Extra extra read all about it: Use code ANYAUSTIN50 to get 50% OFF your first Factor box plus 20% off your next month of orders at bit.ly/3XFDRf4 And also big thanks to Grady for being in my video. Check out his channel: www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel And finally thanks for watching I love you have fun see you later.
Electrician here It is VERY common for poles to not be connected to anything. upgrades, houses demolished, new lines, there will be poles that "dead end", and they just leave it there for future use for the case where you figure they could have jumped to a building from a closer pole, that is also realistic. it has everything to do with the load characteristics of the building. the circuit which is closer to the building is likely not sufficiently large to supply the whole building, or the incorrect voltage the only thing that doesn't happen frequently, is buildings connecting electricity from one to the next. this is almost never done, so i would assume the overhead connected apartments are actually low voltage or fiber optic/internet. finally, your overhead service example is 50 years old. its called open bus system to have 3 or 4 racks connected to the building. nowadays they use 1 rack and use a twisted set of wires for 3x less work and the same outcome. sick vid thanks
I am imagining a game were they hire electricians, plumbers, etc to make sure everything looks right, that guy that is a pro at geoguessr for the vegetation/roads etc
Fun Fact: They originally had animations for electricians being up on the poles doing maintenance that were likely disabled during optimization. I've seen at least one mod for turning them back on so someone was definitely going the extra mile in development.
Omg I was so surprised. Loved the Cameo. I also got your book it's fantastic. After I read it I keep it up on display for my friends to look at and ask questions about
it's like when i was playing Skyrim and reading reddit comments about the game, someone mentioned they like to collect Scimtars for no reason. They could all be the same ones with 0 difference. i immediately started collecting my own. Or someone i watched playing for the first time saw that the wall carvings in the rooms with the claw key doors, seemed to somewhat line up with what the claw says is the correct solution. So i started looking at them too. lmao
I'm a transmission line engineer, and one of my projects actually required me to do pretty much the same thing you did in this video. We were modeling transmission poles, which carry higher-voltage wires than all of the distribution poles they use in the game. But especially when they run through urban areas, transmission poles will often have lower-voltage distribution wires (the kind that can go directly to a building) and communication (phone, internet, etc) wires attached to them too. We had to model all of those little offshoots in order to accurately tell whether the poles were overburdened. So I spent countless hours in google earth street view, following utility lines. We had to track each separate cable that attached to the poles and guess at what type of wire it was, then model them wherever they attached to our poles. So congrats Austin, you did the work of a transmission line engineer for this video!
Also I actually requested that you do a video on the electrical infrastructure in cyberpunk 2077, so I was so excited to see this video! You did a fantastic job and really covered pretty much everything interesting about the topic. I was also screaming when Grady made a cameo. Fantastic job dude!
@@tedgrove7775 When you're trying to tell the utility company if their poles are liable to fall down and kill someone or not, or just exactly how large a factor of safety they are truly working with, it gives you a little bit more enthusiasm to do it correctly. You're also getting paid for every hour you spend on that, so it's really not so bad.
eventually austin will have enough city planning, engineering, and socioeconomics knowledge to build his own town. and they say video games aren't educational
@@travismcnasty51 he can just have Memoria cover that tbh, she's demonstrated a strong propensity for economic girlbossing, and was the original discoverer of loans
22:27 - that's just a ghost pole. I'm a fully qualified spiritual Electrical Engineer and when a pole dies, sometimes it's soul will stay, and hold up the power lines. This normally only works for about 3 years, then it's soul realises it has died and leaves for pole heaven.
As someone who builds powerlines what stands out is all poles with a single wire that's not really a thing. And not every single pole needs transformer cans.
Yeah, it's strange to have that many step-down transformer cans since you realistically only need them when connecting to services. Liberty City should be in uproar of this waste of tax payer dollars.
these videos make me look at my favorite games thru a new lens I never would’ve considered otherwise. powerline is also the name of the famous rockstar in A Goofy Movie
This might be a weird compliment, but I love so much how you don't use these sorts of videos as a way to criticize. The most important thing is that the game *feel* right, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy spending too much time examining them.
Yup, definitely! I feel like these videos do still criticize in a way, ultimately they still do judge the realism of a game (criticism doesn't have to be negative or even serious ^_^). It's really refreshing and fun to just follow these un-asked questions of "huh i wonder if the power grid is connected" or just in general "how would this even work irl" and just going from there, and to see how the differences can exist between the game's representation and how it would actually work. Also, the way that this is done as an opportunity to teach and educate about these tiny details most people don't realise is really unique, gotta respect the dedication to creating those diagrams :3
@@TheFrostedDevyeah I agree, it’s nice to see criticism on UA-cam that’s not the sneering CinemaSins style “here’s all the things you got wrong, I am very smart” kind 🥰
Here in the Netherlands we started moving away from utility poles towards underground lines in the 50s and 60s so nowadays they're only present in some sparsely populated rural areas. IOW when a Dutchman witnesses utility poles in his direct environment he's anxiously aware he's in hillbilly land and needs to return to civilization ASAP.
One of my neighbors as a kid told me if you touched one of those anchor points you would die… after I already touched it. And instead of realizing they were obviously wrong, I just waited in terror day by day for the inevitable end.
The thing with Rusty Schit is painfully realistic. it's the kind of thing that happens when a place like Rusty's was built 20 years ago and was the only thing that needed power there. Then the area grows and more industrial buildings pop up so they decide to run another line straight down the middle to service all the new places. Nobody thinks it's good and it's certainly not designed that way from the start, it's just legacy situations being patched over because it's easier and cheaper than doing it properly.
Yup, zero electrical reason, entirely cheap and lazy. Its part of why overhead is so great because you can just do patchwork jobs like that so easily, underground takes a bit more planning and thought.
The problem with this explanation is that (IIRC) this building is in Algonquin which, like manhattan, has been fully developed and urbanised for at least 200 years by this point. It certainly wouldn’t have been developed only as soon as 20 years ago.
@@RESIST_DIGITAL_ID_UKyeah and they've had electrical infrastructure for more than a century, including times when electrical hookups were an expensive luxury. The building might've been built in that time, paid to get hooked up, and then later the second line was built to serve the rest of the area.
Honestly I thought perhaps the opposite may have happened: Rusty's building being one of several industrial sites in that area built at the same time & all served by that longer line of poles, but all the rest were demolished & now only Rusty's and the poles connecting it remain
Electrical engineer here! 11:45 One of the reasons higher voltage is used to transmit power over long distances because power loss is a function of the current squared and the line's resistance (P = I * I * R), and by raising the voltage of a line you are able to reduce the current by a proportional amount, which then has an exponential effect on reducing power loss. For example, 2x the voltage results in 1/4 the power loss to the line's natural resistance. Great video 👍
Don't you also lose less energy due to not emitting as much heat with a lower current ratio? I'm not sure how significant that is either way but it seems like a relevant aspect as well, woo thermodynamics
@@syrelian You're correct, but also talking about the same thing here. The power loss in a wire is lost as heat. Talking about "power loss" in a wire is really just a way to talk about how much electrical energy is being converted to thermal energy (heat) over time. Energy can't be created nor destroyed, so anytime someone talks about "losing" energy they're really meaning that the energy is converted from the energy they want (electrical energy, in our case) to one we don't want (heat).
@@jacobspadt2567 Also, don't forget magnetic energy :P At house level, it is negligible but with high frequency or high voltage+long distance it becomes significant. High frequency is mostly telecom and why optical is preferred there, but high voltage and long distance is a factor for another type of substation : with modern power electronics it becomes interesting to convert AC sources to DC power lines then DC to AC again, especially if the connection is a transfer line between two different synchronization girds. (An electrical grid need that all is part is synchronized on a single frequency and a DC to AC provide added stability with no additional costs. Like when your long line is hit by solar flares, the conversion stabilizes the output.)
I'm a early thirties cat lady that doesn't play Grand Theft Auto- I came here over Skyrim unemployment forever ago .. Now for some reason when I'm bored Austin and his hair clips is the go to channel. I love the level of nerd it takes to let alone do off shoot subjects like this but to also attract random gamers that don't even play the game mentioned. Keep at it. Its working for some reason.
Electrical engineer here, only reason I can foresee all those lines going into one small building is that the building is either a facade for an underground train station electrical station or the connections have been Jerry rigged for an illegal hydroponics growing operation, sometimes those places will pay for multiple electrical connections to not appear as suspicious with the huge amount of energy or sometimes they'll just connect directly and bypass meters but that's more obvious
How in the hell can you buy multiple hookups to the same address and not immediately get flagged as suspicious? There's only one distributor in an area, so they would absolutely notice something suspicious is going on. Even in the case of multiple meters for a sub-letting thing, wouldn't they just branch at the house instead of running an entire second drop?
@@dustinbrueggemann1875 No, because of load demands. In an industrial property like that it's feasible to assume each "business" would really require as close to 100% of the available incoming power as possible, so it makes more sense to run 3 drops from 3 different transformers.
Curious, what's the reason those farms are so energy intensive? Is it hydroponic systems themselves, or do illegal operations use artificial lights to look like a regular building from a bird's eye view?
This is exactly why I think UA-cam is a pretty special source of content these days. Highly specific, niche content that can be so unbelievably right up one individual person's alley that it's almost incomprehensible how the premise was even concepted to begin with. No reality show slop, no boring lowest common denominator mass-appeal drivel... I spend 45 minutes looking at a Netflix home screen and turn it off, completely disheartened, after finding nothing worthwhile. I open my UA-cam subs and immediately am presented with a 25 minute long video called "Do Liberty City's Power Lines Connect to Anything?" and I am so overwhelmingly fulfilled with a highly specific sense of satisfaction and joy. Appreciate it, and keep up the good, weird, and CIA-secret-spy-satellite-hyper-focused-laser-targeted content that got me subbed in the first place.
I am an engineering student. And man your video gave me a clear view on the power conversion system. My teacher even could not help me understand enough. Now I got a clearer view on the matter thanks to this lol
I love these connection videos- first unemployment surveys, then hydrological surveys, now electrical, Austin is out to become the ultimate Video Game Department of Community Development employee ❤
imaging being the game designer who did this work.. never in a million years did they think someone would research this. man this is why i love the internet. you yourself think of things no one else really does but then you get people who do that and make these type of videos. just awesome
The game designer is in Edinburgh. They've probably never seen an overhead power line in a city. They dont exist in the urban fabric of developed nations.
Yeah I rather wish the actual time and effort (burned resource) was actually spent into making this game into a good game. Especially keep in mind that you babies don't know that this game was basically unplayable on PC, prior the mentioned port wasnt any better, on s*itbox360 it was bugged to hell and back and I forgot what it was like on PS3, probably the best of them all but still a mess anyway. Graphically it was a blurry pissfilter mess and on top of that had too many technical issues to mention on here so I wont. Some things were patched some not and many didnt had their consoles connected to the net anyway so yeah good luck playing this mess. The GTA4 game we have today isnt the same from back then, its a different build, its ok-ish but isnt too much better. Doesnt change the fact that story is garbage and characters inacurate even for a parody. So no matter the tech, the overall games is a joke. Just by Niko Belic alone, he is native Serbian yet he cant speak Serbian, he worked in Russia yet he cant speak Russian either, his words and voice is a typical westerner trying too hard to be stereotipical of too many things at once to the point he forgot wtf role he is even suppose to play. Other characters are not any better. Animations, oh boy ... cars behave like boats, characters movements are like they are drunk or on crack 24 7 same apply to the things they say. glitches, bugs, bla bla bla Im done Lots of you played it as is for the heck of it, or bcs you didnt know any better what to do with your life and equally a big chunk of people imagined it playing. "oh I played that game it was great" no you didnt, no it isnt, stfu ...
