Another ice storm, another series of failures, tho this one isn't blamable on Strangeabbott, the PUC or ERCOT, contra #BlueAnon. Should Texas be more "hardened" against this? State Rep. Erin Zwiener says yes and wants some of the big budget surplus spent to that end. Of course, that might require the wingnuts in the Tex-ass Lege to admit climate change is real, and covers more than global warming. That's even though state climatologist John Nielson-Gammons has long sounded the tocsin.
One form of hardening? Bury electric lines.
Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said burying power lines underground would be more reliable and may be worth the cost in the long run. “We’re cheap,” Webber said. “And it’s very expensive to be cheap.”
If it's too expensive to do all of them? Require that all new ones be done that way. When I was at a group of suburban papers in the Metromess, cities there were requiring it of new developments.
As for the claim that it would jack repair costs that much? Surely monitors, similar to those on gas pipelines, would allow for the location of a problem to be isolated.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, friend of Big Oil and Big Gas (among other things) Russell Gold co-signs all the claims that it can't be done. That's despite Denton making news more than a decade ago for its push to do just that, and burying half of them.
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Contra wingnuts, Austin Energy does trim trees even if residents get their dander up. And it has been doing so for 20 years. (There was plenty of wingnuttery on Twitter in the wake of the ice storm.)
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And, as I noted last week, it IS ice, Yankees.
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