So beautiful

This person makes really beautiful digital art that features a lot of power lines. I think it's really cool. Example:
- While they do affect the skyline, i find them kind of a great. Its like wind turbines, they serve a very easy to understand purpose and exist for everyone while having only little environmental impact and lasting a lomg ass time. Compared to infrastructure like starlink which will only ever serve a few people, obstructs the entire sky for everyone from any angle and will only function for a few(5) years before having to be replaced.
  
  while having only little environmental impact
  If they’re properly maintained… fucking PG&E!
- I can't find the exact shot, but I used to have a picture of the 220kV lines parallel to the Desert Road as my desktop background. Something like this:https://johnmathews.smugmug.com/Nov-18-Desert-Road-North-Island/i-CkSm5tK
- I think the long distance transmission lines are kind of neat. They often become roosts for hawks and eagles here, gives you a chance to see some nature near the city.
  The linked comic is ugly as sin though, that's a high voltage rat nest. And I'm sure there's a happy medium to be found with that sort of electrical pole, but it doesn't give me the feeling of serenity that the high tension towers do.
  Underground transformers seem to be the better approach for denser connectivity
- !wallpapers@lemmy.ca material right there.
- For over a decade every one of my wallpapers was an Aenami piece. They're just so dang cool.
- Nice!
- Thank you for uploading the full rez. Gimme gimme! <3
- Wow, thanks for the link. It's beautiful

Overhead transmission lines are so 1950s.
Invest in your country.
- Japan is earthquake country so they get a pass.
  India however...
  
  Japan is slowly burying all their overhead lines into the sidewalks. A lot of urban streets look so much nicer now than they did 10 years ago.
  It’s probably no worse in an earthquake than the water mains, which would inherently be a lot more rigid than cables with intentional slack built into every segment.
  
  Are they really safer in an earthquake though? Those poles could fall over and people could get caught under the cables, worst case while they're still under high voltage...
- Yes im encouraged by seeing them use those machines to put things in the ground. I had not realized how effiicient it had gotten. May be cheaper than the poles hanging now.
  
  Still about a 10x cost difference, plus (particularly on transmission lines) there's issues with extra capacitive loading.
- Investing on your country would be connecting more people to electricity not make the sky look better
  
  The sky looking better is just one thing. No more blackouts when there’s winds or thunderstorms or just stray branches is the real perk.
- Interestingly, underground lines aren't feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.
  The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.
  
  Interestingly, underground lines aren't feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface.
  I’m 4 meters below sea level. We don’t have basements because the buoyancy of the empty space would cause the houses to literally float on ground water. But we do have buried power lines.
  You are being lied to.
  
  Slab on grade crew!!
- Thanks for the idea, but have you considered spending it all on bombs instead?
- My house has buried lines! ...from the street to the house only... 🥺
- There are benefits of overhead lines. They are cheaper to install, maintain, and repair. Diagnosing problems are much easier as well. They're certainly uglier and easier to damage but you don't have to dig up the road to fix them.
  Newer cities shouldn't install overhead lines but to have old cities with overhead lines switch to underground ones is very expensive and takes a lot of time, something smaller cities likely don't have the budget for.
  
  You don't have to dig up the roads to fix buried power lines any more than you have to tear up your walls to replace power lines in your house: you install a conduit (basically a pipe) under the road once and if the cable somehow gets damaged and needs to be replaced you can just run new cable through the existing conduit by simply pushing it in on one end and pulling from the other.
  Transformers and other non-cable equipment are typically housed aboveground in little boxes or built in to the house, so they're actually easier to maintain than if they were installed aboveground on a pole since you don't need a cherrypicker to access it.
  Obviously in a less wealthy small town with existing overhead infrastructure it doesn't make much sense to move it all underground "just because", but if you're already trenching under the road to install water/sewage/gas mains, it won't cost much extra to throw down an additional one or two smaller conduits for running power cables or telephone/cable/fiber lines.

Powerlines are cool and they make great framing for art
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/m6wdjr/twenty_skies/

If I'm gonna be entirely honest, I think power lines are really nice looking. I even have them as my phones wallpaper. Maybe it's just because I have a interest in infrastructure or something, idk
- me too! I love em, but that's just because I hate all the new stuff we have got. So I like to find comfort in the old things, that are still used everyday.
- I know it's totally backwards, but I feel weird when I go to a neighborhood that doesn't have above ground lines.
- for real though the second drawing is way nicer than the first

I know it's a very unpopular opinion but I actually like the aesthetics of infrastructure and industry.
When I see a steel mill, an oil rig or powerplants like wind parks, hydro- or nuclear power I am reminded of the human ingenuity that went into it. How many people needed to band together to work on something bigger than their tribe. I am reminded of our awe inspiring power to shape our environment completely.
Of course with great power... You know the rest.
- Even though I hate car centric infrastructure, watching a new highway or bypass spring up out of nothing is an incredible testament to our ability to work together to achieve great things
- I traveled across Southeast Asia drawing powerline tangles and run-down alleyways in a sketchbook. It's definitely a thing.
- we have a "wind park" a few miles west of here. i get some of my power from it. slightly less than half of them are inactive at any given time. dunno if its intentional or a rotation scheme. never see any crew trucks around the dead ones
  
  They have to shut off if there's too much power in the grid, it might be that

I actually kind of enjoy powerlines and junction boxes. There's a level of engineering that is both rough and delicate that is magnified by how orderly and chaotic they are alike.
Now if the power lines are at the expense of a view through trees, that'd be more a bummer. Likewise if the trees remain that's a hazard waiting to happen, which is also a bummer.
Buried lines and conduit pipe are preferable in most cases and share similar aesthetic characteristics.