@@dairallan Rockstar always took trips to look at the city they were basing a map on, this is absolutely something they took pictures of and implemented into the game on purpose, it's basically why they took those trips in the first place, stuff like this.
Ghost poles is what I call poles that stand alone they used to connect but not anymore due to the buildings being demolished and underground cables being more easy on the eyes plus at 7:40 you can see the classic village in the sky type development that took over old New York neighborhoods that used to be filled with row homes and brown stones but now are those ugly buildings which use underground connections instead of poles leaving you guessed it Ghost Poles
Electrical engineer who works in the utilities here. This is a very well done and well researched video! Thank you for posting this. A few quick pieces of information from your video. Yes, abandoned standalone poles and even transformers left on them can be somewhat common. It doesn't make sense to put the labor into removing the pole just because it isn't actively in use. In terms of that weird industrial building with the power lines coming in on 3 sides, no you're not going to see that. Yes hypothetically you could have different feeds coming into different parts of the plant, but the way it's actually done is all the power (almost certainly 3 phase in this case) would come into the building into a switchgear room (think like the breaker panel for your home but with heavy duty high amperage equipment) that would then divert power throughout the plant. That substation is definitely cobbled together. There should be 3 wires for 3 phase power but they only had 2, which is what you would see on a distribution line to a small neighborhood. Also one last thing, about high voltage being better to transmit, electricity is measured in wattage. To get wattage, you multiply current by voltage to get the full number, so for instance 120 volts carrying 2 amps would be 240 watts. What transformers do is use magnetism to 'trade' current and voltage. This makes transferring energy much more efficient, as high current tends to create heat (and loss of energy in this heat) on lines it's sitting in. Those pot transformers on the pole are to further step down the voltage and up the amperage before it reaches your home. To recap the journey of electricity to your home: Power Plant (Distribution level voltage with very high current) -> Power plant substation (transformation to high voltage low current) -> Distribution Substation (Transformation to distribution level voltage with moderate current) -> Pot or padmount transformer to your home (high voltage moderate current to low voltage high current) -> Your outlets. Current is what actually does the things and voltage is what gets it there. Hope this helps you and your viewers learn! It's a great career and I encourage people to look into it.
Datacenter I could see having power coming from two different feeds (or even three) on different sides of the building for redundancy reasons. It's very common to do so with things like the fiber optics for data centers, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's also done in some cases for power.
@@tankerkiller125 Redundancy off the same feeder? Typically if someone needs redundancy they'll have an in-house diesel generator. All you're insuring for with multiple feeds off the same feeder is distribution transformer failure, which is kind of stupid.
A great comment! I worked at a company building transformers for 32 years! My husband also worked in the same place for 43 years. He was called a stacker and he put together (stacked) the core and coil assemblies. It was piece work so he stayed at that job his entire working life! I, on the other hand was a material handler, than an assembler, then shipping/receiving lead person on 2nd shift. We made large substation power units as well as the smaller three phase units. One of our other divisions made pole types. My favorite part of the job was wiring the control panels for the power units. My least favorite was sitting on top of units and bolting covers down after they were filled with oil! Ugh! Anyway we both retired from that company about 12 years ago. It was a good company to work for and allowed us to retire comfortably! Thank you for bringing back some good memories!
If I had a nickel for every SWBF transition screen that was used in a video posted today, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. (Luck Stat's video, "Pandemic Studios: The Rise and Fall", ua-cam.com/video/ZqxPtnDQYlU/v-deo.html )
I heard the sound as I was looking away for a second and my head snapped back to the video so fast. That game was part of my childhood and I would recognise that sound anywhere.
As someone who draws blueprints for power infrastructure projects, this was a pretty good, accurate video on the topic of electrical infrastructure realism in GTA. Actually, I do have one note: "its either underground or overhead, you can't have it both ways". The two mix all the time. Individuals can pay to have their service drop run underground from the house to the pole feeding it. In my city, overhead power runs underground when it needs to cross the highway on an overpass. Some entire neighborhoods get converted to underground while the surrounding neighborhoods stay overhead depending on where infrastructure is failing the most. Cities are especially chaotic in this regard, since both underground and overhead have their own pros and cons, and the dense, complicated, and busy nature of cities often requires similarly described power solutions. The one thing I will say is any given span of power supplying wires will always be one or the other (ie, there are normally 3-4 individual wires powering your house, they will all either be OH or UG), but span to span, street to street, it can change for a variety of reasons. Also, that building connected from 3 separate poles from 3 separate directions: The only reason this would happen is if the building has 3 meters (multiple meters are common in situations like apartments, where each unit has its own power bill), but for some insane reason, the 3 meters are on 3 sides of the building. That doesn't really happen. Even then, its still likely the three meters would be fed by the same pole, and just have entrance cable running along the top of the building from the closest point of contact to all 3 meters. Realistically, the setup shown in game would never happen for several reasons, though its also not technically impossible or broken, just wildly impractical in a way that wouldn't happen even with the normal inefficiencies of the grid.
I'm glad someone mentioned the mix of overhead and underground powerlines. The neighborhood I grew up in, which is within walking distance of where I live now, had all underground, which is true of most of the neighborhoods in this town, (probably for similar snow concerns; we also get thunderstorms with bad enough wind that it'll knock over trees, so you at that to a dense network of lines that are already weighed down with snow and it'll clearly cause issues,) but the main road that I live off of now has powerlines directly above the sidewalk across the street. Edit: I can, in fact, on Google streetview, find the _very pole_ that comes off of the lines next to where I live now, and goes underground before running to my old neighborhood. (Which is kind of crazy, because it has to go across a bridge to do it, but I suppose the bridge has stoplights, so they must be getting power from lines that are _in_ the bridge.) And it just looks like a regular transmission pole, except it's got a bunch of PVC pipes strapped to the side of it, and the power lines drop into the pipes before going straight to the ground. I've driven and walked past that pole thousands of times and never even noticed it was any different until today.
I've seen a substation explode... scary sight. Was sitting in the parking lot of my university, all of a sudden hear this loud buzzing sound coming from my right... I look over and there are giant electrical plasma arcs coming up from a substation a few blocks away. Then all of a sudden one of the huge transformers exploded and the entire area got covered in black smoke. It was an interesting afternoon.
@@doughboywhine yeah, that would be a reasonable start. They'd probably send firefighters (who frequently double as initial hazmat containment) and maybe an ambulance in case of any onsite staff during the explosion, and notify the electric company responsible to get actual engineering crews on site to fix it.
@@youmukonpaku3168there should be failsafes that cut off the station from the electical net if something happens right? Because if not how would you even rescue someone inside I imagine getting to close could be quite dangerous if everything around you could be charged
At rockstar hq: Hey man, do you remember while we were finishing gta 4 map, you told me that no one's ever gonna do a precise analysis of utility poles and wiring in the game, so we shouldn't care about it too much? Well guess what
Probably would be fun, but most of gta IV developers left rockstar at this point. It's possible that the worldbuilding team may still be there, but too many people worked at this game, so, tracking them just to prove a point would be stupid.
8:40 it’s possible that these are two separate circuits and one of them was already too overloaded, so connecting a commercial building (which usually require way more power than housing) meant going out of their way to a circuit with lesser load
7:05 just want to note that if you look near by you can actually see a cable spool on the ground which implies to me it’s one of those real slow construction efforts
@@GeneralKenobi69420basement? Sorry lil buddy, but basements aren’t really a thing here in Australia due to the fact that they only really exist to provide utilities below the freeze line. I’d recommend coming up with an original insult next time that actually applies to who it’s insulting that way you can actually hurt their feelings. Hope this helps :)
Guy who designs utility poles here: My biggest pet peeve looking at all these poles is that wires are SUPER heavy and generate a lot of tension on those poles, which is why we have to design them with brace poles and down guys (the ground anchoring wires -which you definitely still shouldn't touch). If they tried to build this system irl, all of these poles would rip out of the ground instantly like a disaster movie. Also, you'll notice irl that every time power feeds into a building, it first has to step down to a lower voltage via the transformer bucket, leaving as a set of three smaller wires (usually braided into a "triplex"). For simplicity, they just stuck the primary wire straight into the building which, to my understanding, would bring in enough power to make every appliance a potential death trap
While im sure your issues are valid, you also have to remember this is a video game, and thus some stuff has to be changed to due to a variety of reasons, even if developers know its logically wrong. For example, the wires may be extra thick in the game because it makes them less prone to aliasing (jagged edges) or simply make them more visible for players as the game originally ran at 960x544, so not even 720p! You can see this is an issue for the thinner chain link fence at 5:47, it is jagged, anti-aliasing causes shimmers, and most of it isnt even visible.
Its plausible that for whatever deranged GTA reason, the transformers are inside the buildings(too many protags hitting the boxes maybe :P ) As for the scale, probably a visual aide, aliasing is a brutal thing on thin objects that makes them look jagged or splintered, and making it thicker helps, as does obviously anti-aliasing options
@@syrelian That's actually the same reason human hair is the thickness it is. Any thinner and the antialiasing would make us realize this is all a simulation
I discovered this channel today and I spent the last hour learning about water and power in fiction places. Now with that in mind. I don't know if you are aware of fake buildings being used for utilities in nyc (at least two of which are known to be substations) these buildings look like normal houses or apartment blocks but are empty facades with opaque windows that are full of infrastructure equipment. since near every building in gta4 is inaccessible to us, and we pretty much never see npc's coming and going from them, we can make a small jump to deduce that they must all be fake buildings. as such any building you cant enter or interact with must be a substation or other utility to service the relatively few you can. this would also explain why the couple of visible substations that are not connected, as the city already has an overabundance of infrastructure redundancy and the open substations may even have been vandalised ( perhaps explaining the bad wiring and such), and so have been largely disconnected from the grid to protect the city infrastructure and public. Hell if we want to make some less plausible (because clearly my theory is flawless so far) jumps in logic we could suggest that all of the power grid from mining/drilling fuel to delivery is hidden in these buildings. I seem to remember Los Angeles uses this strategy of fake buildings to hide urban oil drilling. now we know liberty city is a strange disconnected archipelago city, so perhaps they found a way to take this fake building thing to its illogical endpoint and use it to become independent and self sufficient and the nuclear power plant is an artifact from when they were reliant on deliveries of nuclear fuel. All of this said, If it isn't evident by now, I am not in any way a relevant professional in this field. So this is probably not the case, and it's just a fun video game about car theft and crime families, that really need not waste it's devs time in creating fully explained power grids. ...unless I'm right. Loved the video, I feel like this channel perfectly encapsulates the UA-cam content that defies categorisation niche. Can't wait to see you explain the Los Santos import export shipping trade (or whatever else you choose is cool too, I guess)
I remember getting GTA IV when I was a kid and being so excited to play it. When I got home I turned it on and immediately broke into tears when I realized the electrical infrastructure wasn't realistic. At that point, it was impossible for me to enjoy the game because I just kept asking myself how the lights were on in all the buildings. My immersion was broken so I haven't touched the game since
The writing in this is so subtly good! Calling the creators "developers" for wide appeal, then readjusting the term to "artists" - so respectful and clear and aware of the industry. All the attention to silly details is very entertaining, and just love how this was put together.
