Here in Germany there were still enough protests even against buried cables. The construction is still disruptive, and they aren't completely invisible afterwards (they emit heat that can lead to visibly different vegetation on the surface, and you can't plant trees on them) so they don't really satisfy the "but my property prices" crowd (of course they have a long list of real and imagined concerns, but imho they mostly boil down to disruption from construction, pseudoscience and property prices)
Moving the discussion to "we put some sculptures in your landscape, and in return those sculptures carry some cables" might genuinely help
> Moving the discussion to "we put some sculptures in your landscape, and in return those sculptures carry some cables" might genuinely help [..]
If you have the Alps on your doorstep, you may simply want your landscape to stay the way it is, neither adding (modern) sculptures nor (overground) power cables.
I think this is one of many times it's not possible for everything to stay the same. If everyone fights and delays switch away from fossil fuels, the landscape will change in one way. If these lines are run, it will change in another. I have my opinions about which a true nature lover would prefer.
The litmus test for all "oh noes! Don't put any engineering into our pretty mountains!" should always be a proposal to dismantle the Karprun reservoirs, the Landwasser viaduct and the Stelvio hairpins. Because visible engineering is bad, right?
The Alps are mostly impacted. Once you reach the mountains in Germany there aren't many consumers of electricity left requiring new power lines.
The big new power lines are needed to get electricity from offshore Windparks in the Northern and Baltic Sea to industrial zones south. The conflicts are with villagers in probably nice but not as special areas as the Alps.
Where I live there is a very ugly line of cables that follows a motorway. This motorway was built recently. Surely they could have put a cable duct, trench or similar alongside it, or an under the adjacent cycle path. Maintenance would surely be cheaper too.
> Surely they could have put a cable duct, trench or similar alongside it, or an under the adjacent cycle path. Maintenance would surely be cheaper too.
Burying a cable is 3x to 10x more expensive than running it overhead. [1]
Although faults are less common, they become much more expensive to fix - digging the cables up to fix is expensive, and it's even more expensive when you don't know quite where the fault is and you need a bunch of exploratory digging.
And unlike California, Austria doesn't have a load of wildfire problems.
I’m sure the equation is different when the cabling is following a route that’s already having earthworks done, but that would seem unlikely to overcome a 4-5x price difference.
Not an expert on this, but why do the cables have to be buried? Couldn't you put them into a trench with some kind of cover, that could be quickly be opened again for maintenance?
That’s one way cables are often routed next to railroad tracks. A concrete trench with concrete covering slabs. I’m sure it’s more expensive than just digging, though it serves to make the cables serviceable.
Moving the discussion to "we put some sculptures in your landscape, and in return those sculptures carry some cables" might genuinely help