Name: Should The U.S. Bury Its Power Lines?
Uploaded: 2023-10-21T16:54:34.000Z
Duration: 10 min 24 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

We're digging trenches, we're laying conduit, we're

And after that will come electric construction.

Here in Arnold, California, Pacific Gas and Electric is

This is an expensive but surefire way to practically

eliminate the risk of utility-caused wildfires,

which have devastated towns throughout California.

And a Hawaii utility could also be the cause of Maui's

We're coming off of a historic drought, and those

conditions are materially different than the

conditions that we saw just ten short years ago.

And so now is absolutely the right time to be taking

bold, decisive action with regard to the grid safety

and grid's resiliency and scaling this underground

The infamous Camp Fire of 2018 sparked when high winds

knocked over a poorly maintained PG&E transmission

line. The resulting blaze destroyed the town of

PG&E was found liable, and the massive cost drove the

nation's largest utility into bankruptcy, from which

But just a year later and in the same county, PG&E

equipment started another catastrophic fire, prompting

the utility to announce plans to move 10,000 miles

of distribution lines underground. It's an

ambitious goal that Martin says would reduce ignition

But undergrounding just one mile costs anywhere from

The total plan would likely be in the tens of billions,

and that bill would be footed by PG&E's customers,

who already face some of the highest rates in the

It's very expensive to live in this state, and people

are already spending a lot of their money on keeping

the lights on, keeping their heat on on a cold

night, you know, keeping their medical devices

running. If we keep pushing up electricity rates, the

most vulnerable of us are not going to be able to pay.

But though it's expensive, burying power lines isn't

new. It's common practice in city centers, where

overhead lines would be obstructive, and more common

in Europe, where cities tend to be denser.

41% of medium- and low-voltage power lines in

Europe are buried, and in Germany and the Netherlands,

nearly all of them are. Only about 18% of

distribution lines in the U.S. are underground, though

for both safety and aesthetic reasons, almost

all the new lines that are built are now buried.

So while our other underground lines were

primarily in more urban areas of our service

territory, this program is exclusively focused on the

highest risk areas in our service territory, getting

the lines out of the air and eliminating ignition

In general, overhead power lines are not insulated, as

When you look at our overhead wire, it's bare

wire. And that's why we've got such concerns about

that, is that if the tree falls into that and that

bare wire, that is where the risk comes from.

Basically, whenever the electricity in an energized

line has a direct path to the ground, be that through

a tree that's fallen on a line or a line that's fallen

So during storms and times of high wildfire risk,

One option is to essentially just shut down the power

line, because if there is no voltage and no current on

the line, there is no chance of this release of

energy happening and then there is no chance of an

ignition. So shutting them down is a very disruptive

option. It is being used quite widely in California,

but it's really a very disruptive option.

PG&E has been implementing public safety power shutoffs

in California since 2019, impacting millions of

people. But as disruptive as this option is, it does

work. Hawaiian Electric, the utility that could be

found liable for the Maui wildfires that killed at

least 98 people, was criticized for not shutting

off power in advance of high wind warnings.

If the company is determined to be at fault,

it doesn't have nearly enough money to pay off

undoubtedly cheaper than dealing with the massive

costs of deadly wildfires and undoubtedly less

disruptive than shutting off power completely.

When a line is put underground, ignition risk

So for this one time capital investment, we're

essentially eliminating the risk of ignition from an

overhead power line by placing it underground.

Martin says that you also eliminate vegetation

management costs and many maintenance costs as well,

since underground wires aren't exposed to the