Los Alamos County Electric System Unreliability

The power flickers this past week have caused me so much grief, I just have to comment about them. The Los Alamos Monitor has published a short explanation of most if not all of them in the next edition after the outage. Today the Sunday edition has a longer, front page, above the fold, article about a general problem with something called the RL 115KV line. I am curious what RL stands for. The article implies that Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) has something to do with it.

I think part of the general problem is the short-sighted thinking twenty to forty years ago. Then the emphasis was on burying electric and phone lines, eventually cable TV lines, too. I don't think there was any technical reason. There used to be the opinion that lightning would cause fewer outages, and phone linepersons have told me that woodpeckers do damage to overhead phone wires. No, the reason was aesthetics, just plain opinion about what is ugly and what is not so ugly.

Now, the burying could have been done in conduits. But it was cheaper to use direct-bury cable. In some high-density areas, the phone lines are in conduits. Brittle conduits susceptible to water intrusion that may be worse than spotty moisture for direct-bury cables, but some areas do have conduits none-the-less. But using conduits for electric wires only began more recently, maybe by the year 2000, maybe even later.

So now we need expensive trenching or horizontal boring to do it over with conduit this time. And with trenching we use short lengths of conduit with joints that will probably let water leak in, so that is not good, either.

Then there is the absence of the Ojo Line Extension. Another casualty of opinion about aesthetics.

Sigh.

I think OLE should be built, including dozens, maybe hundreds, of fibers along it. I think overhead utilities where direct-buried ones exist should be considered. I think high-density, commercial areas should have utility tunnels, which would also be storm sewers, where all gas, water, electric, communication and other utility connections can be maintained and replaced without digging or boring.