8 ms·

I must say, as an American reading this, I've got a bit of infrastructure envy. In the mid 20th century, the US was building out massive infrastructure. Now i

I must say, as an American reading this, I've got a bit of infrastructure envy. In the mid 20th century, the US was building out massive infrastructure. Now it seems we are no longer capable of such projects. It may be an oversimplification but I think the focus on running every organization like a corporation has led to an inability to handle projects that extend beyond the fiscal year effectively. Instead our largest infrastructure projects are collapsing before completion due to cascading delays, political turmoil and failed private contracts.

whatshisface 8y ago
What's the benefit in modernizing the US's grid faster than it is being done already? Nobody wants to pay more for electricity, and while the Chinese government is motivated by the economic stimulus effect the US doesn't share that goal. If they started tearing down and replacing power lines that today are good enough you would have to pay for it.
- the8472 8y ago
  The benefit of modernizing the grid is reduction of carbon emissions. The ideal geographic locations for wind and solar are not necessarily close to the consumers. If you lack the transmission capacity the plants have to throttle down and waste potential energy production which has to be compensated by plants closer to the consumers.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    In that case you wouldn't want to modernize the grid just for the sake of it, you would want to reduce carbon emissions. The places where you would build out new infrastructure would be different if the plan was to connect solar panels in Nevada versus if you just went around to the oldest wooden poles and replaced them with newer ones.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  When I lived in Maryland we had multiple-day blackouts several times after hurricanes because power lines were down. There was also a huge blackout along the whole east coast which also took days. In California transformers are starting wildfires. I think there is a lot to improve.
  - makomk 8y ago
    What China seems to be doing is replacing the complex tangle of distributed local generation and distribution with big, high-profile, headline-grabbing single point of failure power lines. That doesn't sound like a good way of avoiding blackouts due to weather taking out power lines - if anything, that's an argument against copying China.
    - katbyte 8y ago
      The mentiones how they are building in redundancies and not running serveral of the links at full capacity to prevent just such a situation.
      - 4thaccount 8y ago
        Building a line to run @ only 25% capacity isn't exactly super smart. We have these conversations all the time in grid operations and planning when we hear about these big projects. In power transmission you always have to carry power reserves for your single greatest contingency (actually more). Let's say your largest contingency today is the loss of a 900 MW nuke plant. So you have to always have an extra 900 MW laying around. Now go build a 4 GW line. What happens if it trips? Big changes around the regions on each side. Chances are you now have to carry considerable more reserves unless you operate it at a much lower percent of capacity. It's the same with large amounts of wind. If you suddenly see your wind forecast fall off a cliff and need to make up multiple GW of lost generation, you're in a really risky spot. You have to carry extra reserves and try to best anticipate the event and that also costs money. In a future with lots of big batteries, this isn't as problematic, but we're very far from having that much storage on the grid.
- ggm 8y ago
  Modern HVDC transmission systems have lower losses. A re-design/upgrade/modernization would permit load managament to be optimised for the current population and industry needs, not the last centuries state. Its highly likely new paths, new poles, new pits, new transformers, new synchronous re-generators would be deployed. The transmission grid reflects the technologies used: if less coal and oil and gas is being used, its very likely there would be more points of storage and re-generation deployed, to leverage the surplus power inherent in a lot of solar and wind (which may not be currently captured) Its not cheap. But, thats what re-capitalization of a public utility function is all about: the thing which makes no sense to any individual profit-seeker but which delivers a non-profit moment for the entire community: safer, (less polluting) more efficient (less loss in transmission, less loss of ephemeral power) and more resilient power. "it costs more" is a false argument. All improvements "cost more" the question is "are they worth it" and I personally believe (very strongly) btw they are. I absolutely concede there is a case to be put "no, they aren't worth it" but I would prefer that case and the pro-case is made by operations-research, economists, power engineers than the Koch brothers. It is very unlikely under current economic climate, that any of the TVA, or the west coast power, or a myriad of state investments made in the 30s 40s and 50s would be done: Not because they are bad, but because they generate low profit outcomes, and we have forgotten why corporate entities were invented in the first place. If you don't agree, consider the giant cluster-fuck of US bridges in urgent need of repair and the logjam behind "who pays" with the current federal government favouring handing the assets to private sector investors to maintain and then charge to use, compared to a more normal (I mean worldwide) model of using tax and other central spend planning to pay for utility infrastructure. Which do you think makes more sense?