(Electrician here) Substations step up voltage (power) for transmission over long distances because of ohms law. Almost all conductors have some degree of resistance (which opposes voltage), so a long length of wire would have a lot of resistance. So to keep losses minimal, voltage is stepped up so that any resistance present in the transmission line will not impact it's usage far away from the source. There is a lot more to it, but that's the gist of it. An additional perk is that there is an inverse ratio between voltage and amperage (ohms law again), so if you step up voltage then amperage drops, this allows you to transmit power using smaller gauge wires. (cost savings!)
@@planetslime Superconductors, still waiting for room temp. 20 years every year. And sometimes just like claims of dark alchemy but that doesn't seem to have borne fruit.
I just want whoever does the Sponsor Block segment control for these videos to know that your millisecond perfect timing and seamless transitions making it impossible to even *notice* the sponsored segments is greatly f***ing appreciated. Holy crap it is so consistently good.
Power systems engineer here: I started typing out a comment to respond to 8:45 and then he went on to perfectly describe the reality of having many people with different priorities working together 😂 Great video!
Electrical engineer here (something I've commented on Grady's videos before), although not on the utility side, but rather the building side. It's actually increasingly rare to see overhead lines run to buildings, especially on the commercial side. Many utility companies will require underground connections for new work, unless there is some extenuating circumstance, even if the neighborhood has all overhead wires. However, most commercial buildings will have a utility transformer set outside the building, so it's very obvious that it is an underground service. And for neghborhoods where wires are buried, there will be a transformer every third or fourth home to serve them.
God you nailed what I mean when I say "I don't want realism, I want "believable-ism" in games. I don't need a 1:1 recreation of my world. I just need it to be consistent within itself and at least realistic that I can act much as I do in real life. I do not question where the power comes from and goes. I understand that electrical poles act as a line to bring it to me from a substation that is fed off the generation source. I don't question where the river down the road starts. I know it's somewhere northwest of here by several hundred miles minimum probably much more. That's all I know. In GTA I never once questioned the power lines and in Skyrim I never questioned the rivers. Their realism existed not as a perfect recreation but as one that would, to any layman, appear normal. I realize now that the reason I always find guns frustrating is because I know guns inside and out. I know this subject in far more depth than most. Leaving me unable to miss the little mistakes.
What about having a game feature of taking out the right power lines to cut power to an area, or a sandbox that lets you dam and flood areas with water flow?
Been following this channel for a couple of years now. It’s really great to see how you’ve found your voice and that you’re getting exposure. Keep up the good work.
Seemed very obvious to me.. A lot of "look how much work this is to map this all out" in this video, while truth be told, it takes at most a few hours. There were 50 icons on that map, not as if it was a behemoth of thousands of poles.
About the poles that seem like dead ends: It doesn't look like they were modelled differently so it probably wasn't intended, but those could be dip poles/riser poles. These are poles that have the wire running down them and continuing underground
Electricity metering installation inspector here! Love the video and I'll always support more eyes on electricity infrastructure! A couple standout points to note: 1) Around the 9 minute mark you mention the Rusty Schit building connected to a line farther away than a closer point. A couple reasons for this first of all could be that the closer line was built later and they didn't connect because the building already had power. Also could be that there used to be other buildings in the area connected to the offshoot you pointed out. Also the key word in electric grid construction is redundancy! So that in case you have a downed line it doesn't mess up the whole system. 2) As some others have mentioned it's really weird that all the overhead lines only have one wire. Normally distribution systems (the power lines close to customers i.e. in cities etc.) use 3-phase AC current which means three or four wires (one for each phase and one ground which isn't always present). This is made even stranger by the fact that the larger taller overhead lines in some places in the video seem to have three lines, very weird. Unless the distribution system is all DC and all buildings have their own converters or the city distributes single phase AC this makes no sense! 3) The poles which have a line coming in and no line coming out all seem to have transformer cans on them (also it's weird that there always seems to be two transformers for only one wire???). This likely means that there's a wire running into the ground as a lot of distribution grids in big cities include underground lines so that there isn't as many wires overhead and also because underground lines are less prone to sagging down into the street on particularly hot says with high loads (think of hot summer days where everyone is running their air conditioners).
ok idk if this would be at all useful as a video but since i’ve started watching you, all i can think is that you would enjoy disney’s extremely goofy skateboarding (2001). its maps are incredibly unsettling
@@pumpernickelspices dude the graphics are rough and i mostly remember it being like. weird vacant cityscapes? and empty beaches? i had it as a kid and couldn’t get past the first few levels tho
I'm an electrical engineer, the building with inefficient wiring could happen in real life if the city redeveloped and just left the old wiring when they added a new power line branch
The building with tons of wires connected to it kind of reminds me of the cable we have attached to our house. Sure it's stuck to what looks like a "power pole" but it's an old TV cable. We could remove it but honestly, birds like sitting on it, so there it stays.
The thing that surprised me was that you were drawing the grid out on paper, but you hadn't printed out a map of Liberty City to draw it on. Anyway, love what you're doing.
More like this ❤ This and the water flow in Hyrule, unemployment direct surveys, and neat unappreciated places. Keep exploring new intricacies of things we didn't appreciate enough. ❤
Substation Electrical Design engineer here, never thought to see one of my favorite youtubers talking about what i do for work every day. Cool stuff, keep it up.
Higher voltage travels better because it reduces the current while transmitting the same power(power = current * voltage). Wires get hot if they're too thin for the current, which is how toasters work.
i think my favorite part of this video is the hand drawn map. it reminds me of how as a kid my classmates used to make fun of maps from centuries past for being wonky and incorrect, extrapolating information wrong or repeating things, inventing features that aren’t there. seeing you struggle to hand draw the grid made me think about how difficult it must’ve been to map the real world with much more limited information back in the day
My town has like 10-12 poles going out to an empty field with nothing else attached to them, because 15 years ago there was going to be houses built there, but for whatever reason they didnt end up getting built
11:47 That guy here to help! :) ⚡⚡ When the substation makes the electricity higher voltage, this also majorly slows down the electricity's current (speed), which is the substation's real goal. Fast current through the wires generates a lot of heat (like moving your hand quickly across carpet) meaning our useful electrical energy is being transformed into useless heat. So instead, slowing down the current minimises the heat generated and therefore energy lost, making a more efficient power grid! A little long winded but i hope I've given a little back to our learning together on this channel 😎 any more Qs, just lmk 😌
@@zacdoodles5717 I learned way too much about NYC's power grid due to a detective novel where the murderer rigged up and used arc flashes to kill people
8:35 Electrical Distribution Engineer (a.k.a, nerd) here. You make a poignant observation here. Yes, there are wide and varied reasons why service lines might be built in a way that seems counterintuitive or built at excessive length. One common reason for example, is that the existing pole-mounted transformers (those things that look like silver cans) closest to this particular factory building does not supply the output voltage that customer requires for their equipment. Typical residential houses need transformers to supply an output voltage of 120/240V. Commercial services might need more “juice” (for example, 277/480 Volts) to sufficiently give them the power required to run heavier machinery than what you or i run inside our homes or apartments. Great video Austin, keep up the fun ideas! (P.S. thanks for loving us nerds! Lol)
Amazing having Brady from Practical Engineering here! I have the feeling you'll be the reason game studios will start hiring geologists and civil engineers.
I'm an aspiring game developer. I've put little details in games I've made thinking no one would ever notice or care. Knowing someone like you actually exists is very heartwarming
After spending time in New Orleans, I understand why Austin immediately focused in on that leaning power pole. The ground there is so saturated, I'm not sure anything stays level.
Not a lineman, but I am an commercial/industrial electrician so I'll add what insight I can. For the building around 8:30, irl there could be several reasons why it was connected how it was. The one that comes to mind first, is that the branch that splits right may not have existed when the building was first constructed, thus with the service connection being on the left, the utility was coordinated to go that way as well. Later on the right side branch was developed and coincidentally ran closer to the building. Now if you ask yourself why not change it afterwards, the simple answer is money. The connection as is works and is safe, there's no need to change when it's already done, and doing so would mean unnecessary investment of man-hours and materials. Maybe a lineman can correct me but I don't think you will ever see a grid looping back on itself; can do wonky thing to the phases. The multiple services to the same building is a head scratcher for me on a practical level. If there were multiple things inside that needed their own breaker/fuse panel, you would normally just bring in a large service to a main distribution panel, and from that feed a few smaller subpanels to handle whatever their misc need might be. Maybe they're parallel feeds but then why not bring them all in at the same spot? Good niche topic, keep up the good work my man.
I'm a surveyor and after doing many feature surveys, I can confirm it's not impossible for there to be powerlines to nowhere and power poles by themselves. Usually just because the line was decommissioned, and it's easy to pull down the lines but sometimes the poles can be left for months or even years depending on its state, the funding for the location or even just its location. A good example is communication lines, they're everywhere still after becoming almost completely obsolete. Out here in Australia, on both decommissioned and currently in use train lines, there are tens of thousands of communication lines aswell as their poles still standing not connected to anything. I've got photos as proof if your curious
When the telephone lines in our rural area were decommissioned here in Finland, they left all the wires branching out to the properties in place and just took out the wires from the main road, so there's lots of phantom lines here.
Same with the NBN rollout. The overhead telephone lines were decommissioned but left in place. Some people have cut their own lines down and left them rolled up at the bottom of poles, maybe because it was removed for works or they didn't want a pointless wire hanging around. I'm not surprised cables get left lingering, why pay for someone to do work when it doesn't add to your product? A relative's house has 3 or 4 lines connected to the house, only one actually provides anything.
This channel is a goldmine for me because these videos are about things that I've always done in games. I've walked around looking at how the infrastructure in these fictional cities connects and other things that aren't intended. Sometimes I just climb around all of the Vinewood hills backyards in GTA Online. I've stopped in Mario Kart to look at the characters at the side of the road moving like animatronics like in the older videos and if I could easily load up GTA 4 I'd spend maybe an hour walking around "Rusty Schit Salvage" looking at the low poly junked school buses that are slightly to the wrong scale or look at what cars they have on the racks. I'm glad other people do this because I thought I was insane
electrical engineer here! electricity is scary. to be more real for a sec, high voltage travels further because at a power plant power P is produced, and P = R * I² where R is the resistance of the line. And the loss of power over the distance of the line is P_Loss = R * (P / U)² where U is the voltage of the line. R goes up the longer of a power line we measure this drop over, and P is constant because it's the power output of our plant, so if we make U bigger, since it's in the denominator of the fraction, it reduces the amount of power lost over the line. which matters alot on long lines since that increases R. hope that was comprehensible to some people thank you for reading
And electricity consumed by R in the values here is just turned into heat. With heat wires sag and they light trees or other vegetation on fire. There's a reason we bump up voltage when sending it over high distances. The formula the guy referenced here is called Ohm's law.
@@nomms yep, also upping the line voltage also means line amperage is lower, since the equality has to be conserved. Although high voltage lines are still in the 1000 amp range
You had me when you did the classic fakeout at 13:07 ("that's not gonna happen") and then after 2 seconds of silence, you announced Grady and I literally yelled out loud lol. Such a legit collaboration!
I’ve found myself enjoying this series of yours, starting witt the rivers in Skyrim, far more than I initially thought I would. It’s a really simple concept, based on even simpler questions - But your presentation and humour makes it both entertaining and even relaxing to listen to. Keep up the great work man!
Electrician here, though Commercial/Resi rather than Lineman. Have built plenty of masts and service connections though. Normally you would prefer having a single connection to the building, as it will normally condense your electrical hardware to a single location which is important for safety and disconnections in emergency situations. It is possible to have a building with multiple connections, especially if there are multiple tenants or owners and each has a separate connection, or maybe one owner with a lot of high amperage loads that somehow got the utility company to sign off on multiple drops, but that seems unlikely as its kinda shady.
