What do you call this place?

Favrion@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 261 points –

Electric Valley? Wire Canyon? Zap Way?

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I used the term Hydro line once on Reddit and had a lot of people asking what the hell I was talking about.

Are you Canadian by any chance? It's common in Canada to call electrical utilities "hydro" whether there's water generation or not. In the states they don't do this as much. At least not in my experience.

Similarly, in the US we have “telephone poles” to carry residential power lines, even if there are no telecom wires on them.

I call them that sometimes, but mostly just "power lines."

But what do you call the actual wooden pole that holds the power lines? Like if someone hit the pole how would you describe it?

Utility poles. Could carry electricity and/or telephone and/or cable tv. In some places it may be home to street lights, sirens, emergency signals, fiber optic cables & junctions/splitters, or other infrastructure.

Interesting. I haven't heard them called that, even though I'm in a state where most electricity is from hydro, And my state borders Canada.

Well hello there Washington citizen! WA is the only state in the US to get most of its electricity from hydro.

You've got a great river system up there and WA manages to put it all to great use. If the whole country had that kind of river network, perhaps we'd all be running on renewables...

Ah - I didn't know we were the only ones who do. But yes, it's nice to have that. I understand we also have the largest ferry system in at least the US, although I think that's not directly related to the rivers.

To me "hydro line" sounds like a weird way to say "water pipe".

Mostly because hydro means water. Of course that would be confusing.