  - 4thaccount 8y ago
    Yeah...the 500-kV projects that TVA built in the 50s are very useful today. They waaay overbuilt it then (they only needed 115 or 138 kV iirc) and that would never happen today.
- jdavis703 8y ago
  I would gladly pay double for the price of electricity (or more precisely double for the transmission component of the bill), maybe even triple if you give me a hard sale. The past few falls I've been breathing in air that's more polluted than Chinese air. The reason is because PG&E doesn't have enough money to invest in infrastructure because the rates are kept low by state regulators who only see "cheap power" as their mandate.
  - learc83 8y ago
    >that's more polluted than Chinese air. What city is this? The US doesn't have a single city in the top 500. China makes up about half of the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-polluted_cities_by_particulate_matter_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-polluted_cities_b...
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Maybe parent was in LA during the forest fires last summer? It can get up there even if only for a few weeks.
      - learc83 8y ago
        They said the past few falls though.
    - kenneth 8y ago
      SF during the recent wildfires caused by faulty PG&E infrastructure (local power utility) had the worst air quality index in the world, far beyond any Chinese (or Indian/Pakistani for that matter) city.
      - snowwindwaves 8y ago
        If PG&E didn't start the fire something else would have.
      - learc83 8y ago
youeseh 8y ago
It is an inability to set clear goals. Every time we have a proposal, everyone else jumps in with additional requirements and the project dies.
- dismalpedigree 8y ago
  Wait a second. Are we talking about software projects or infrastructure?
  - samstave 8y ago
    Yes
    - dismalpedigree 8y ago
      Touche
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Maybe a bit of maintenance drag too.. it's always more exciting and easy when you do it the first time..
adventured 8y ago
> Now it seems we are no longer capable of such projects Not quite, we changed our priorities considerably. The US shifted its government expenditures to welfare, entitlements and standing-military spending. The US has dramatically expanded its social safety net over the last four or five decades. You can see that by checking the federal budget by decade and how its allocation has changed. Properly few voters want to go back to 1955, they'd rather we continue paying for free healthcare for the bottom 1/4, at a cost of ~$650 billion per year. If you give those people a choice between national high-speed rail and their health coverage, they'll choose health coverage every time. The mistake in the case of the US, is in not having built eg high-speed rail when it could have done it, before welfare and entitlement spending demands got so massive. In short, the US system, the social contract, has fundamentally, permanently changed. There's no scenario where it will or ever can do infrastructure like it did 60 or 80 years ago, because the government allocations can never be like they were. It's comparing two entirely different systems of spending demand & allocation, along with entirely different social expectations. China is currently undergoing exactly the same transformation as it seeks to build out a social safety net. As that proceeds, they'll no longer be fiscally capable of the infrastructure spending they've been undertaking the prior ~20 years. Social welfare spending demands will rise perpetually, particularly given the rate at which their society is aging. Right now the average pension in China is about $200 per year, and their pension system is already financially tipping over. That won't stand, China will be forced to allocate dramatically greater spending to social welfare over time. China is about to start running twin deficits, on their fiscal budget (already bad) and their trade. I don't see a scenario going forward where they can both meet the social demands of an aging population that wants a far greater social safety net and the free-wheeling infrastructure spending behavior of their past. They'll be forced to choose, as every other developed nation has.
- maypeacepreva1l 8y ago
  I think you are saying why US can't do it. Healthcare prices maybe one of the reasons not because people want to remain healthy.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
BurningFrog 8y ago
One reason is the decentralized nature of the country. No one can centrally decide a nationwide infrastructure project. It needs approval from all the involved states, counties, cities and property owners. This was to some extent true in the mid 20th century too, but much of those projects were built on empty land, and since then we've also built many layers of regulations and hired armies of regulators, all focused of finding ways and reasons to say NO to change.
- joelwilliamson 8y ago
