7 ms·

At my current company we're working on one of the problems involved in this in much of the developed world. Actually coming to the point where you can lay power

At my current company we're working on one of the problems involved in this in much of the developed world. Actually coming to the point where you can lay power lines is a huge issue that has to do with figuring out property ownership, the stuff that's already in the ground, water ways, roads, trees and more. People work months on finding a route that's actually possible and that sometimes involves paying a lot to property owners for using their land. Right now we're creating a tool that gives the engineers insight into all these factors and automatically creates possible routes through all this madness. It's quite interesting to work on and fascinating to learn about all these complexities. It also doesn't scale well, we're building this for the Netherlands, which has a lot of centralized, (mostly) open data that can be used. In other countries that's not so much true.

eppp 4y ago
Why shouldn't the property owners be paid for a profit taking enterprise to functionally steal their land? I understand that it has to be done to make the world work but it absolutely disproportionally effects rural people while the benefits go to the urban areas. This is one of those situations where a percentage of those gains flow back into the rural areas.
- randommuser 4y ago
  I don’t think he said they shouldn’t get paid. He is just saying that sometimes the best solution/route is over private property where the owner gets paid.
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    Correct. It's also not just about the money, it also takes a lot of time and adds a large amount of uncertainty to a project. Not every owner is willing to comply, causing an entire route to have to be reconsidered, which takes a lot of time. Eminent domain is pretty much never used, because judges (in my country) will pretty much always side with the property owner, unless the utility can proof that there's really no other way (which they almost never can). So on a 10km+ route with hundreds of properties, multiple municipalities or other public organizations and other utilities, this gets really complicated really quickly.
    - cmmeur01 4y ago
      Eminent domain being “pretty much never used” is a bold face lie in the US. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/bullitt-county-judge-rules-against-bernheim-in-lge-pipeline-case/70080827007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/bullitt... Here’s a story from this week where a gas company took land from a forest to build a pipeline that the previous and current landowners had no interest in selling to the gas company.
      - donkeyd 4y ago
        I'm not in the US, hence me explicitly writing 'in my country', because I'm aware that more countries exist and that things aren't the same everywhere.
      - markdown 4y ago
        That's so bizarre. In my country only the government can force you to sell them your land under eminent domain. Insane that in the US, companies can use eminent domain as well.
        1123581321 4y ago
        Much of the activity stems from a disastrous Supreme Court ruling a couple decades ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London A lot of farmland and lovely homes have been unprotected since. Many Americans wish for this case to be revisited (if they know about the case.)
        ghaff 4y ago
        While Kelo was IMO a bad decision, it's also not the case that eminent domain is routinely exercised at low cost and effort in the US. Private property owners routinely block many types of development on their land and adjoining land. People like to decry NIMBYism all the time. I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible. ADDED: And, in general, exercising eminent domain should be hard. One can simultaneously believe it should exist and have a lot of safeguards against exercising it.
  - eppp 4y ago
    Perhaps the reward isn't enough if it is that difficult to get permission. Landowners near me compete for cell tower leases because it is absolutely worth it. I suspect profit sharing on the electricity sold through the line would grease the wheels a bit.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Perhaps landowners have unreasonable negotiating leverage when a small number who have little to gain or lose can stop a project that is worth billions to society as a whole. If you need to get permission of thousands of people, and any single one can hold up the entire endeavor, then the economically rational thing to do is to be the last holdout, as you will get paid a lot more. Everybody loses in that scenario except the holdout.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Negotiations can be done en bloc but the downside is that it may take decades to do anything big.
        biomcgary 4y ago
        In the US, class action lawsuits allow multiple entities to be rolled into a class to sue another party. Is there an equivalent in the other direction (i.e., could a utility company roll everyone into class)? I see lots of possible problems (i.e., class participation allows opt-out).
        mindslight 4y ago
        The dynamic of class action lawsuits isn't about the quantity of class members, but rather that they're unenumerable. As such they don't really make sense to apply to defendants, and would have terrible results if they were. A plain old suit with many enumerated defendants would work for this topic though, assuming there was a cause of action.
      - eppp 4y ago
- pjc50 4y ago