Hey Austin, studying engineer here, love your video and the want to continue learning! The support cables that are diagonally holding down the telephone polls that kids believe they would get electrocuted if touched, are called "down guys" hope this helps!
I’m not saying this to be argumentative or discredit what you said but I feel like reality is probably even more sinister. Most of those officials that seem like they’re not thinking about homeless people are actually overthinking where the homeless people sleep and actively making it worse. Sometimes it’s obvious with anti homeless spikes or something but sometimes it’s completely under the radar by like moving or removing a bench. A lot of it’s done by the land owners but I’m sure every single city has this on the government side too to whatever degree
@@monhi64 To be fair if city officials are pushing for policies like spikes and all that, it's because people don't like homeless people understandably in their neighborhood
@@KoopstaKlicca to be fair that’s friggen obvious to literally every person to ever exist. And to blow all that money for what, moving a homeless person 100 feet or maybe do nothing but make em less comfortable
dude! i only just recently started watching your videos but its so cool to see you getting more recognition now, when i found your channel i was so shocked to see that you werent getting a million on every video. what youre doing is really special, im completely hooked
I live in the Netherlands, here there aren't any powerlines anywhere except the really big high voltage powerline towers that are like 50 meters high. The rest is ALL underground and the grid is still really reliable. I guess if they are underground and build right they don't need a lot maintenance down there I guess.
I work at a power company! Underground lines have the advantage of not having to deal with weather (storms, snow, wind, etc), people (someone driving into a pole or breaking into a substation to steal copper), or trees (every power company spends massive amounts of money on vegetation management). On the other hand, they are about 5 times more expensive to build, at least in Canada where I live. So it's a balancing act for the companies and what makes sense for a particular area.
Another factor to consider: earthquakes. If you don't have them regularly (like in the Netherlands), underground powerlines make a lot of sense. If you _do_ have them, repairing the grid after one apparently becomes an absolute nightmare from what I've read (compared to overhead lines), so they're not really practical for many areas of the world unfortunately.
Yeah in any developed country in Europe they are ALL underground..I tried to think if I've ever seen one anywhere in Europe...I can only think of Greece..and Greece is poor and ghetto..so any GOOD country has them under ground
@@philadelphus3570 in America or Canada you barely see your neighbour...in the Netherlands houses and attached to eachoter...and many countries in Europe are built their homes very closely...with small alleys etc..over head powerlines are impossible
the fact Austin doesn’t even use charts to move around easier to complete these menial tasks for these videos. Dude is dedicated to whatever this vibe is
I love that because Austen takes seriously whatever video subject he deems interesting, the majority of the comments take that subject very seriously too, and so under all such videos there are discussions of professionals on the topic. This is so fascinating, and a very impressive achievement too
I'm so glad I found your videos. You've managed to combine so many of my special interests. A Louisiana local, I lived in New Orleans for six years, and I did an architectural thesis there that focused heavily on energy infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Despite this, I don't have much more knowledge than you - definitely no electrical engineer. Your portion about the NYC snowstorm really highlighted the importance of electrical infrastructure during severe weather events. For a local reference to underground power lines, I do know that during storms in New Orleans, even if a majority of the city loses power, you can go to Entergy's outage map and usually see that most of the French Quarter and CBD are still glowing green. That's because all the lines there are underground, and those are much more resilient to storms since trees and debris (and mylar balloons) can't knock them down. If only we had some money going towards non-aesthetic infrastructural upgrades... (I'm looking at you, lights on the CCC). The energy and water infrastructure supporting and surrounding New Orleans is nothing short of colossal. I really recommend the game Norco if you want to explore the public health implications of living with, among, and against these infrastructural giants. There's also no shortage of academic reading, but games are more fun :) Thanks for the educational video!
on that closing thought, video game lights are the only digital in-game item that also literally exist IRL. You turn on a light in game to illuminate your game world, and it not only uses IRL electricity to power that virtual light, but it also literally lights up your IRL space. Neato.
As someone that 100%'d GTA4 I appreciate this video so much more the tiny details in these massive games get ignored by 98% of people I spent so much time taking my time getting the 100% I didn't want it to end! Amazing video I hope the developer that put that mattress in that specific alleyway sees this and smiles
i love you for using the OG star wars battlefront sound effect for zooming in/pointing out locations every time you used a map. i recognised it was from an old video game i loved instantly when it first played, and despite me thinking really, really hard, it had to play two more times before i had an illumination and figured it out. awesome stuff, really threw me back
You know, at 20:35 ish when Austin says his diatribe about game developers taking a top-down approach to capturing a slice of reality isn’t the point of the video… I kind of think it’s the point of the video
22:00 I remember using a physical map of liberty city that came with my copy of the game and drawing out routes for "zombie escape plans" as a kid. Probably could've come in handy for keeping track of powerlines for your video - side note, a video on hypotheticals (like "how I'd survive a zombie apocalypse in GTA IV") would bring my childhood full circle and be right up your alley. Great video! :D
@@bable6314 Thinking of ending on a high note with my most recent upload. I was making a working side-scroller in Halo that has a working demo and everything, but aside from 343 partnering with me I don't see myself returning. Collabing with them has fallen through multiple times on their end so I'm not really sure what I'm working towards at this point. Refocusing my skills elsewhere, currently writing a novel. Might give away my 2 WIP's to the forge community soon so they can finish what I started maybe
In the beginning when you checked out how lines connect to buildings, I realized that it's very different in Europe, because we often have underground cables, and the point of connection is just a small box in the basement. Of course it's different if you go further out from a city, there are some power poles, but even small towns run their cables underground around here.
What also happens (at least here in Portugal) is that you'll also have exposed power cables, but instead of being supported by utility poles, they are "glued" to the side of the buildings
Great video. I love how you dont use mods or cheats to get your footage. the fact that you hopped in a heli and flew around looking for locations has such 2009 energy and i respect you so much for because of it. Keep up the awkward content and ill keep consooming.
Extra extra read all about it: Use code ANYAUSTIN50 to get 50% OFF your first Factor box plus 20% off your next month of orders at bit.ly/3XFDRf4
And also big thanks to Grady for being in my video. Check out his channel: www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel
And finally thanks for watching I love you have fun see you later.
7:45 WHERE'S THE SOURCES
Ok to be fair I don't think they thought someone would ever be crazy enough to actually do something like this.
Grady!!!!
OK DORK, I understand
look, all we need to know is do the power lines connect to the bowling alley, and is it the nexus point of the GTA 4 universe?
Electrician here
It is VERY common for poles to not be connected to anything. upgrades, houses demolished, new lines, there will be poles that "dead end", and they just leave it there for future use
for the case where you figure they could have jumped to a building from a closer pole, that is also realistic. it has everything to do with the load characteristics of the building. the circuit which is closer to the building is likely not sufficiently large to supply the whole building, or the incorrect voltage
the only thing that doesn't happen frequently, is buildings connecting electricity from one to the next. this is almost never done, so i would assume the overhead connected apartments are actually low voltage or fiber optic/internet.
finally, your overhead service example is 50 years old. its called open bus system to have 3 or 4 racks connected to the building. nowadays they use 1 rack and use a twisted set of wires for 3x less work and the same outcome.
sick vid thanks
This is a wonderful reply thank you bro
I am imagining a game were they hire electricians, plumbers, etc to make sure everything looks right, that guy that is a pro at geoguessr for the vegetation/roads etc
Fun Fact: They originally had animations for electricians being up on the poles doing maintenance that were likely disabled during optimization. I've seen at least one mod for turning them back on so someone was definitely going the extra mile in development.
Nerd
@@ColinBFClarke I don't think you can call someone nerd when its their literal work and something they need to know.
We are all powered by the Nine Mile Point Entergy #5 Natural Gas Plant on this blessed day. Thanks for including me!
This Cameo really made my day! Cheers Brady 🍻
Omg I was so surprised. Loved the Cameo. I also got your book it's fantastic. After I read it I keep it up on display for my friends to look at and ask questions about
Thank you for doing this! It’s great to see you doing cameos on other channels!
Did not expect this collaboration ❤
seeing you in the video got me excited and i dont know why. Keep up the good content
Did I give a shit about the wires in Liberty City this morning? No. Am I very concerned about them now? Yes.
it's like when i was playing Skyrim and reading reddit comments about the game, someone mentioned they like to collect Scimtars for no reason. They could all be the same ones with 0 difference. i immediately started collecting my own. Or someone i watched playing for the first time saw that the wall carvings in the rooms with the claw key doors, seemed to somewhat line up with what the claw says is the correct solution. So i started looking at them too. lmao
Now I also care about how transformer stations work. This channel is hell on my ADHD
Now we got something more in common with tweakers.
Love your comment 😂
Heaven forbid you lookup and notice the local eruv's around your city...
I'm a transmission line engineer, and one of my projects actually required me to do pretty much the same thing you did in this video. We were modeling transmission poles, which carry higher-voltage wires than all of the distribution poles they use in the game. But especially when they run through urban areas, transmission poles will often have lower-voltage distribution wires (the kind that can go directly to a building) and communication (phone, internet, etc) wires attached to them too. We had to model all of those little offshoots in order to accurately tell whether the poles were overburdened. So I spent countless hours in google earth street view, following utility lines. We had to track each separate cable that attached to the poles and guess at what type of wire it was, then model them wherever they attached to our poles.
So congrats Austin, you did the work of a transmission line engineer for this video!
Also I actually requested that you do a video on the electrical infrastructure in cyberpunk 2077, so I was so excited to see this video! You did a fantastic job and really covered pretty much everything interesting about the topic. I was also screaming when Grady made a cameo. Fantastic job dude!
That sounds like a tall task of a project! It's pretty interesting to read as someone who has no clue about how these things work
@@tedgrove7775 When you're trying to tell the utility company if their poles are liable to fall down and kill someone or not, or just exactly how large a factor of safety they are truly working with, it gives you a little bit more enthusiasm to do it correctly. You're also getting paid for every hour you spend on that, so it's really not so bad.
Hope he puts it on his resume 👍
eventually austin will have enough city planning, engineering, and socioeconomics knowledge to build his own town. and they say video games aren't educational
He'll also have to take finance to make sure to account for the home loans.
@@travismcnasty51 he can just have Memoria cover that tbh, she's demonstrated a strong propensity for economic girlbossing, and was the original discoverer of loans
I would love to see a stream where he sits down for some Cities Skylines! Maybe invites on others like City Planner Plays or the like.
And then he’ll finally be qualified to play animal crossing!
he should make the walled city but irl and the size of the entire planet
22:27 - that's just a ghost pole. I'm a fully qualified spiritual Electrical Engineer and when a pole dies, sometimes it's soul will stay, and hold up the power lines. This normally only works for about 3 years, then it's soul realises it has died and leaves for pole heaven.
1 like= 1 pole prayer 🙏 Gobbless
So this is that high quality comment he was talkin about
@@colinthemarines3567🤦🏻♂️
@@Fooma777🤦🏻♂️
@@gabe-u4r what a funny joke.
As someone who builds powerlines what stands out is all poles with a single wire that's not really a thing. And not every single pole needs transformer cans.
Upvote
@@Pookias yeah, so many single phase lines, no low voltage lines below. But then again, to save on some geometry it makes sense why they didnt.
Yeah, it's strange to have that many step-down transformer cans since you realistically only need them when connecting to services. Liberty City should be in uproar of this waste of tax payer dollars.
