapest per mile number I have found recently is $1.5 million to bury lines. Even in 2017, when Hydro Quebec floated the idea of burying 11 miles of lines (that didn't require any horizontal drilling, mind you), it was $4 million per mile

So if you have a way to put high voltage transmission lines in the ground for $2/foot, write Eversource and tell them because they'll be all over that.

it’s gone it’s all gone poof

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Except most people know that that would be a complete lie. The powerlines in front of your house are almost never the ones that cause an outage. Outages usually happen upstream when they affect thousands of people.

Yeah, I used to work with a lot of people who lived in VT. They lost power about as much as we did, which is to say not all that much, except in really rural areas.

And there's also been a ton of people I know from MA who've been without power for several days due to this storm. So it's not unique to NH to lose power in a storm that features heavy snow and high winds.

> I doubt the expense argument too

Seattle buried some power lines in 2007. It cost about $2500 per foot - and the way that article is written, it doesn't necessarily cover the whole cost.

A much cheaper proposition by Hydro Quebec was floated in 2017. And by "much cheaper" I mean it was $4.2 million per mile instead of the $13 million per mile it cost in Seattle.

Generally speaking, burying powerlines costs about 10x as much as running them overhead, and the numbers in that article come out to be just under $4 million per mile.

Even the most recent prices I can find, for PG&E, put a number between $1.5M and $3M per mile with the costs being paid by the people who are served by the electric utility, and the costs being dependent on how much the process is.

The reason that housing developments are putting utilities underground is that burying power cables rated for 200 amps when you already have trenches for water and sewer doesn't add a huge expense over running the cables overhead, since most of the cost, at that point, is the cable. Because for residential installs, the cost per foot is only about $8, unless there's local regulations and rules that make it significantly more expensive, because there's limited capacity in underground conduits and cable vaults.

And again, all of these costs are basic costs. They don't account for the type of terrain we have in NH. The closest we could get would be the cost from Hydro Quebec but even there the soil is much flatter and they weren't going to have to do any horizontal drilling to make it work - That was all using existing infrastructure for buried cable. Horizontal drilling is much harder when you have as much rock in your soil as we do.

Yes, I too am tired for driving 15 minutes to get absolute top notch, essentially pharma grade bud. I long for the days of meeting randy in the Walmart parking lot and getting ripped off for an 1/8th of seeds and stems.

Try your evidence locker, I’m sure you’ve got plenty there, unless the shift leader already took it all. There’s an opioid crisis in the USA, and Manchester is rife with it. Maybe focus our tax dollars on that instead of trying to arrest someone with the botanical equivalent of a 6 pack.

I heard drinks at The Library are great. Haven’t been yet though, but that came from a very good source.

bario if you like margs!

flag hill for a tasting super fun.

stoneface brewery is great.

Black Trumpet

The state is not fiscally responsible for power company infrastructure, so I'm not certain why you are saying "NH won't bury the power lines." Cost estimates to bury lines are between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per mile to bury the lines, dependent on what they have to be dug through. Based on the reported 18,000 miles of residential lines on poles, that would be $1.8 billion dollars to $18 billion dollars to accomplish. Not going to happen.

Wilder

Isn't everything here woodsy?

Congrats! Now if xFinity would please come back on….day 3

I would join an outing club good luck!

Too much fruity pebbles in the serial bus

How in the 2023 do we not have a simple tracker on buses that can send location to a phone app.

People seem to like Surf. The food is good, if not great.

Ok, but you started out claiming that it couldn’t be done because of ‘bedrock’, and now your argument is it’s too expensive. I doubt the expense argument too. As noted, new developments are almost all putting utilities underground. It apparently isn’t all that expensive. But yes there is obviously a cost. The offset is drastically reduced maintenance costs. The problem is that it takes a long time for the maintenance offset to balance out the installation expense.

I vaguely recall seeing information that burying the lines caused access and I THINK some sort of induction issues? Maybe someone out there is fluent in power lines!

If nobody responds you can wing it. Monadnock is so heavily hiked that you could just ask people in the parking lot; I wouldn't be at all surprised if you find somebody or some group happy to let you come along. It's a common hike for beginners, so they won't be surprised.