On 12/27/20 10:26 AM, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
All of the 400V and 10 kV is buried. That means no wires along streets, anywhere.
The long haul transmission network consists mostly of 150 kV and 400 kV lines. That has been partly buried, especially near and in cities. There was a project to have it all buried but was abandoned halfway due to cost.
But then it is all fully redundant, so they will just power it down if it needs maintenance. My company is digging for FTTH and in the few cases we need to cross one of these bad guys, they will shut it for us while we are working. Nobody looses power of course.
The 10 kV network is redundant too. We managed to hit those a few times. That will cause a power interruption for 10 to 20 minutes until they reroute the power. I believe mostly for safety, they need to be sure that the damaged line will not become energized again.
It's hard to build in redundancy when the entirety of lower Manhattan was under water though. Dealing with that must have been a hellacious job. Mike