Noticed the transformer oversight when he got to Rusty's and several poles in a line had them when they didn't connect to anything else lol
Utility engineer here. Rockstar seems to have confused power lines with telephone lines in that regard. Common mistake
these videos make me look at my favorite games thru a new lens I never would’ve considered otherwise. powerline is also the name of the famous rockstar in A Goofy Movie
NakeyJakey would like A Goofy Movie. That’s sick.
I love you NakeyJakey. Your music has gotten me through some tough times.
This might be a weird compliment, but I love so much how you don't use these sorts of videos as a way to criticize. The most important thing is that the game *feel* right, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy spending too much time examining them.
Yup, definitely! I feel like these videos do still criticize in a way, ultimately they still do judge the realism of a game (criticism doesn't have to be negative or even serious ^_^).
It's really refreshing and fun to just follow these un-asked questions of "huh i wonder if the power grid is connected" or just in general "how would this even work irl" and just going from there, and to see how the differences can exist between the game's representation and how it would actually work.
Also, the way that this is done as an opportunity to teach and educate about these tiny details most people don't realise is really unique, gotta respect the dedication to creating those diagrams :3
@@TheFrostedDevyeah I agree, it’s nice to see criticism on UA-cam that’s not the sneering CinemaSins style “here’s all the things you got wrong, I am very smart” kind 🥰
Yes, exactly!
Here in the Netherlands we started moving away from utility poles towards underground lines in the 50s and 60s so nowadays they're only present in some sparsely populated rural areas. IOW when a Dutchman witnesses utility poles in his direct environment he's anxiously aware he's in hillbilly land and needs to return to civilization ASAP.
@@Chloe-pw4uh CinemaSins and its consequences have been a disaster for online media criticism
One of my neighbors as a kid told me if you touched one of those anchor points you would die… after I already touched it. And instead of realizing they were obviously wrong, I just waited in terror day by day for the inevitable end.
In a large enough time scale, they're right.
@@Darkskytornado just like drinking water. 100 percent death rate within 100 or so years.
Rip
Don't worry, give it some time...
Your time is coming...
One day you'll see it
The thing with Rusty Schit is painfully realistic. it's the kind of thing that happens when a place like Rusty's was built 20 years ago and was the only thing that needed power there. Then the area grows and more industrial buildings pop up so they decide to run another line straight down the middle to service all the new places.
Nobody thinks it's good and it's certainly not designed that way from the start, it's just legacy situations being patched over because it's easier and cheaper than doing it properly.
Yup, zero electrical reason, entirely cheap and lazy. Its part of why overhead is so great because you can just do patchwork jobs like that so easily, underground takes a bit more planning and thought.
Great description. Upvote
The problem with this explanation is that (IIRC) this building is in Algonquin which, like manhattan, has been fully developed and urbanised for at least 200 years by this point. It certainly wouldn’t have been developed only as soon as 20 years ago.
@@RESIST_DIGITAL_ID_UKyeah and they've had electrical infrastructure for more than a century, including times when electrical hookups were an expensive luxury. The building might've been built in that time, paid to get hooked up, and then later the second line was built to serve the rest of the area.
Honestly I thought perhaps the opposite may have happened: Rusty's building being one of several industrial sites in that area built at the same time & all served by that longer line of poles, but all the rest were demolished & now only Rusty's and the poles connecting it remain
That Star Wars Battlefront zoom at 0:38 tho
THANK YOU!!! I was losing my mind where I heard that sound bit before
Felt so good
It hit me like a bus and took several seconds to figure out why. God do I miss that game.
10:39 as well
They connect to my heart
Omg the powerline god
bro is the statue of liberty
A moment of silence for our defibrillationmaxxing brother.
pacemaker
Bro thinks he’s Cole MacGrath
Electrical engineer here! 11:45 One of the reasons higher voltage is used to transmit power over long distances because power loss is a function of the current squared and the line's resistance (P = I * I * R), and by raising the voltage of a line you are able to reduce the current by a proportional amount, which then has an exponential effect on reducing power loss.
For example, 2x the voltage results in 1/4 the power loss to the line's natural resistance.
Great video 👍
Great comment
Beat me to it!
Don't you also lose less energy due to not emitting as much heat with a lower current ratio? I'm not sure how significant that is either way but it seems like a relevant aspect as well, woo thermodynamics
@@syrelian You're correct, but also talking about the same thing here. The power loss in a wire is lost as heat. Talking about "power loss" in a wire is really just a way to talk about how much electrical energy is being converted to thermal energy (heat) over time. Energy can't be created nor destroyed, so anytime someone talks about "losing" energy they're really meaning that the energy is converted from the energy they want (electrical energy, in our case) to one we don't want (heat).
@@jacobspadt2567 Also, don't forget magnetic energy :P At house level, it is negligible but with high frequency or high voltage+long distance it becomes significant.
High frequency is mostly telecom and why optical is preferred there, but high voltage and long distance is a factor for another type of substation : with modern power electronics it becomes interesting to convert AC sources to DC power lines then DC to AC again, especially if the connection is a transfer line between two different synchronization girds. (An electrical grid need that all is part is synchronized on a single frequency and a DC to AC provide added stability with no additional costs. Like when your long line is hit by solar flares, the conversion stabilizes the output.)
Star Wars Battlefront expert here,
That transition into the map around 00:38 made me very happy and I enjoyed hearing those beeps again. Thanks.
I recognized them but couldn't place it, thank you
All I needed was to hear it two more times, just the once left me feeling very weird.
Thanks so much it was for the ps2 right
Made me smile when I saw that.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who caught that.
I'm a early thirties cat lady that doesn't play Grand Theft Auto- I came here over Skyrim unemployment forever ago ..
Now for some reason when I'm bored Austin and his hair clips is the go to channel.
I love the level of nerd it takes to let alone do off shoot subjects like this but to also attract random gamers that don't even play the game mentioned.
Keep at it. Its working for some reason.
Electrical engineer here, only reason I can foresee all those lines going into one small building is that the building is either a facade for an underground train station electrical station or the connections have been Jerry rigged for an illegal hydroponics growing operation, sometimes those places will pay for multiple electrical connections to not appear as suspicious with the huge amount of energy or sometimes they'll just connect directly and bypass meters but that's more obvious
How in the hell can you buy multiple hookups to the same address and not immediately get flagged as suspicious? There's only one distributor in an area, so they would absolutely notice something suspicious is going on. Even in the case of multiple meters for a sub-letting thing, wouldn't they just branch at the house instead of running an entire second drop?
@@dustinbrueggemann1875 cause of legal hydroponics growing operations
lots of people probably steal off their neighbors as well.
@@dustinbrueggemann1875 No, because of load demands. In an industrial property like that it's feasible to assume each "business" would really require as close to 100% of the available incoming power as possible, so it makes more sense to run 3 drops from 3 different transformers.
Curious, what's the reason those farms are so energy intensive? Is it hydroponic systems themselves, or do illegal operations use artificial lights to look like a regular building from a bird's eye view?
Substations are actually often disguised as regular buildings, so a substation could be any house in the game connected to the grid.
Maybe that could explain the confusing 3 connections building?
damn fr?
Wait so you're telling me there's GHOST HOUSES just chilling in our neighborhoods that are just for power?
Wow, I'm an industrial electrician and didn't know they did this, heard of them doing it for pump stations but not distribution stuff.
Building facades will also be used for hiding venting for subway tunnels. In Los Angeles there are plenty of fake buildings that hide oil derricks.
This is exactly why I think UA-cam is a pretty special source of content these days.
Highly specific, niche content that can be so unbelievably right up one individual person's alley that it's almost incomprehensible how the premise was even concepted to begin with.
No reality show slop, no boring lowest common denominator mass-appeal drivel... I spend 45 minutes looking at a Netflix home screen and turn it off, completely disheartened, after finding nothing worthwhile.
I open my UA-cam subs and immediately am presented with a 25 minute long video called "Do Liberty City's Power Lines Connect to Anything?" and I am so overwhelmingly fulfilled with a highly specific sense of satisfaction and joy.
Appreciate it, and keep up the good, weird, and CIA-secret-spy-satellite-hyper-focused-laser-targeted content that got me subbed in the first place.
I've lived off youtube since I was in high school and its so much better than 10 years ago
It's also heaven for us neurodivergents! TV is so predictable and boring.
Been on the UA-cam wave for at least a decade now. It’s the best medium for content creation in the history of humanity.
Agreed. If only UA-cam would stop shoving all that garbage Mr Beast recommendations, both him and all the other copycats, it would be so much better.
it’s cuz we’re all nerds but also seeking to find joy in the mundane cuz what else is there on a day to day to keep us going? r/im14andthisisdeep
I am an engineering student. And man your video gave me a clear view on the power conversion system. My teacher even could not help me understand enough. Now I got a clearer view on the matter thanks to this lol
I love these connection videos- first unemployment surveys, then hydrological surveys, now electrical, Austin is out to become the ultimate Video Game Department of Community Development employee ❤
imaging being the game designer who did this work.. never in a million years did they think someone would research this. man this is why i love the internet. you yourself think of things no one else really does but then you get people who do that and make these type of videos. just awesome
The game designer is in Edinburgh. They've probably never seen an overhead power line in a city. They dont exist in the urban fabric of developed nations.
Yeah I rather wish the actual time and effort (burned resource) was actually spent into making this game into a good game. Especially keep in mind that you babies don't know that this game was basically unplayable on PC, prior the mentioned port wasnt any better, on s*itbox360 it was bugged to hell and back and I forgot what it was like on PS3, probably the best of them all but still a mess anyway. Graphically it was a blurry pissfilter mess and on top of that had too many technical issues to mention on here so I wont.
Some things were patched some not and many didnt had their consoles connected to the net anyway so yeah good luck playing this mess.
The GTA4 game we have today isnt the same from back then, its a different build, its ok-ish but isnt too much better. Doesnt change the fact that story is garbage and characters inacurate even for a parody. So no matter the tech, the overall games is a joke.
Just by Niko Belic alone, he is native Serbian yet he cant speak Serbian, he worked in Russia yet he cant speak Russian either, his words and voice is a typical westerner trying too hard to be stereotipical of too many things at once to the point he forgot wtf role he is even suppose to play. Other characters are not any better.
Animations, oh boy ... cars behave like boats, characters movements are like they are drunk or on crack 24 7 same apply to the things they say.
glitches, bugs, bla bla bla Im done
Lots of you played it as is for the heck of it, or bcs you didnt know any better what to do with your life and equally a big chunk of people imagined it playing. "oh I played that game it was great" no you didnt, no it isnt, stfu ...
@@minmogrovingstrongandhealthyoh you mean grand theft auto iv? I played that game and it was great
@@dairallan Rockstar always took trips to look at the city they were basing a map on, this is absolutely something they took pictures of and implemented into the game on purpose, it's basically why they took those trips in the first place, stuff like this.
@@dairallanThere were actually more staff working on GTA IV based outside of R* North than at it. Scottish nationalists are so tedious and pathetic.
Grady helping figure out a video game electrical substation has made my week, I love the collab.
Also, very unexpected!
@@RastaWaffles Quite unexpected, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless!
It’s made me weak 😊
Ghost poles is what I call poles that stand alone they used to connect but not anymore due to the buildings being demolished and underground cables being more easy on the eyes plus at 7:40 you can see the classic village in the sky type development that took over old New York neighborhoods that used to be filled with row homes and brown stones but now are those ugly buildings which use underground connections instead of poles leaving you guessed it Ghost Poles
Electrical engineer who works in the utilities here. This is a very well done and well researched video! Thank you for posting this. A few quick pieces of information from your video. Yes, abandoned standalone poles and even transformers left on them can be somewhat common. It doesn't make sense to put the labor into removing the pole just because it isn't actively in use.