  In countries that do not have a cadastral property register, it may not be simple to go from "GPS location" to "mailing address to offer to pay the owner for access to their land"; finding that can be a substantial cost in itself.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  It's a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. Say you need the co-operation of 1000 landowners. - Everybody co-operates, everybody gets paid a little bit. - One or two people make unreasonable demands, the builder caves and they get paid a lot. - Several people make unreasonable demands, nobody gets paid. It's more complicated than that because multiple routes are always considered simultaneously, but the basic large number non-iterated prisoners dilemma problem applies.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    >unreasonable I think therein is the issue. Who is to say that the small piece of property isn't worth the "unreasonable" amount to that owner? My home is worth $X on the market, but I don't want to sell it. Why shouldn't it be worth 10 * $x if a company wants to buy it from me? Why should I be forced to sell?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It's the time-old public/private issue; with money it's easier because it's fungible. Eminent domain has existed for millennia; this is just an aspect of it. In general the common result seems to be that for the "public good" the government has relatively large leeway (+/- political pressure) for things like roads, freeways, transit, utilities, etc. The line gets blurred when some of those are technically for-profit companies like some (many) utilities are. Often the end result is relatively fair for "everyone" but still the landowner is most affected (things like requiring power lines to be buried, or the power company has to build a driveway for the land owner, etc can happen). At extremes you have "town eminent domains your house so Walmart can build a parking lot on top of it." Some cities plan very far in advance and basically put a "we will buy this property when the landowner dies" lien on it; and wait out the 30-50 years before doing the project.
    - scythe 4y ago
      For reference, here's how we used to do things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataloochee_(Great_Smoky_Mountains) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataloochee_(Great_Smoky_Mount... >In the 1920s, the increase in tourism and the destructive effects of logging gave rise to a movement to create a national park in the Smokies. For this to happen, the residents living in the proposed park boundaries would either have to sell their land or be forced out via eminent domain. In 1928, Reverend Pat Davis broke the news to the residents of Cataloochee at Palmer's Chapel, telling them the valley was within proposed park boundaries and that they would be forced to sell. Hattie Caldwell Davis, who was at the meeting, recalled women crying and men threatening to dynamite the roads and shoot anyone who tried to enter. Some men had the idea of blocking Cove Creek Gap so the government representatives would have to come in from the Tennessee side, where Mount Sterling residents would surely stop them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- justrealist 4y ago
  The fact is that the rural US has benefitted from the US's very robust freight rail network, almost all of which was either taken via eminent domain or before the land was parceled out. If we tried to rebuild the train network we have today using the protracted legal process we have for reallocating land, it would be 100% impossible.
  - StrictDabbler 4y ago
    The rail network is a big part of the reason we're in this mess, though. The "checkerboard" system granted alternating squares of land to the railroad companies as an incentive to build out the network. The railroads sold those squares to various entities. The result is that much of the public land in the Western United States is "corner-locked". There are two parcels, diagonally adjacent, but a new easement would be required to cross between them. Even if you could get the corner easement you'd be running lines that zig-zag all over the place, so now the private owner can extract whatever the savings are for a straight line. https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossing-report https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossi...
    - justrealist 4y ago
      This seems like a completely unrelated implementation detail.
      - mywittyname 4y ago
        Seriously. The government could have just leased rights to the land for 100 years to the railroad companies.
        justrealist 4y ago
        We don't need to go full PRC, we can just make land grants that make geometric sense.
        4y ago
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > I understand that it has to be done to make the world work but it absolutely disproportionally effects rural people while the benefits go to the urban areas. This seems like a bit of a stretch. The usage of extremely tiny portions of rural land for infrastructure pales in comparison to the ludicrously large subsidies of rural areas by urban areas.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    > ludicrously large subsidies of rural areas by urban areas Which subsidies are you referring to? The department of agriculture does have subsidies, but they measure in the (<10) billions which I don’t think we can call ludicrously large in comparison.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      I'm mostly just talking about tax revenue versus public spending, since that's probably the easiest to get objective numbers for. But of course it's still going to depend on where you draw the line between "urban" and "rural" (I would probably want to look at dense urban centers versus everything else). With a quick Google you can find a bunch of studies showing that urban areas subsidize rural areas as well as a bunch of articles "debunking" those studies, so I'm sure anyone can find the conclusion they were looking for. There is also subtler stuff that isn't exactly "subsidy" but is perhaps suggestive of societal conflict between urban and rural areas, for example vastly disproportionate political representation (in the United States).
- Gasp0de 4y ago
  They should absolutely get paid (and they are in most civilized countries). But they shouldn't have a veto right. I private ownership of land is a weird concept anyway.
  - eppp 4y ago
    They get paid a pittance compared to the value of what is provided.
MonaroVXR 4y ago
In from the Netherlands too,can you find me the company name? I think someone is interested in this as well.

