Re: energy in UK

On 2025-04-21 23:54, Don Y wrote:

On 4/21/2025 9:48 AM, Joe Gwinn wrote:

The 5-to-1 is installation only, but it's hard for decreased
maintenance and repair to make enough difference to tilt the balance.

 Hmmm, I would have thought damage from storms (branches falling on
overhead lines), "accidents" (drivers skidding in snow; drunks)
and the inevitable "road widening" operations would be very costly.

Floods can kill underground service, too.
...

Here, we are plagued with /caliche/ making digging very difficult

new word to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliche
Caliche (/kəˈliːtʃiː/) (unrelated to the street-slang "Caliche" spoken in El Salvador) is a soil accumulation of soluble calcium carbonate at depth, where it precipitates and binds other materials—such as gravel, sand, clay, and silt. It occurs worldwide, in aridisol and mollisol soil orders—generally in arid or semiarid regions, including in central and western Australia, in the Kalahari Desert, in the High Plains of the western United States, in the Sonoran Desert, Chihuahuan Desert and Mojave Desert of North America, and in eastern Saudi Arabia at Al-Hasa. Caliche is also known as calcrete or kankar (in India). It belongs to the duricrusts. The term caliche is borrowed from Spanish and is originally from the Latin word calx, meaning lime.[1]
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Cheers, Carlos.