In terms of that weird industrial building with the power lines coming in on 3 sides, no you're not going to see that. Yes hypothetically you could have different feeds coming into different parts of the plant, but the way it's actually done is all the power (almost certainly 3 phase in this case) would come into the building into a switchgear room (think like the breaker panel for your home but with heavy duty high amperage equipment) that would then divert power throughout the plant.
That substation is definitely cobbled together. There should be 3 wires for 3 phase power but they only had 2, which is what you would see on a distribution line to a small neighborhood.
Also one last thing, about high voltage being better to transmit, electricity is measured in wattage. To get wattage, you multiply current by voltage to get the full number, so for instance 120 volts carrying 2 amps would be 240 watts. What transformers do is use magnetism to 'trade' current and voltage. This makes transferring energy much more efficient, as high current tends to create heat (and loss of energy in this heat) on lines it's sitting in. Those pot transformers on the pole are to further step down the voltage and up the amperage before it reaches your home.
To recap the journey of electricity to your home: Power Plant (Distribution level voltage with very high current) -> Power plant substation (transformation to high voltage low current) -> Distribution Substation (Transformation to distribution level voltage with moderate current) -> Pot or padmount transformer to your home (high voltage moderate current to low voltage high current) -> Your outlets. Current is what actually does the things and voltage is what gets it there. Hope this helps you and your viewers learn! It's a great career and I encourage people to look into it.
Datacenter I could see having power coming from two different feeds (or even three) on different sides of the building for redundancy reasons. It's very common to do so with things like the fiber optics for data centers, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's also done in some cases for power.
@@tankerkiller125 Redundancy off the same feeder? Typically if someone needs redundancy they'll have an in-house diesel generator. All you're insuring for with multiple feeds off the same feeder is distribution transformer failure, which is kind of stupid.
A great comment! I worked at a company building transformers for 32 years! My husband also worked in the same place for 43 years. He was called a stacker and he put together (stacked) the core and coil assemblies. It was piece work so he stayed at that job his entire working life!
I, on the other hand was a material handler, than an assembler, then shipping/receiving lead person on 2nd shift.
We made large substation power units as well as the smaller three phase units. One of our other divisions made pole types. My favorite part of the job was wiring the control panels for the power units. My least favorite was sitting on top of units and bolting covers down after they were filled with oil! Ugh! Anyway we both retired from that company about 12 years ago. It was a good company to work for and allowed us to retire comfortably!
Thank you for bringing back some good memories!
This comment is why i pay my Internet bills. Thanks for the information random engineer 👍 .......
But why are your power cables in cities not underground like in every other country? USA is like a third world country
OH THAT BATTLEFRONT 1 MAP SOUND HIT ME LIKE A FREIGHT TRAIN DUDE, WHAT A REFERENCE
I also enjoyed the star wars battlefront map sound
+
If I had a nickel for every SWBF transition screen that was used in a video posted today, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
(Luck Stat's video, "Pandemic Studios: The Rise and Fall", ua-cam.com/video/ZqxPtnDQYlU/v-deo.html )
I heard the sound as I was looking away for a second and my head snapped back to the video so fast. That game was part of my childhood and I would recognise that sound anywhere.
Doot doot doot doot…..duut duut duut duut….daaaat
As someone who draws blueprints for power infrastructure projects, this was a pretty good, accurate video on the topic of electrical infrastructure realism in GTA.
Actually, I do have one note: "its either underground or overhead, you can't have it both ways". The two mix all the time. Individuals can pay to have their service drop run underground from the house to the pole feeding it. In my city, overhead power runs underground when it needs to cross the highway on an overpass. Some entire neighborhoods get converted to underground while the surrounding neighborhoods stay overhead depending on where infrastructure is failing the most. Cities are especially chaotic in this regard, since both underground and overhead have their own pros and cons, and the dense, complicated, and busy nature of cities often requires similarly described power solutions. The one thing I will say is any given span of power supplying wires will always be one or the other (ie, there are normally 3-4 individual wires powering your house, they will all either be OH or UG), but span to span, street to street, it can change for a variety of reasons.
Also, that building connected from 3 separate poles from 3 separate directions: The only reason this would happen is if the building has 3 meters (multiple meters are common in situations like apartments, where each unit has its own power bill), but for some insane reason, the 3 meters are on 3 sides of the building. That doesn't really happen. Even then, its still likely the three meters would be fed by the same pole, and just have entrance cable running along the top of the building from the closest point of contact to all 3 meters. Realistically, the setup shown in game would never happen for several reasons, though its also not technically impossible or broken, just wildly impractical in a way that wouldn't happen even with the normal inefficiencies of the grid.
I'm glad someone mentioned the mix of overhead and underground powerlines. The neighborhood I grew up in, which is within walking distance of where I live now, had all underground, which is true of most of the neighborhoods in this town, (probably for similar snow concerns; we also get thunderstorms with bad enough wind that it'll knock over trees, so you at that to a dense network of lines that are already weighed down with snow and it'll clearly cause issues,) but the main road that I live off of now has powerlines directly above the sidewalk across the street.
Edit: I can, in fact, on Google streetview, find the _very pole_ that comes off of the lines next to where I live now, and goes underground before running to my old neighborhood. (Which is kind of crazy, because it has to go across a bridge to do it, but I suppose the bridge has stoplights, so they must be getting power from lines that are _in_ the bridge.) And it just looks like a regular transmission pole, except it's got a bunch of PVC pipes strapped to the side of it, and the power lines drop into the pipes before going straight to the ground. I've driven and walked past that pole thousands of times and never even noticed it was any different until today.
Me, an european who hasn't seen a power line in the street in real life in her entire life: Yeah, everything makes sense
Same here, kinda weird to think they are just there, accessible to everyone
@@ChrisAegrim to be fair, when they are underground, they are even more acessible lol
I've seen a substation explode... scary sight. Was sitting in the parking lot of my university, all of a sudden hear this loud buzzing sound coming from my right... I look over and there are giant electrical plasma arcs coming up from a substation a few blocks away. Then all of a sudden one of the huge transformers exploded and the entire area got covered in black smoke. It was an interesting afternoon.
Yep, very fun and you get to hear cool sci fi noises while out in the street.
who do you even call at that point? 911?
@@doughboywhine yeah, that would be a reasonable start. They'd probably send firefighters (who frequently double as initial hazmat containment) and maybe an ambulance in case of any onsite staff during the explosion, and notify the electric company responsible to get actual engineering crews on site to fix it.
that sounds like a scene in a batman movie or something and the joker blew up a subway station for fun
@@youmukonpaku3168there should be failsafes that cut off the station from the electical net if something happens right? Because if not how would you even rescue someone inside I imagine getting to close could be quite dangerous if everything around you could be charged
At rockstar hq:
Hey man, do you remember while we were finishing gta 4 map, you told me that no one's ever gonna do a precise analysis of utility poles and wiring in the game, so we shouldn't care about it too much?
Well guess what
Probably would be fun, but most of gta IV developers left rockstar at this point. It's possible that the worldbuilding team may still be there, but too many people worked at this game, so, tracking them just to prove a point would be stupid.
@@molhosojachill dude it's just a joke
@@molhosojamy god shut up
@@molhosoja 💀
"We need to delay GTA 6 now"
You know, I adore video gaming with diagrams. Proves the continued value of real and direct surveying methods.
8:40 it’s possible that these are two separate circuits and one of them was already too overloaded, so connecting a commercial building (which usually require way more power than housing) meant going out of their way to a circuit with lesser load
7:05 just want to note that if you look near by you can actually see a cable spool on the ground which implies to me it’s one of those real slow construction efforts
Who let the furry out of the basement 💀
@@GeneralKenobi69420basement? Sorry lil buddy, but basements aren’t really a thing here in Australia due to the fact that they only really exist to provide utilities below the freeze line. I’d recommend coming up with an original insult next time that actually applies to who it’s insulting that way you can actually hurt their feelings.
Hope this helps :)
@@Drazamuffin Now I am curious. Are Australian furries just as dangerous as the other animals living there?
6:35 I remember some big kids tried daring me to touch a utility pole anchor as a kid. But I was too scared.
Guy who designs utility poles here:
My biggest pet peeve looking at all these poles is that wires are SUPER heavy and generate a lot of tension on those poles, which is why we have to design them with brace poles and down guys (the ground anchoring wires -which you definitely still shouldn't touch). If they tried to build this system irl, all of these poles would rip out of the ground instantly like a disaster movie.
Also, you'll notice irl that every time power feeds into a building, it first has to step down to a lower voltage via the transformer bucket, leaving as a set of three smaller wires (usually braided into a "triplex"). For simplicity, they just stuck the primary wire straight into the building which, to my understanding, would bring in enough power to make every appliance a potential death trap
Calm down, there are no appliances in that model.
While im sure your issues are valid, you also have to remember this is a video game, and thus some stuff has to be changed to due to a variety of reasons, even if developers know its logically wrong. For example, the wires may be extra thick in the game because it makes them less prone to aliasing (jagged edges) or simply make them more visible for players as the game originally ran at 960x544, so not even 720p! You can see this is an issue for the thinner chain link fence at 5:47, it is jagged, anti-aliasing causes shimmers, and most of it isnt even visible.
Its plausible that for whatever deranged GTA reason, the transformers are inside the buildings(too many protags hitting the boxes maybe :P )
As for the scale, probably a visual aide, aliasing is a brutal thing on thin objects that makes them look jagged or splintered, and making it thicker helps, as does obviously anti-aliasing options
@@syrelian That's actually the same reason human hair is the thickness it is.
Any thinner and the antialiasing would make us realize this is all a simulation
Why should you still not touch the ground anchoring wires?
I discovered this channel today and I spent the last hour learning about water and power in fiction places.
Now with that in mind.
I don't know if you are aware of fake buildings being used for utilities in nyc (at least two of which are known to be substations) these buildings look like normal houses or apartment blocks but are empty facades with opaque windows that are full of infrastructure equipment. since near every building in gta4 is inaccessible to us, and we pretty much never see npc's coming and going from them, we can make a small jump to deduce that they must all be fake buildings. as such any building you cant enter or interact with must be a substation or other utility to service the relatively few you can. this would also explain why the couple of visible substations that are not connected, as the city already has an overabundance of infrastructure redundancy and the open substations may even have been vandalised ( perhaps explaining the bad wiring and such), and so have been largely disconnected from the grid to protect the city infrastructure and public.
Hell if we want to make some less plausible (because clearly my theory is flawless so far) jumps in logic we could suggest that all of the power grid from mining/drilling fuel to delivery is hidden in these buildings. I seem to remember Los Angeles uses this strategy of fake buildings to hide urban oil drilling. now we know liberty city is a strange disconnected archipelago city, so perhaps they found a way to take this fake building thing to its illogical endpoint and use it to become independent and self sufficient and the nuclear power plant is an artifact from when they were reliant on deliveries of nuclear fuel.
All of this said, If it isn't evident by now, I am not in any way a relevant professional in this field. So this is probably not the case, and it's just a fun video game about car theft and crime families, that really need not waste it's devs time in creating fully explained power grids. ...unless I'm right.
Loved the video, I feel like this channel perfectly encapsulates the UA-cam content that defies categorisation niche.
Can't wait to see you explain the Los Santos import export shipping trade (or whatever else you choose is cool too, I guess)
“Ayyy Niko! Come, let us go bowling!“
"Bah, Roman I am busy."