eppp 4y ago

Why shouldn't the property owners be paid for a profit taking enterprise to functionally steal their land? I understand that it has to be done to make the world work but it absolutely disproportionally effects rural people while the benefits go to the urban areas. This is one of those situations where a percentage of those gains flow back into the rural areas.

randommuser 4y ago
I don’t think he said they shouldn’t get paid. He is just saying that sometimes the best solution/route is over private property where the owner gets paid.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  Correct. It's also not just about the money, it also takes a lot of time and adds a large amount of uncertainty to a project. Not every owner is willing to comply, causing an entire route to have to be reconsidered, which takes a lot of time. Eminent domain is pretty much never used, because judges (in my country) will pretty much always side with the property owner, unless the utility can proof that there's really no other way (which they almost never can). So on a 10km+ route with hundreds of properties, multiple municipalities or other public organizations and other utilities, this gets really complicated really quickly.
  - cmmeur01 4y ago
    Eminent domain being “pretty much never used” is a bold face lie in the US. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/bullitt-county-judge-rules-against-bernheim-in-lge-pipeline-case/70080827007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/bullitt... Here’s a story from this week where a gas company took land from a forest to build a pipeline that the previous and current landowners had no interest in selling to the gas company.
    - donkeyd 4y ago
      I'm not in the US, hence me explicitly writing 'in my country', because I'm aware that more countries exist and that things aren't the same everywhere.
    - markdown 4y ago
      That's so bizarre. In my country only the government can force you to sell them your land under eminent domain. Insane that in the US, companies can use eminent domain as well.
      - 1123581321 4y ago
        Much of the activity stems from a disastrous Supreme Court ruling a couple decades ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London A lot of farmland and lovely homes have been unprotected since. Many Americans wish for this case to be revisited (if they know about the case.)
        ghaff 4y ago
        While Kelo was IMO a bad decision, it's also not the case that eminent domain is routinely exercised at low cost and effort in the US. Private property owners routinely block many types of development on their land and adjoining land. People like to decry NIMBYism all the time. I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible. ADDED: And, in general, exercising eminent domain should be hard. One can simultaneously believe it should exist and have a lot of safeguards against exercising it.
- eppp 4y ago
  Perhaps the reward isn't enough if it is that difficult to get permission. Landowners near me compete for cell tower leases because it is absolutely worth it. I suspect profit sharing on the electricity sold through the line would grease the wheels a bit.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Perhaps landowners have unreasonable negotiating leverage when a small number who have little to gain or lose can stop a project that is worth billions to society as a whole. If you need to get permission of thousands of people, and any single one can hold up the entire endeavor, then the economically rational thing to do is to be the last holdout, as you will get paid a lot more. Everybody loses in that scenario except the holdout.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Negotiations can be done en bloc but the downside is that it may take decades to do anything big.
      - biomcgary 4y ago
        In the US, class action lawsuits allow multiple entities to be rolled into a class to sue another party. Is there an equivalent in the other direction (i.e., could a utility company roll everyone into class)? I see lots of possible problems (i.e., class participation allows opt-out).
        mindslight 4y ago
        The dynamic of class action lawsuits isn't about the quantity of class members, but rather that they're unenumerable. As such they don't really make sense to apply to defendants, and would have terrible results if they were. A plain old suit with many enumerated defendants would work for this topic though, assuming there was a cause of action.
    - eppp 4y ago
pjc50 4y ago
In countries that do not have a cadastral property register, it may not be simple to go from "GPS location" to "mailing address to offer to pay the owner for access to their land"; finding that can be a substantial cost in itself.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
It's a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. Say you need the co-operation of 1000 landowners. - Everybody co-operates, everybody gets paid a little bit. - One or two people make unreasonable demands, the builder caves and they get paid a lot. - Several people make unreasonable demands, nobody gets paid. It's more complicated than that because multiple routes are always considered simultaneously, but the basic large number non-iterated prisoners dilemma problem applies.
- Loughla 4y ago
