Duffman,
Thanks for the data (duh, wiki, the internet & all, I feel silly
)
also I think I have been misunderstood
I am not worried about terrorism and power lines (how many poles lost to terrorists = 0)
I
am worried about storm/weather damage = thousands of poles knocked down each year
millions lost to economic impact of power outages each year
let us address the real danger before the imaginary
I'm sure the 2-4 times installation cost (per wiki) of pole versus buried cable is for
power companies expense only & does not take into account community economics
BTW
finding a break in a long buried wire is probably not as hard as you might think
you can "ring" the wire electrically and basically echo locate the break
in fact a clever power company could do it live and might even be able to predict failure points
we do it at work all the time to test coax cable health/losses
conradpdx,
I like your idea of distributed power idea & I have dreamed that dream too
but run the economics - it is a looser/expensive
in fact even selling at market rates you would be loosing your shirt
otherwise I would already be doing this
Also
for those worried wind is not a true large scale solution
sure wind could be too intermittent for high percentage use (say over ~20%)
but I don't think that is going to happen any time soon
here is a DOE report selling 20% wind by 2030
20% Windpower by 2030
so the "too much wind" debate is a little premature
