/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1527819
When your entire country is steamrolled and rebuilt in the 1950s, which was after most electrical systems solidified and people learned what was best, hey, you can build nice things!

The USA has not had that opportunity. We basically invented the stuff and there was no national plan for rolling it out. Some systems were AC, some were DC. Some AC systems were 25 Hz, others were 50, others were 60. Single phase and three phase too. Every regional operator had their own power plant or dam, designed by their own engineers, who all had different ideas about what was best. Remember, many early systems in the USA were for lighting only or industrial machines only. Sometimes a company would build their own plant just to power their own facility and only later expand to the surrounding area. Hell, we didn't even unify our AC systems to 60 Hz until after WWII. Parts of New York still had DC available until 2007, which was a 125 year old system first installed by Edison himself. There is a lot of existing infrastructure and no one wants to spend the money on replacing large parts of it. Same reason why electric/hydrogen vehicle infrastructure and fiber optic hasn't sprung up overnight.

I leave near an area that was wiped out by a large fire in 2018. One of the nice things about that is the local telco is running fiber the whole way. No more copper lines at the street level. When you have to rebuild everything anyway it makes it a lot easier.