  >unreasonable I think therein is the issue. Who is to say that the small piece of property isn't worth the "unreasonable" amount to that owner? My home is worth $X on the market, but I don't want to sell it. Why shouldn't it be worth 10 * $x if a company wants to buy it from me? Why should I be forced to sell?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's the time-old public/private issue; with money it's easier because it's fungible. Eminent domain has existed for millennia; this is just an aspect of it. In general the common result seems to be that for the "public good" the government has relatively large leeway (+/- political pressure) for things like roads, freeways, transit, utilities, etc. The line gets blurred when some of those are technically for-profit companies like some (many) utilities are. Often the end result is relatively fair for "everyone" but still the landowner is most affected (things like requiring power lines to be buried, or the power company has to build a driveway for the land owner, etc can happen). At extremes you have "town eminent domains your house so Walmart can build a parking lot on top of it." Some cities plan very far in advance and basically put a "we will buy this property when the landowner dies" lien on it; and wait out the 30-50 years before doing the project.
  - scythe 4y ago
    For reference, here's how we used to do things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataloochee_(Great_Smoky_Mountains) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataloochee_(Great_Smoky_Mount... >In the 1920s, the increase in tourism and the destructive effects of logging gave rise to a movement to create a national park in the Smokies. For this to happen, the residents living in the proposed park boundaries would either have to sell their land or be forced out via eminent domain. In 1928, Reverend Pat Davis broke the news to the residents of Cataloochee at Palmer's Chapel, telling them the valley was within proposed park boundaries and that they would be forced to sell. Hattie Caldwell Davis, who was at the meeting, recalled women crying and men threatening to dynamite the roads and shoot anyone who tried to enter. Some men had the idea of blocking Cove Creek Gap so the government representatives would have to come in from the Tennessee side, where Mount Sterling residents would surely stop them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
justrealist 4y ago
The fact is that the rural US has benefitted from the US's very robust freight rail network, almost all of which was either taken via eminent domain or before the land was parceled out. If we tried to rebuild the train network we have today using the protracted legal process we have for reallocating land, it would be 100% impossible.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  The rail network is a big part of the reason we're in this mess, though. The "checkerboard" system granted alternating squares of land to the railroad companies as an incentive to build out the network. The railroads sold those squares to various entities. The result is that much of the public land in the Western United States is "corner-locked". There are two parcels, diagonally adjacent, but a new easement would be required to cross between them. Even if you could get the corner easement you'd be running lines that zig-zag all over the place, so now the private owner can extract whatever the savings are for a straight line. https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossing-report https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossi...
  - justrealist 4y ago
    This seems like a completely unrelated implementation detail.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      Seriously. The government could have just leased rights to the land for 100 years to the railroad companies.
      - justrealist 4y ago
        We don't need to go full PRC, we can just make land grants that make geometric sense.
        4y ago
tshaddox 4y ago
> I understand that it has to be done to make the world work but it absolutely disproportionally effects rural people while the benefits go to the urban areas. This seems like a bit of a stretch. The usage of extremely tiny portions of rural land for infrastructure pales in comparison to the ludicrously large subsidies of rural areas by urban areas.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  > ludicrously large subsidies of rural areas by urban areas Which subsidies are you referring to? The department of agriculture does have subsidies, but they measure in the (<10) billions which I don’t think we can call ludicrously large in comparison.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    I'm mostly just talking about tax revenue versus public spending, since that's probably the easiest to get objective numbers for. But of course it's still going to depend on where you draw the line between "urban" and "rural" (I would probably want to look at dense urban centers versus everything else). With a quick Google you can find a bunch of studies showing that urban areas subsidize rural areas as well as a bunch of articles "debunking" those studies, so I'm sure anyone can find the conclusion they were looking for. There is also subtler stuff that isn't exactly "subsidy" but is perhaps suggestive of societal conflict between urban and rural areas, for example vastly disproportionate political representation (in the United States).
Gasp0de 4y ago
They should absolutely get paid (and they are in most civilized countries). But they shouldn't have a veto right. I private ownership of land is a weird concept anyway.
- eppp 4y ago
  They get paid a pittance compared to the value of what is provided.

MonaroVXR 4y ago

In from the Netherlands too,can you find me the company name? I think someone is interested in this as well.