How can power lines be protected against strong winds?

In hurricane belt in US often see local line use poles that are metal and concrete despite wood being much cheaper

Burying however usually increases maintenance costs tenfold

simple answer is to bury them. But that's more expensive to do and far more expensive to maintain and fix issues

Very sad to see the loss of life again by a fallen tree, a young man allowed to go home from work early before the Red Alert started. One death is too many. Trees have been allowed to grow wild on roadsides and near power lines over the years. Time for our Authorities and landowners to wake up and take action. Cut them down.

Every roadside tree should be cut down.

Such anger against the ESB. They are only human. Only so much they can do at a time. They are doing there best. I am sure some of them might have been affected by the storm too.

To do the job that they are super well paid to do is it?????

So someone is buying 25 generators at €2,000 each, and you’re calling ESB workers ****.

What have you spent to protect your electric supply?

Typical CA thread.

People giving out about to things they probably know nothing about, people coming up with crazy ideas about solutions to problems, people complaining about state workers.

I'm expecting someone to accuse another poster of working for the ESB soon.

The ones at the side of the road are not maintained. They are also undermined by traffic, roadworks, pollution. Really it's the stragglers that are left and the ones pushed to the edge of fields. If you cut a tree down then plant some native trees elsewhere for future generations. Like in the middle of the field, away from the road.

The last time I asked, the ESB have 2,000,000 poles.

The biggest help would be increasing the maintenance clearance distance during tree cutting cycles. Typically they are around 4.0m for MV lines.

Increase to 10m would be a game changer, but I'd can hear the tree lovers and environmental groups losing their sh1t if it was even mentioned.

No other obvious solution I can think of it.

Another aspect of the huge repair works is the risk to the men doing the work particularly in the often less than ideal weather conditions.

Don't be silly. One death is certainly a tragedy, but you're suggesting we cut down all trees in the country that are on the borders of any roads or power cables?

Most of the roads are very well maintained, the side roads and boreens are often overgrown, but Ireland has the longest road network in Europe per head of capita

20 metres of road for every person in the country. This is because our housing is low density. Ireland stands out as a prime example of low-density urbanisation combined with ribbon development

The actual long term solution to this, is not to guarantee that there won't be more power cuts by spending hundreds of billions rebuilding the entire grid, it's to have local storage, distributed generation and for every home to have their own battery to store energy (the same way every home now has a hot water tank to store hot water)

When dynamic pricing comes in, it will make sense to install battery storage, so you can charge your battery at off peak prices, and run off those batteries when the price is high

That exact same infrastructure will also serve as a backup for when there is a storm, while the grid is restored, people can survive with minimal inconvenience off their battery storage.

this is from nie electric. shows the damage forestry can do. a gap was left but. it's near Fivemiletown.

https://x.com/NIElectricity/status/1883498066323402901

oooops sorry scrolled up and saw same video, sorry !

No one plants trees in the middle of fields.

That said, in suburban areas they should keep the trees and bury the cables, which should have been underground in the first place.