"With what?“
"I am making map of Liberty City power line system!“
in my head i was hearing them voices with the accent while i was reading this
That's the kind of stuff I do in my city and my friends think I'm odd
"What?! Cousin since when did you get into the Liberty City Energy Company?!"
"I went legit Roman!"
Niko becomes a lone wolf and shows the municipality who is boss.
cope
I remember getting GTA IV when I was a kid and being so excited to play it. When I got home I turned it on and immediately broke into tears when I realized the electrical infrastructure wasn't realistic. At that point, it was impossible for me to enjoy the game because I just kept asking myself how the lights were on in all the buildings. My immersion was broken so I haven't touched the game since
Omg same except it happened in Simcity
this is hilarious..and also completely true for myself as well
@@nickmusicmediaReally? Was it really?
@@tobyjohnson6722Are you joking?
@@user-vi4xy1jw7e yeah your mom thought the same thing when we watched it together
The most surprising thing I learned today is that you live in New Orleans. I always thought you have such strong midwest energy
He is all over the place, look at his first music videos. Dude gives so many different energies if you look into the past a bit.
His music project is called The Excellent Man from Minneapolis, so I'm guessing that's where that comes from.
I was also surprised by that
The writing in this is so subtly good!
Calling the creators "developers" for wide appeal, then readjusting the term to "artists" - so respectful and clear and aware of the industry.
All the attention to silly details is very entertaining, and just love how this was put together.
I haven't stopped shaking and crying since he said 'we're gonna have to go outside'. I've never heard a more upsetting sentence in my life
Outside?! Where is that? I’ve never heard of such a word.
Dude I heard there's hot dogs and ice cream outside
Grow up dawg
@@AAirallapretty sure it’s somewhere in like central Africa? Idk “outside” sounds so familiar but not positive I can pin this one down
@@yungafrica6022 grop up dawg, get some sense of humor
0:30 The original Battlefront menu zoom in? Glorious.
Yeah that sound gave me some memories 😂
Subscribed just for this 😂
i got flashbacks
did you mean 0:40?
@@wcott more like 0:39
(Electrician here)
Substations step up voltage (power) for transmission over long distances because of ohms law. Almost all conductors have some degree of resistance (which opposes voltage), so a long length of wire would have a lot of resistance. So to keep losses minimal, voltage is stepped up so that any resistance present in the transmission line will not impact it's usage far away from the source. There is a lot more to it, but that's the gist of it. An additional perk is that there is an inverse ratio between voltage and amperage (ohms law again), so if you step up voltage then amperage drops, this allows you to transmit power using smaller gauge wires. (cost savings!)
Almost all conductors have resistance? What conductors don’t?
Superconductors, which require very specific conditions to work with no energy losses.@@planetslime
@@planetslime Superconductors, still waiting for room temp. 20 years every year. And sometimes just like claims of dark alchemy but that doesn't seem to have borne fruit.
@@planetslime The super ones! superconductors can conduct electricity without resistance
@@Xenosplitter That was much catchier than mine, props.
I just want whoever does the Sponsor Block segment control for these videos to know that your millisecond perfect timing and seamless transitions making it impossible to even *notice* the sponsored segments is greatly f***ing appreciated. Holy crap it is so consistently good.
Power systems engineer here:
I started typing out a comment to respond to 8:45 and then he went on to perfectly describe the reality of having many people with different priorities working together 😂
Great video!
Electrical engineer here (something I've commented on Grady's videos before), although not on the utility side, but rather the building side. It's actually increasingly rare to see overhead lines run to buildings, especially on the commercial side. Many utility companies will require underground connections for new work, unless there is some extenuating circumstance, even if the neighborhood has all overhead wires. However, most commercial buildings will have a utility transformer set outside the building, so it's very obvious that it is an underground service. And for neghborhoods where wires are buried, there will be a transformer every third or fourth home to serve them.
Cable guy here. Southeast Michigan is almost entirely aerial. I hope this mostly underground land comes here soon
The boroughs still have neighborhoods with overhead electrical, but I’m pretty sure it’s almost entirely phased out in the city.
God you nailed what I mean when I say "I don't want realism, I want "believable-ism" in games. I don't need a 1:1 recreation of my world. I just need it to be consistent within itself and at least realistic that I can act much as I do in real life.
I do not question where the power comes from and goes. I understand that electrical poles act as a line to bring it to me from a substation that is fed off the generation source.
I don't question where the river down the road starts. I know it's somewhere northwest of here by several hundred miles minimum probably much more. That's all I know.
In GTA I never once questioned the power lines and in Skyrim I never questioned the rivers. Their realism existed not as a perfect recreation but as one that would, to any layman, appear normal.
I realize now that the reason I always find guns frustrating is because I know guns inside and out. I know this subject in far more depth than most. Leaving me unable to miss the little mistakes.
Your ignorance it's pretty useful huh? I guess the saying goes "ignorance is bliss"
@@CodiMorphett what an odd thing to say
What about having a game feature of taking out the right power lines to cut power to an area, or a sandbox that lets you dam and flood areas with water flow?
This is what bugs me about computers in TV & movies so often!
Been following this channel for a couple of years now. It’s really great to see how you’ve found your voice and that you’re getting exposure. Keep up the good work.
12:59 I was 99% sure you were going to lead with "Grady, hit me up" but I 0% expected "so anyway here's Grady"
Best collab of this year!
Seemed very obvious to me.. A lot of "look how much work this is to map this all out" in this video, while truth be told, it takes at most a few hours. There were 50 icons on that map, not as if it was a behemoth of thousands of poles.
@@Planetdune Did you reply to the right comment...?
About the poles that seem like dead ends: It doesn't look like they were modelled differently so it probably wasn't intended, but those could be dip poles/riser poles. These are poles that have the wire running down them and continuing underground
Electricity metering installation inspector here! Love the video and I'll always support more eyes on electricity infrastructure! A couple standout points to note:
1) Around the 9 minute mark you mention the Rusty Schit building connected to a line farther away than a closer point. A couple reasons for this first of all could be that the closer line was built later and they didn't connect because the building already had power. Also could be that there used to be other buildings in the area connected to the offshoot you pointed out. Also the key word in electric grid construction is redundancy! So that in case you have a downed line it doesn't mess up the whole system.
2) As some others have mentioned it's really weird that all the overhead lines only have one wire. Normally distribution systems (the power lines close to customers i.e. in cities etc.) use 3-phase AC current which means three or four wires (one for each phase and one ground which isn't always present). This is made even stranger by the fact that the larger taller overhead lines in some places in the video seem to have three lines, very weird. Unless the distribution system is all DC and all buildings have their own converters or the city distributes single phase AC this makes no sense!
3) The poles which have a line coming in and no line coming out all seem to have transformer cans on them (also it's weird that there always seems to be two transformers for only one wire???). This likely means that there's a wire running into the ground as a lot of distribution grids in big cities include underground lines so that there isn't as many wires overhead and also because underground lines are less prone to sagging down into the street on particularly hot says with high loads (think of hot summer days where everyone is running their air conditioners).
0:38 STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT 2004 MENTIONED !!! 🔥🔥🔥
ok idk if this would be at all useful as a video but since i’ve started watching you, all i can think is that you would enjoy disney’s extremely goofy skateboarding (2001). its maps are incredibly unsettling
Just googled this….. Why does it look like that
@@pumpernickelspices dude the graphics are rough and i mostly remember it being like. weird vacant cityscapes? and empty beaches? i had it as a kid and couldn’t get past the first few levels tho
Sounds right up his alley
I'm an electrical engineer, the building with inefficient wiring could happen in real life if the city redeveloped and just left the old wiring when they added a new power line branch
The building with tons of wires connected to it kind of reminds me of the cable we have attached to our house. Sure it's stuck to what looks like a "power pole" but it's an old TV cable. We could remove it but honestly, birds like sitting on it, so there it stays.
The thing that surprised me was that you were drawing the grid out on paper, but you hadn't printed out a map of Liberty City to draw it on.
Anyway, love what you're doing.
More like this ❤
This and the water flow in Hyrule, unemployment direct surveys, and neat unappreciated places.
Keep exploring new intricacies of things we didn't appreciate enough. ❤
Substation Electrical Design engineer here, never thought to see one of my favorite youtubers talking about what i do for work every day. Cool stuff, keep it up.
Higher voltage travels better because it reduces the current while transmitting the same power(power = current * voltage). Wires get hot if they're too thin for the current, which is how toasters work.
i think my favorite part of this video is the hand drawn map. it reminds me of how as a kid my classmates used to make fun of maps from centuries past for being wonky and incorrect, extrapolating information wrong or repeating things, inventing features that aren’t there. seeing you struggle to hand draw the grid made me think about how difficult it must’ve been to map the real world with much more limited information back in the day
Haha, now I'm imagining your teacher sending you out with pencil and paper to map your neighborhood
With what little they had to work off of, it's incredible ancient maps were as accurate as they were.
@@halo7oo Naw they had more than we know. Had to. 😂
I just farted up a storm in my room and your comment made me feel so much better. ❤Thank you.
"Here be dragons"
My town has like 10-12 poles going out to an empty field with nothing else attached to them, because 15 years ago there was going to be houses built there, but for whatever reason they didnt end up getting built
11:47 That guy here to help! :) ⚡⚡
When the substation makes the electricity higher voltage, this also majorly slows down the electricity's current (speed), which is the substation's real goal.
Fast current through the wires generates a lot of heat (like moving your hand quickly across carpet) meaning our useful electrical energy is being transformed into useless heat. So instead, slowing down the current minimises the heat generated and therefore energy lost, making a more efficient power grid!
A little long winded but i hope I've given a little back to our learning together on this channel 😎 any more Qs, just lmk 😌
@@zacdoodles5717
I learned way too much about NYC's power grid due to a detective novel where the murderer rigged up and used arc flashes to kill people
@@CircusFoxxothat's epic
@@CircusFoxxo WE LOVE LEARNING SCIENCE IN NEEDLESSLY INCONVENIENT WAYS‼️‼️‼️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗯️🗯️🗯️
@@zacdoodles5717 there was a lot of extraneous "here's what I learned in my research" moments like a long section on load balancing with flywheels
@@CircusFoxxook but what was the book tho 👀
8:35 Electrical Distribution Engineer (a.k.a, nerd) here. You make a poignant observation here. Yes, there are wide and varied reasons why service lines might be built in a way that seems counterintuitive or built at excessive length. One common reason for example, is that the existing pole-mounted transformers (those things that look like silver cans) closest to this particular factory building does not supply the output voltage that customer requires for their equipment. Typical residential houses need transformers to supply an output voltage of 120/240V. Commercial services might need more “juice” (for example, 277/480 Volts) to sufficiently give them the power required to run heavier machinery than what you or i run inside our homes or apartments. Great video Austin, keep up the fun ideas! (P.S. thanks for loving us nerds! Lol)
Amazing having Brady from Practical Engineering here!
I have the feeling you'll be the reason game studios will start hiring geologists and civil engineers.
I'm an aspiring game developer. I've put little details in games I've made thinking no one would ever notice or care. Knowing someone like you actually exists is very heartwarming
0:42 it's crazy you know the sound scape better than the devs that did the remake
Dude that sound was my childhood
I enjoyed the remake, didn't have any glitches or server issues, but I will never get over the fact that the noise is wrong. So simple.
I was scrolling to find a comment. Starwars battlefront 2 was my childhood game
After spending time in New Orleans, I understand why Austin immediately focused in on that leaning power pole. The ground there is so saturated, I'm not sure anything stays level.
