That's really interesting! I assumed that everybody would aim for a resilient system to reduce support costs, but you're saying the electric grid is built cheap & fragile and the cost of support is just an accepted part of it?
How come the support costs are cheaper for maintaining the electric grid than paying a bit more for hardware that requires less support?
You can't even outsource your support costs to a cheaper COL country.
Is it because the infra is subject to nature & thus always being degraded in all sorts of ways in all different environments?
Yes, once you realize even the ground you walk on is shifting cm's per year like a slow moving ocean, you see that nothing fits nicely in the world indefinitely with then precision needed for electricity infra.
There's a lot of slop in electricity infrastructure especially in those big towers with cable drapes of hundreds of feet.
Australia, the continent, has shifted by 4.9 feet since the last local mapping grid adjustment was made to GPS coordinates back in 1994.
That's about 2.7 inches a year .. that took entire regional electrical service areas along with it as a single unit with no stretching of cables.
In your scenario you need to find electrical works spanning a fault line, rigidly fixed to both sides, and built by Engineers (civil, mech, not software) clueless to drift .. like a steel bridge constructed without expansion joints to account for tempreture changes.
Comments
That's really interesting! I assumed that everybody would aim for a resilient system to reduce support costs, but you're saying the electric grid is built cheap & fragile and the cost of support is just an accepted part of it?
How come the support costs are cheaper for maintaining the electric grid than paying a bit more for hardware that requires less support?
You can't even outsource your support costs to a cheaper COL country.
Is it because the infra is subject to nature & thus always being degraded in all sorts of ways in all different environments?
Yes, once you realize even the ground you walk on is shifting cm's per year like a slow moving ocean, you see that nothing fits nicely in the world indefinitely with then precision needed for electricity infra.
There's a lot of slop in electricity infrastructure especially in those big towers with cable drapes of hundreds of feet.
Australia, the continent, has shifted by 4.9 feet since the last local mapping grid adjustment was made to GPS coordinates back in 1994.
That's about 2.7 inches a year .. that took entire regional electrical service areas along with it as a single unit with no stretching of cables.
In your scenario you need to find electrical works spanning a fault line, rigidly fixed to both sides, and built by Engineers (civil, mech, not software) clueless to drift .. like a steel bridge constructed without expansion joints to account for tempreture changes.