[Vulture]

In Montreal there are a lot of buried cables. I worked in a research facility for the only power company around and they pointed out several problems for this method. It costs a fortune so its not really applicable for very long distances. Also, whenever there is a failure you have to reel a few kilometers of cables, fix them and rewire everything in a tube full of mud, water and who knows what. During autumn the water in the tube freezes and expands causing stress and fissures.

It was discussed extensively since we had a massive power outage in 1998 caused by icing rain that affected about 3 millions for 3 weeks.

So burying cables might work well in a city for a while but I really don't think its any silver bullet.

[hackermom]

It has worked great inside their cities for almost 50 years - as my post clearly stated, the urban electrical infrastructure of Sweden has been entirely underground since the 60s. The ongoing change is replacing the pylons spanning the country with underground cabling. I'm pretty confident they know what they're doing. Not all underground solutions have to be the same, but by nature, the pylon model is always vulnerable, and it always suffers the same risks.