  China is also quite decentralized. The provinces have an enormous amount of power to resist central government demands to do things they don't want to do. Look at how much trouble they are having trying to crack down on highly polluting power and industrial plants. If Beijing wants something, and the provinces don't, it's probably not going to happen.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    >>If Beijing wants something, and the provinces don't, it's probably not going to happen. What if the Party wants something what will happen? Not sure 100% about China, but in such systems you either go with the flow or...best case scenario you'll get audited, Chinese style.
    - house_atr 8y ago
      Stop with these mindless tropes
    - azernik 8y ago
      The Party is decentralized as well - the distinction between state and party institutions is fuzzy in the Chinese system.
    - chillacy 8y ago
      I bet to an outsider the US government probably looks pretty coherent too, one could say "What if the US Government wants something to happen?" and you'd understand what they meant. But the US Senate has political parties, and heck, even our political parties have various factions. And I'm sure the Party has its own factions as well, and they play the political game that humans play in order to arrive at some semblance of a story we can tell. (Granted it also seems to me that the CCP is more unified, but I don't know if it's actually true or if it's because all of their arguments happen behind closed doors.)
bogidon 8y ago
Maybe China can invest a lot more into the technology of today because it doesn’t have old, ailing infrastructure and debt to worry about. The US’s infrastructure was the envy of the world too when everything was new. I’m curious how China’s pre-UHV power grid investments compare to the US’s. Did China build its conventional infrastructure at prices already reduced by the global market and therefore pay much less than the US did when it was trailblazing, like China is today? How is China going to manage it’s by-then outdated infrastructure 50 years from now? Maybe more important for “long term thinking” isn’t how can we build the coolest thing today, but how can we do a decent job of keeping pace with innovation.
- jorblumesea 8y ago
  +1, a better question to ask would be, how does Europe keep their infrastructure up to date? A better model, given the age of the US infrastructure.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
    I don't think Europe's infrastructure is exactly the envy of the world. Sure, they've got a decent train network. That's because it's much more densely populated than the US. Infrastructure in Paris or Madrid isn't much different than in New York or Boston. And infrastructure in the middle of nowhere Romania isn't that much different than infrastructure in North Dakota.
    - athrun 8y ago
      I've never been to New York and Boston, so I cannot compare. I've been multiple times to San Francisco and Seattle though, which I still consider to be first-tier US cities and their overall infrastructure* is certainly no match for Western EU's first-tier cities. IMHO, one area where US infrastructure is markedly superior is the financial infrastructure (availability of capital, legal system) which is on the intangible side of things. * Roads, Rail, Power Grid, Water Grid, Fiber networks, Public transport, Schools, Hospitals, Police, Fire Departments
erikpukinskis 8y ago
The U.S. is not a republic like China it is a federation of states. Many states in the U.S. do enough trade on their own to fund nation-sized infrastructure projects. And they do organize those things to the extent their legislatures think it makes sense.
Shivetya 8y ago
Sorry, one of the biggest inhibitors to large projects, let alone nationwide ones, isn't how we run every organization, it is because of politics and the court system. politics which dictates who has to be involved in planning, building, and whatnot, and the courts as every special interest group wants their payout. Just look at how the costs of the California's folly of a high speed rail turned out. It was just one state but had all issues rolled into one. Big grandiose projects need special handling, not walking all over the environment type rules, but handling to expedite them and insure the best bidders along the way are involved and enough rules to keep the legal system mostly on the side lines. I don't think that is possible anymore. We simply have so much bureaucracy both in legislative and the courts that there are too many hands to reach into the pot
4thaccount 8y ago
China doesn't have to worry about an army of lawyers coming from people losing property for the right of ways needed for high voltage lines. Remember that China forced a lot of people to move for the three gorges hydro electric dam. That one dam has something like 20 GW of output...putting things into perspective, the entire Middle of the US from Arkansas to Canada uses about that much instantaneous electricity on a mild spring day. We have capital for big projects, but the legal and environmental challenges are big here (not without good reason).
- Gpetrium 8y ago
  Good points, although I would argue that in some cases, we don't have the capital for big projects when we account for all the legal, environmental and other factors that the people care(d) about.
e3b0c 8y ago
As far as I know, China's grid and power plants are not run by the government either.
- SimplePeople 8y ago
  They certainly own them, from the article: >...the State Grid Corp. of China, a state-owned company that runs most of China’s transmission and distribution grids..

