this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023

117 points (98.3% liked)

News

23014 readers

11 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

117

Biden pledges $95 million for Hawaii’s electrical grid after Maui wildfires (www.washingtonpost.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Biden administration announced Wednesday it will spend $95 million to help strengthen Hawaii’s electrical grid in the wake of deadly wildfires that swept through parts of Maui earlier this month. The fast-moving fires were the deadliest in modern U.S. history, killing more than 100 people on the island, forcing thousands to evacuate and destroying the historic town of Lahaina.

On Wednesday afternoon, President Biden addressed both the government’s long-term recovery and rebuilding efforts on the island, as well as the administration’s ongoing response to Hurricane Idalia, a major storm that made landfall in Florida on Wednesday morning.

“I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of a climate crisis anymore,” Biden said. “Just look around. Historic floods ... more intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we’ve never seen before.”

top 8 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's expensive as hell, but if we buried power lines, these sorts of disasters won't happen. Also has other safety benefits, such as cars not running into live powerline poles, people not stepping on downed lines in an earthquake, windstorm, hailstorm, etc, and lines not clogging up sidewalks with the visual clutter of poles and lines.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe its late in the day, maybe i'm losing it, but how is it more expensive to bury infrastructure instead of putting poles in and hanging it? Is it easements and right aways? It just seems like we bury plenty of other stuff. Its not like we're running hour water system on poles because its cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Trenching (dirt/grass) and boring (road or driveway) are both much more expensive in comparison to just running it overhead with poles. You first have to add the surrounding conduit cost in to properly protect the cable from water damage compared to just hanging it up. Easements are about the same I believe between the two but I'm sure, depending on the place, those underground easements will have to deal with more obstacles such as existing water and waste rather than just throwing up a pole every 200'.

Then there is also the troubleshooting issue for line crews for if a cable faults out, you then have to dig out a much larger section to first find the issue then to splice it rather than just splicing the overhead line with a normal line crew and splice kit.

I can't remember the exact numbers but I think the ratio for overhead, trenching, and boring was around $4/6/8 per foot making it over twice as expensive to bore over just throwing up some poles. Numbers can definitely vary, but most utilities probably won't want to trench and bore unless they have to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I can’t remember the exact numbers but I think the ratio for overhead, trenching, and boring was around $4/6/8 per foot making it over twice as expensive to bore over just throwing up some poles. Numbers can definitely vary, but most utilities probably won’t want to trench and bore unless they have to.

Right on. Thanks for that. Good enough for back of the napkin/ ballpark probably.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All energy will be generated with renewables, right? Right?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

All energy will be generated with renewables, right? Right?

I mean, yeah, likely. The biggest issue is corruption though. Hawaii's state government is extremely corrupt and be it via nepotism, cronyism or incompetence, it doesn't seem to be getting better.

It doesn't seem to matter if its infrastructure, policing, or just basic things like building permits, Hawaii is rife with corruption. The idea that you could try to run any kind of project through HECO and get reasonable results seems laughable.

Some more material:

https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/11/public-corruption-directly-undermines-faith-in-hawaiis-government/

https://www.civilbeat.org/category/hawaii-corruption-investigations/

https://www.hawaiifreepress.com/Articles-Main/ID/36523/Deep-Moral-Crisis-in-Hawaii-Government

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How about building some microgrids and burying power lines this time?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Corporate doesn't like that and watches with stressed eyes if mentioned by their purchase