Is it so hard to bury power cables underground? At least in new neighbourhoods / towns / subdivisions...
That's "Medium Voltage" and "Low Voltage" in utility terms and it is already standard practice for densely populated developments. Even the transformers are underground. Somewhere... I never did find the one serving our other house.
OTOH, in less densely populated areas and older areas like where I live now, we have pole mounted transformers served from some "Medium Voltage" (maybe 12 kV, maybe less, I didn't ask) and we have trees. Lots and lots of trees and the lines go right through the branches. That's why the utility company has been trimming trees in the neighborhood. We're not in any danger, it's not a forest but still, we had 3 outages last year caused by shorting lines in the neighbor's trees across the street. The utility finally got tired of replacing fuses so they came along and cut the trees.
The problem with pole mount transformers is that there is a limit to how far the secondary voltage can run without excessive voltage drop. Maybe a couple of hundred feet. At our house, the secondary is underground, only the primary is on poles.
The problems seem primarily related to "Transmission Level" towers. Voltages at 69 kV and above - probably up around 230 kV to 500 kV. These towers are relatively far apart, the cables tend to flap around in high wind and, as a function of load, the cables sag. It doesn't help that people shoot at the insulators.
Northern California is scheduled for more shutdowns today. Apparently it is primarily the "Medium Voltage" lines because the transmission lines are going to stay energized. They serve too many customers that aren't involved with forests.
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Everybody missed the point! These outages were only tangentially related to preventing fires and saving lives. What they really were was pressure on the Legislature to come up with a $21 BILLION dollar compensation fund to protect the utilities.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-wildfire-legislation/california-governor-signs-bill-for-21-billion-wildfire-fund-idUSKCN1U72LI----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's nothing like getting the press all riled up over shutdowns affecting a million customers to get the Governor to do anything you want.
This has been a taxpayer scam from the beginning. How else could they get the flatlanders to pay for fires in the hills?
Pay attention!