whatshisface 8y ago

What's the benefit in modernizing the US's grid faster than it is being done already? Nobody wants to pay more for electricity, and while the Chinese government is motivated by the economic stimulus effect the US doesn't share that goal. If they started tearing down and replacing power lines that today are good enough you would have to pay for it.

the8472 8y ago
The benefit of modernizing the grid is reduction of carbon emissions. The ideal geographic locations for wind and solar are not necessarily close to the consumers. If you lack the transmission capacity the plants have to throttle down and waste potential energy production which has to be compensated by plants closer to the consumers.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  In that case you wouldn't want to modernize the grid just for the sake of it, you would want to reduce carbon emissions. The places where you would build out new infrastructure would be different if the plan was to connect solar panels in Nevada versus if you just went around to the oldest wooden poles and replaced them with newer ones.
maxxxxx 8y ago
When I lived in Maryland we had multiple-day blackouts several times after hurricanes because power lines were down. There was also a huge blackout along the whole east coast which also took days. In California transformers are starting wildfires. I think there is a lot to improve.
- makomk 8y ago
  What China seems to be doing is replacing the complex tangle of distributed local generation and distribution with big, high-profile, headline-grabbing single point of failure power lines. That doesn't sound like a good way of avoiding blackouts due to weather taking out power lines - if anything, that's an argument against copying China.
  - katbyte 8y ago
    The mentiones how they are building in redundancies and not running serveral of the links at full capacity to prevent just such a situation.
    - 4thaccount 8y ago
      Building a line to run @ only 25% capacity isn't exactly super smart. We have these conversations all the time in grid operations and planning when we hear about these big projects. In power transmission you always have to carry power reserves for your single greatest contingency (actually more). Let's say your largest contingency today is the loss of a 900 MW nuke plant. So you have to always have an extra 900 MW laying around. Now go build a 4 GW line. What happens if it trips? Big changes around the regions on each side. Chances are you now have to carry considerable more reserves unless you operate it at a much lower percent of capacity. It's the same with large amounts of wind. If you suddenly see your wind forecast fall off a cliff and need to make up multiple GW of lost generation, you're in a really risky spot. You have to carry extra reserves and try to best anticipate the event and that also costs money. In a future with lots of big batteries, this isn't as problematic, but we're very far from having that much storage on the grid.
ggm 8y ago
Modern HVDC transmission systems have lower losses. A re-design/upgrade/modernization would permit load managament to be optimised for the current population and industry needs, not the last centuries state. Its highly likely new paths, new poles, new pits, new transformers, new synchronous re-generators would be deployed. The transmission grid reflects the technologies used: if less coal and oil and gas is being used, its very likely there would be more points of storage and re-generation deployed, to leverage the surplus power inherent in a lot of solar and wind (which may not be currently captured) Its not cheap. But, thats what re-capitalization of a public utility function is all about: the thing which makes no sense to any individual profit-seeker but which delivers a non-profit moment for the entire community: safer, (less polluting) more efficient (less loss in transmission, less loss of ephemeral power) and more resilient power. "it costs more" is a false argument. All improvements "cost more" the question is "are they worth it" and I personally believe (very strongly) btw they are. I absolutely concede there is a case to be put "no, they aren't worth it" but I would prefer that case and the pro-case is made by operations-research, economists, power engineers than the Koch brothers. It is very unlikely under current economic climate, that any of the TVA, or the west coast power, or a myriad of state investments made in the 30s 40s and 50s would be done: Not because they are bad, but because they generate low profit outcomes, and we have forgotten why corporate entities were invented in the first place. If you don't agree, consider the giant cluster-fuck of US bridges in urgent need of repair and the logjam behind "who pays" with the current federal government favouring handing the assets to private sector investors to maintain and then charge to use, compared to a more normal (I mean worldwide) model of using tax and other central spend planning to pay for utility infrastructure. Which do you think makes more sense?
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  Yeah...the 500-kV projects that TVA built in the 50s are very useful today. They waaay overbuilt it then (they only needed 115 or 138 kV iirc) and that would never happen today.
jdavis703 8y ago
I would gladly pay double for the price of electricity (or more precisely double for the transmission component of the bill), maybe even triple if you give me a hard sale. The past few falls I've been breathing in air that's more polluted than Chinese air. The reason is because PG&E doesn't have enough money to invest in infrastructure because the rates are kept low by state regulators who only see "cheap power" as their mandate.
- learc83 8y ago
  >that's more polluted than Chinese air. What city is this? The US doesn't have a single city in the top 500. China makes up about half of the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-polluted_cities_by_particulate_matter_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-polluted_cities_b...
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Maybe parent was in LA during the forest fires last summer? It can get up there even if only for a few weeks.
    - learc83 8y ago
      They said the past few falls though.
  - kenneth 8y ago
    SF during the recent wildfires caused by faulty PG&E infrastructure (local power utility) had the worst air quality index in the world, far beyond any Chinese (or Indian/Pakistani for that matter) city.
    - snowwindwaves 8y ago
      If PG&E didn't start the fire something else would have.
    - learc83 8y ago