Not as bad as cars everywhere

The Lain aesthetics is just a regular day in Brazil.

This but unironically.
Fuck appeals to nature.
- Honestly, to me the ironic part is the power lines in this artwork are unappealing to me because of the artist not the subject matter. It seems they don't know what all the lines are or where they go or how they work, so when I look at it and do know what it's supposed to look like, this just looks like a mess that makes zero sense. The artist has created some sort of electrical fire hazard.
  
  You're gonna love this
  
  I suspect that came directly from irl
  
  I've seen some polls significantly worse than that, but not in a developed country.
- I love nature. Termite mounds are nature, honeycombs are nature, spiderwebs are nature. Humans are a part of nature and our infrastructure is a part of who we are.
  Carving out exceptions for human artifacts like this takes for granted that a bunch of arboreal primates figured out how to melt down the rocks themselves to extract their purest essence, then wound that essence into ropes that contain the lightning we learned to generate ourselves to power the many other artifacts we developed to bring light into our dwellings, communicate with primates on the other side of the planet, and automate the menial tasks of our lives.
  While certainly selfish and misguided at times, everything we make is nature, just as much as honeycombs and spiderwebs.

Have it run underground. Safer for all parts.

Somewhere. Somewhere Japan
- It me, in somewhere Japan a couple days ago
  
  Me somewhere Japan yesterday

Do you guys like having power? Lol
- Have you heard of under ground power cables? Or of not that, a slightly neater organization of power cables?
- In civilized countries we tend to bury them
  
  Not just civilized countries, it's fairly common to bury power lines in Florida, because hurricanes.

I think clean power lines look nice. I'd definitely prefer them to a butterfly killing roadway or lighted poles that create light pollution and confuse wildlife.
- https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/what-s-killing-monarchs-our-roads
  Plant the fields, not the roadways, got it

Power lines blocking sky, Japan: 😍😍😍😍
- go look at pictures of the Indian power systems

But also:
- Remembering that show frustrates me. How did they start with such a hilarious premise and end up with a show that's okay and not one milligram more?

I weirdly don't mind

My entire factorio server looks like the second photo. India style.
- Would be a nice QoL update to adds underground poles lol

Oh. I guess they could take the sky from me.
- 🍃

Welcome to Mexico, er have such beautiful cities! Except for the 3623516582 cables everywhere

Check out the photography by Alex Hyner for some amazing skies between the power lines
- This was the first thing I thought of, but couldn't remember the artists name - thank you!

Yes
But
not getting power
- Put it in the ground
  
  And have to dig up even more earth using even more big machines? If you did a 50ft power line underground, that's 50 ft of earth that has to be dug up, not to mention what happens whenever something inevitably goes wrong and you have to dig it all up again. Then you also have to bury transformers, which means you need to cool them.
  There's many, many good reasons that we use power lines over burying them. Mostly, power lines are so significantly cheaper and easier that it's not even comparable. I've seen the bill when a buried fiber line gets broken. It is crazy expensive.
  
  I'M AN ADULT!
  
  Different countries have different needs. In the US you have hurricanes so it makes sense to.protect the power lines above ground, but here we just had a flood, do you want us to loose power for months everytime it rains a lot? It makes a lot nore sense to us to have it above ground.

Gainax AF.

Oh, I just watched that episode of Serial Experiments Lain.

Yes

The highways are even worse.

I'm on vacation in Thailand for the first time right now and it's sooo true here.

Lateral
Movement

Yes, but, what if it had even more cables?

The argument for japan is because of earthquakes, easier to repair. But for other countries?

Duvet plays

the motions of the electrons moving through those wires can be

Haibane Renmei (left), Serial Experiments Lain (right)
- just needs a subtle background hum and everything is complete.
  
  ~~50hz~~ 120hz is such a soothing tone

How's the serenity?

This is like the R. Crumb style

ah, beautiful Québec :)

Only in backwater countries that still use those antique washing lines that break with every instance of bad weather.
- It’s cheaper to repair them all the time than it is to dig to repair them occasionally
  If you’re wondering why
  
  Why not just bury a good length of conduit and just repull the line when it has issues?

What is your solution?
- Underground cables.
  
  And that's always the best solution? You see no reason for above ground cables?
  
  Underground works well for greenfields construction, where you can map everything out ahead of time and don't have to deal with existing underground services.
  It's manageable on low-density streets where its really only three waters and maybe some telephone lines.
  It's a nightmare to underground existing infrastructure in dense environments. Underground is already full of three generations of critical comms, corroding gas, water, HV lines that will fail if you look at them wrong, and if you're really unlucky, steam pipes too.

Grow up