. . You end up with a infrastructure like our power grid that is dilapidated because there is no incentive beyond government grands to do anything about it.
Out of curiosity, why do you call the power grid “dilapidated”?
On average and excluding major events, the average customer had just over one outage lasting under 100 minutes per year. When you add in major events, you get 1.3 outages per customer with an average of around 200 minutes.
Yes, it can always be better. That said, are you the customer willing to pay for it? For instance, Japan has one of the best outage rates, yet they pay over twice what the average US customer pays. ($.26/kw/h vs $.12/kw/h)
Finally, many outages are on the distribution system, often caused by tree contacts/vegetation/etc. Yet when the utilities try to trim those trees, they are yelled at by the property owner. So why not run cables underground?
Here is something regarding a 345 kv line “
An underground 345 kV line costs 10 to 15 times the cost of an overhead line due to time, materials, process, the need to include transition substations and the use of specialized labor. The proposed overhead 345 kV line would cost approximately $1 million per mile. Part of the added costs to bury lines may include routing and boring to avoid other underground installations, such as water, natural gas and sewer lines.
An overhead line often can be routed around or over these difficult areas.”
https://www.xcelenergy.com/staticfiles/xe/Corporate/Corporate PDFs/OverheadVsUnderground_FactSheet.pdf
Ok, what about distribution lines then. Yep, they are more reliable, but when they do fail, they take about 10x longer to fix
https://www.puc.nh.gov/2008IceStorm/ST&E Presentations/NEI Underground Presentation 06-09-09.pdf
so, how much are you willing to pay for reliability? If you live on a coast in the hurricane zones, you should expect that when a hurricane hits, you will be without power for a while until the utility can return service. If it hits an area not used to hurricanes, you might even see longer outages, but even then they have gotten power back on fairly quickly. If you want to see a real dilapidated power grid, go to Puerto Rico where between the government being corrupt and not investing in the utility, and the people stealing power without paying for it, you have a grid that had serious problems before a major hurricane hit. After it hit, it needs almost a complete rebuild.