youeseh 8y ago

It is an inability to set clear goals. Every time we have a proposal, everyone else jumps in with additional requirements and the project dies.

dismalpedigree 8y ago
Wait a second. Are we talking about software projects or infrastructure?
- samstave 8y ago
  Yes
  - dismalpedigree 8y ago
    Touche
agumonkey 8y ago
Maybe a bit of maintenance drag too.. it's always more exciting and easy when you do it the first time..

adventured 8y ago

> Now it seems we are no longer capable of such projects Not quite, we changed our priorities considerably. The US shifted its government expenditures to welfare, entitlements and standing-military spending. The US has dramatically expanded its social safety net over the last four or five decades. You can see that by checking the federal budget by decade and how its allocation has changed. Properly few voters want to go back to 1955, they'd rather we continue paying for free healthcare for the bottom 1/4, at a cost of ~$650 billion per year. If you give those people a choice between national high-speed rail and their health coverage, they'll choose health coverage every time. The mistake in the case of the US, is in not having built eg high-speed rail when it could have done it, before welfare and entitlement spending demands got so massive. In short, the US system, the social contract, has fundamentally, permanently changed. There's no scenario where it will or ever can do infrastructure like it did 60 or 80 years ago, because the government allocations can never be like they were. It's comparing two entirely different systems of spending demand & allocation, along with entirely different social expectations. China is currently undergoing exactly the same transformation as it seeks to build out a social safety net. As that proceeds, they'll no longer be fiscally capable of the infrastructure spending they've been undertaking the prior ~20 years. Social welfare spending demands will rise perpetually, particularly given the rate at which their society is aging. Right now the average pension in China is about $200 per year, and their pension system is already financially tipping over. That won't stand, China will be forced to allocate dramatically greater spending to social welfare over time. China is about to start running twin deficits, on their fiscal budget (already bad) and their trade. I don't see a scenario going forward where they can both meet the social demands of an aging population that wants a far greater social safety net and the free-wheeling infrastructure spending behavior of their past. They'll be forced to choose, as every other developed nation has.

maypeacepreva1l 8y ago
I think you are saying why US can't do it. Healthcare prices maybe one of the reasons not because people want to remain healthy.
- CryptoPunk 8y ago

BurningFrog 8y ago

One reason is the decentralized nature of the country. No one can centrally decide a nationwide infrastructure project. It needs approval from all the involved states, counties, cities and property owners. This was to some extent true in the mid 20th century too, but much of those projects were built on empty land, and since then we've also built many layers of regulations and hired armies of regulators, all focused of finding ways and reasons to say NO to change.

