Isaiah Taylor

Power does not travel through the cable.

it travels through the electrical field around the cable.

If a power line is underground, you have resistance with the ground.

The electromagnetic field is actually traveling through the dirt,

and you're picking up all sorts of resistance along that.

So bearing cables, now maybe we're making enough energy that we don't care about that, and we just decide to bury it.

But another way to think about this is keep it above ground because it's cheaper that way and because you lose less energy, and then have it more decentralized, which means one cable set going down doesn't destroy the whole grid.

That's an alternative way to do it.

And then you don't really have to worry about the fact that they're above ground or that one transformer got blown up or these sorts of things.

If it's broken up into smaller risk areas and it's diversified, then you just don't have to worry about these problems that much and the system solves itself.

Yeah, another way you can do this is with insulation, that sort of thing.

Again, anything underground is more expensive, right?

You're digging, you've got groundwork, you're thinking about ground stability, these sorts of things.

And these are problems we figured out.

So the short answer to your question is like, yes, you certainly could bury the lines and that would solve some of the vulnerability problem.

And my argument to that would be like, let's try that.

Let's try that in a microgrid.

And let's try another grid over here that has above ground infrastructure.

And we're going to learn a lot of lessons.

And maybe we'll find out that the buried infrastructure had a different vulnerability than the above ground did.