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NEWS broadcasts yesterday headlined reports of power outages across Victoria which left thousands of homes without electricity.

On Monday and Tuesday, it was Sydney’s turn to succumb to winds generated from a strong cold front which cut power to nearly 10,000 homes as electricity lines came down.

The weather was by no means unusual, nor was the loss of power. It’s the price we pay for having power lines strung from poles across the metropolitan area. They will come down whenever the wind blows.

So it doesn’t make much sense for the Rudd Labor Government to string its much-vaunted hi-tech glass fibre national broadband networks (NBN) lines on the same rotting wooden poles.

Surely the whole 21st century concept of providing a “nation-building infrastructure needed for tomorrow”, to use Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s own overblown description of the scheme, demands something more substantial than transmission towers built to meet the demands of the 19th century?

Taxpayers, who will be saddled with a $43 billion debt for the network, should be demanding surety of service, not a high-risk web of hundreds of thousands of kilometres of vulnerable overhead cabling.

The problem is that the NBN was a spur-of-the-moment decision without the backing of any research and no proper costing or business plan. The Government is now searching for ways to reduce the stupendous cost burden.

Running dangerous overhead lines is the Government’s first option to reduce the cost. It should be the last.

In a number of submissions to the Federal Government’s Senate Select Committee, a variety of groups have pointed out the foolishness of the low-cost overhead roll-out.

Some refer to the findings of a $1.5 million study conducted for the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts by Optus and Telstra in 1998 titled Putting Cables Underground which concluded (presciently) that undergrounding electricity lines would decrease transmission losses and reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions.

Other timely conclusions included the reduction of bushfire risk, reduced electricity outages and a reduction in the number of electrocutions, reduced network maintenance costs, reduced numbers of vehicle collisions with poles, reduced costs of tree pruning and a beneficial impact on property values.

Placing all cables underground makes sense. Up to 10 per cent of all road deaths currently involve a roadside pole.

The lobby group Cables Down Under also claims that underground cables are up to five times more reliable than overhead networks and cost 50 per cent less to maintain. The undergrounding initiative is also supported by the NSW Local Government Association.

Commonsense should apply. Even an amateur DIY handyman would understand the difference between repairing a broken copper wire connection with a simple twist and the technical difficulties involved in joining a brittle glass fibre.

If we are to believe the Government, there is a crying need to go into hock to pay for the NBN because it will essentially replace all other forms of communication.

To place such a network at risk by stringing it between poles rather than undergrounding negates the thinking behind building a modern web.

In every bushfire around Sydney in the past 30 years, wooden power and telephone poles have been burnt down, cutting communications in a crisis.

In some areas, those wooden poles have now been replaced with concrete replicas but the threat to the wires is the same.

In the 1994 bushfires there were power and communications failures to the south, west and north of the city. In the 2003 ACT fires suburbs of Canberra lost communication and power lines.

The severe storms that sweep NSW are just as likely to smash the communication and power distribution networks – as Blacktown residents learnt to their cost in February last year, when thousands were left without power or communications for weeks.

NSW has suffered enough from patch-work solutions to pressing problems (look at the Cahill Expressway) and the repeatedly-announced plans to fix the public transport system. It seems that the Federal Labor Government is now determined to impose a second-rate Third World solution to this latest challenge.

Anyone who has seen the webs of wires hanging from poles in Asian and South and Central American slums will be familiar with the answer the Rudd Government has in mind for its broadband rollout.

Cheap and nasty comes to mind but ugly, inefficient and ultimately more costly is closer to the mark.

Source: Piers Akerman – Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 11:04pm

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/powerful_arguments_for_rudd_to_go_underground