joelwilliamson 8y ago
China is also quite decentralized. The provinces have an enormous amount of power to resist central government demands to do things they don't want to do. Look at how much trouble they are having trying to crack down on highly polluting power and industrial plants. If Beijing wants something, and the provinces don't, it's probably not going to happen.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  >>If Beijing wants something, and the provinces don't, it's probably not going to happen. What if the Party wants something what will happen? Not sure 100% about China, but in such systems you either go with the flow or...best case scenario you'll get audited, Chinese style.
  - house_atr 8y ago
    Stop with these mindless tropes
  - azernik 8y ago
    The Party is decentralized as well - the distinction between state and party institutions is fuzzy in the Chinese system.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    I bet to an outsider the US government probably looks pretty coherent too, one could say "What if the US Government wants something to happen?" and you'd understand what they meant. But the US Senate has political parties, and heck, even our political parties have various factions. And I'm sure the Party has its own factions as well, and they play the political game that humans play in order to arrive at some semblance of a story we can tell. (Granted it also seems to me that the CCP is more unified, but I don't know if it's actually true or if it's because all of their arguments happen behind closed doors.)

bogidon 8y ago

Maybe China can invest a lot more into the technology of today because it doesn’t have old, ailing infrastructure and debt to worry about. The US’s infrastructure was the envy of the world too when everything was new. I’m curious how China’s pre-UHV power grid investments compare to the US’s. Did China build its conventional infrastructure at prices already reduced by the global market and therefore pay much less than the US did when it was trailblazing, like China is today? How is China going to manage it’s by-then outdated infrastructure 50 years from now? Maybe more important for “long term thinking” isn’t how can we build the coolest thing today, but how can we do a decent job of keeping pace with innovation.

jorblumesea 8y ago
+1, a better question to ask would be, how does Europe keep their infrastructure up to date? A better model, given the age of the US infrastructure.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  I don't think Europe's infrastructure is exactly the envy of the world. Sure, they've got a decent train network. That's because it's much more densely populated than the US. Infrastructure in Paris or Madrid isn't much different than in New York or Boston. And infrastructure in the middle of nowhere Romania isn't that much different than infrastructure in North Dakota.
  - athrun 8y ago
    I've never been to New York and Boston, so I cannot compare. I've been multiple times to San Francisco and Seattle though, which I still consider to be first-tier US cities and their overall infrastructure* is certainly no match for Western EU's first-tier cities. IMHO, one area where US infrastructure is markedly superior is the financial infrastructure (availability of capital, legal system) which is on the intangible side of things. * Roads, Rail, Power Grid, Water Grid, Fiber networks, Public transport, Schools, Hospitals, Police, Fire Departments

erikpukinskis 8y ago

The U.S. is not a republic like China it is a federation of states. Many states in the U.S. do enough trade on their own to fund nation-sized infrastructure projects. And they do organize those things to the extent their legislatures think it makes sense.

Shivetya 8y ago

Sorry, one of the biggest inhibitors to large projects, let alone nationwide ones, isn't how we run every organization, it is because of politics and the court system. politics which dictates who has to be involved in planning, building, and whatnot, and the courts as every special interest group wants their payout. Just look at how the costs of the California's folly of a high speed rail turned out. It was just one state but had all issues rolled into one. Big grandiose projects need special handling, not walking all over the environment type rules, but handling to expedite them and insure the best bidders along the way are involved and enough rules to keep the legal system mostly on the side lines. I don't think that is possible anymore. We simply have so much bureaucracy both in legislative and the courts that there are too many hands to reach into the pot

4thaccount 8y ago

China doesn't have to worry about an army of lawyers coming from people losing property for the right of ways needed for high voltage lines. Remember that China forced a lot of people to move for the three gorges hydro electric dam. That one dam has something like 20 GW of output...putting things into perspective, the entire Middle of the US from Arkansas to Canada uses about that much instantaneous electricity on a mild spring day. We have capital for big projects, but the legal and environmental challenges are big here (not without good reason).

Gpetrium 8y ago
Good points, although I would argue that in some cases, we don't have the capital for big projects when we account for all the legal, environmental and other factors that the people care(d) about.

e3b0c 8y ago

As far as I know, China's grid and power plants are not run by the government either.

SimplePeople 8y ago
They certainly own them, from the article: >...the State Grid Corp. of China, a state-owned company that runs most of China’s transmission and distribution grids..