Not a lineman, but I am an commercial/industrial electrician so I'll add what insight I can. For the building around 8:30, irl there could be several reasons why it was connected how it was. The one that comes to mind first, is that the branch that splits right may not have existed when the building was first constructed, thus with the service connection being on the left, the utility was coordinated to go that way as well. Later on the right side branch was developed and coincidentally ran closer to the building. Now if you ask yourself why not change it afterwards, the simple answer is money. The connection as is works and is safe, there's no need to change when it's already done, and doing so would mean unnecessary investment of man-hours and materials.
Maybe a lineman can correct me but I don't think you will ever see a grid looping back on itself; can do wonky thing to the phases.
The multiple services to the same building is a head scratcher for me on a practical level. If there were multiple things inside that needed their own breaker/fuse panel, you would normally just bring in a large service to a main distribution panel, and from that feed a few smaller subpanels to handle whatever their misc need might be. Maybe they're parallel feeds but then why not bring them all in at the same spot?
Good niche topic, keep up the good work my man.
13:20 And now I know why this video got recommended to me. Always awesome to see unexpected colabs in the wild without even knowing it!
I'm a surveyor and after doing many feature surveys, I can confirm it's not impossible for there to be powerlines to nowhere and power poles by themselves. Usually just because the line was decommissioned, and it's easy to pull down the lines but sometimes the poles can be left for months or even years depending on its state, the funding for the location or even just its location.
A good example is communication lines, they're everywhere still after becoming almost completely obsolete. Out here in Australia, on both decommissioned and currently in use train lines, there are tens of thousands of communication lines aswell as their poles still standing not connected to anything.
I've got photos as proof if your curious
When the telephone lines in our rural area were decommissioned here in Finland, they left all the wires branching out to the properties in place and just took out the wires from the main road, so there's lots of phantom lines here.
Same with the NBN rollout. The overhead telephone lines were decommissioned but left in place. Some people have cut their own lines down and left them rolled up at the bottom of poles, maybe because it was removed for works or they didn't want a pointless wire hanging around. I'm not surprised cables get left lingering, why pay for someone to do work when it doesn't add to your product? A relative's house has 3 or 4 lines connected to the house, only one actually provides anything.
This channel is a goldmine for me because these videos are about things that I've always done in games. I've walked around looking at how the infrastructure in these fictional cities connects and other things that aren't intended.
Sometimes I just climb around all of the Vinewood hills backyards in GTA Online. I've stopped in Mario Kart to look at the characters at the side of the road moving like animatronics like in the older videos and if I could easily load up GTA 4 I'd spend maybe an hour walking around "Rusty Schit Salvage" looking at the low poly junked school buses that are slightly to the wrong scale or look at what cars they have on the racks. I'm glad other people do this because I thought I was insane
electrical engineer here!
electricity is scary.
to be more real for a sec, high voltage travels further because at a power plant power P is produced, and P = R * I² where R is the resistance of the line.
And the loss of power over the distance of the line is P_Loss = R * (P / U)² where U is the voltage of the line.
R goes up the longer of a power line we measure this drop over, and P is constant because it's the power output of our plant, so if we make U bigger, since it's in the denominator of the fraction, it reduces the amount of power lost over the line. which matters alot on long lines since that increases R.
hope that was comprehensible to some people
thank you for reading
Welder, here. Electricity is indeed very crazy and dangerous. I'll never _not_ be fascinated by it.
@@williampotter3369 zap zap
Basically power has a certain strength and has to force it's way into peoples homes, but the longer it has to travel the stronger it needs to be.
And electricity consumed by R in the values here is just turned into heat. With heat wires sag and they light trees or other vegetation on fire. There's a reason we bump up voltage when sending it over high distances. The formula the guy referenced here is called Ohm's law.
@@nomms yep, also upping the line voltage also means line amperage is lower, since the equality has to be conserved. Although high voltage lines are still in the 1000 amp range
Youve forgot there's actually electician worker fixing the power on the pole.
Its rare to find him like mailman in freeroam in morning.
You had me when you did the classic fakeout at 13:07 ("that's not gonna happen") and then after 2 seconds of silence, you announced Grady and I literally yelled out loud lol. Such a legit collaboration!
I’ve found myself enjoying this series of yours, starting witt the rivers in Skyrim, far more than I initially thought I would.
It’s a really simple concept, based on even simpler questions - But your presentation and humour makes it both entertaining and even relaxing to listen to. Keep up the great work man!
Electrician here, though Commercial/Resi rather than Lineman. Have built plenty of masts and service connections though. Normally you would prefer having a single connection to the building, as it will normally condense your electrical hardware to a single location which is important for safety and disconnections in emergency situations. It is possible to have a building with multiple connections, especially if there are multiple tenants or owners and each has a separate connection, or maybe one owner with a lot of high amperage loads that somehow got the utility company to sign off on multiple drops, but that seems unlikely as its kinda shady.
>it's kinda shady
Sounds like GTA to me!
Hey Austin, studying engineer here, love your video and the want to continue learning! The support cables that are diagonally holding down the telephone polls that kids believe they would get electrocuted if touched, are called "down guys" hope this helps!
That one developer who put the mattress in has officially thought more about where homeless people sleep than some elected officials
This is one of the best comments I've ever seen on yt
I’m not saying this to be argumentative or discredit what you said but I feel like reality is probably even more sinister. Most of those officials that seem like they’re not thinking about homeless people are actually overthinking where the homeless people sleep and actively making it worse. Sometimes it’s obvious with anti homeless spikes or something but sometimes it’s completely under the radar by like moving or removing a bench. A lot of it’s done by the land owners but I’m sure every single city has this on the government side too to whatever degree
@@monhi64 To be fair if city officials are pushing for policies like spikes and all that, it's because people don't like homeless people understandably in their neighborhood
@@KoopstaKlicca to be fair that’s friggen obvious to literally every person to ever exist. And to blow all that money for what, moving a homeless person 100 feet or maybe do nothing but make em less comfortable
@@monhi64 well you said it's sinister, and I'm saying it's not sinister. Most people don't like homeless people.
14:52 It's been a while since I studied engineering, but I do remember one key thing. Transformers' main purpose was to sell action figures to kids.
I'll upvote this anyways, but to be pedantic: both factions are Transformers. *Autobots* protect us from Decepticons. ;)
@@joshmartin2744 Ah I appreciate your correction! Also your kindness haha
The thing about electrical transformers is that there is always more than meets the eye.
8:10 "just bring an air horn and time it so you blow it right when I curse."
Fucking magnificent
I bet you also swear in front of young children. Oh wait, you probably don't have kids.
dude! i only just recently started watching your videos but its so cool to see you getting more recognition now, when i found your channel i was so shocked to see that you werent getting a million on every video. what youre doing is really special, im completely hooked
I live in the Netherlands, here there aren't any powerlines anywhere except the really big high voltage powerline towers that are like 50 meters high. The rest is ALL underground and the grid is still really reliable. I guess if they are underground and build right they don't need a lot maintenance down there I guess.
I work at a power company! Underground lines have the advantage of not having to deal with weather (storms, snow, wind, etc), people (someone driving into a pole or breaking into a substation to steal copper), or trees (every power company spends massive amounts of money on vegetation management). On the other hand, they are about 5 times more expensive to build, at least in Canada where I live. So it's a balancing act for the companies and what makes sense for a particular area.
Another factor to consider: earthquakes. If you don't have them regularly (like in the Netherlands), underground powerlines make a lot of sense. If you _do_ have them, repairing the grid after one apparently becomes an absolute nightmare from what I've read (compared to overhead lines), so they're not really practical for many areas of the world unfortunately.
Yeah in any developed country in Europe they are ALL underground..I tried to think if I've ever seen one anywhere in Europe...I can only think of Greece..and Greece is poor and ghetto..so any GOOD country has them under ground
@@philadelphus3570 in America or Canada you barely see your neighbour...in the Netherlands houses and attached to eachoter...and many countries in Europe are built their homes very closely...with small alleys etc..over head powerlines are impossible
That battlefront loading screen graphic:
100% pure unfiltered hit of nostalgia
Thank you x
the fact Austin doesn’t even use charts to move around easier to complete these menial tasks for these videos. Dude is dedicated to whatever this vibe is
Charts?
I love that because Austen takes seriously whatever video subject he deems interesting, the majority of the comments take that subject very seriously too, and so under all such videos there are discussions of professionals on the topic. This is so fascinating, and a very impressive achievement too
0:38 That original battlefront zoom in slapped me in the face with nostalgia
I knew I recognized it from somewhere but couldn't place it. thanks
instant sub when the battlefront zoom happened.
I'm so glad I found your videos. You've managed to combine so many of my special interests.
A Louisiana local, I lived in New Orleans for six years, and I did an architectural thesis there that focused heavily on energy infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Despite this, I don't have much more knowledge than you - definitely no electrical engineer. Your portion about the NYC snowstorm really highlighted the importance of electrical infrastructure during severe weather events.
For a local reference to underground power lines, I do know that during storms in New Orleans, even if a majority of the city loses power, you can go to Entergy's outage map and usually see that most of the French Quarter and CBD are still glowing green. That's because all the lines there are underground, and those are much more resilient to storms since trees and debris (and mylar balloons) can't knock them down. If only we had some money going towards non-aesthetic infrastructural upgrades... (I'm looking at you, lights on the CCC).
The energy and water infrastructure supporting and surrounding New Orleans is nothing short of colossal. I really recommend the game Norco if you want to explore the public health implications of living with, among, and against these infrastructural giants. There's also no shortage of academic reading, but games are more fun :)
Thanks for the educational video!
on that closing thought, video game lights are the only digital in-game item that also literally exist IRL. You turn on a light in game to illuminate your game world, and it not only uses IRL electricity to power that virtual light, but it also literally lights up your IRL space. Neato.
I've used the Assassins Creed 2 main menu for light before
Jesus, the use of the Star Wars Battlefront 1 loading screen zoom-in thing made me so happy
I can't believe you got Grady to cameo in this video! 😊
As someone that 100%'d GTA4 I appreciate this video so much more the tiny details in these massive games get ignored by 98% of people I spent so much time taking my time getting the 100% I didn't want it to end! Amazing video I hope the developer that put that mattress in that specific alleyway sees this and smiles
8:05 Ah Schit, here we go again.
i love you for using the OG star wars battlefront sound effect for zooming in/pointing out locations every time you used a map. i recognised it was from an old video game i loved instantly when it first played, and despite me thinking really, really hard, it had to play two more times before i had an illumination and figured it out. awesome stuff, really threw me back
I don't know why this has become my favourite type of video but it has
It's a series that captures those fleeting thoughts about how far the facade reaches, and interrogates them in a dark room until they crack.
You know, at 20:35 ish when Austin says his diatribe about game developers taking a top-down approach to capturing a slice of reality isn’t the point of the video… I kind of think it’s the point of the video
It is, he has a habit of that i think. He discovers why he made the video midway thru it like every time.
You calling him a liar? /s
22:00 I remember using a physical map of liberty city that came with my copy of the game and drawing out routes for "zombie escape plans" as a kid. Probably could've come in handy for keeping track of powerlines for your video - side note, a video on hypotheticals (like "how I'd survive a zombie apocalypse in GTA IV") would bring my childhood full circle and be right up your alley. Great video! :D
When's your next Infinite map?
@@bable6314 Thinking of ending on a high note with my most recent upload. I was making a working side-scroller in Halo that has a working demo and everything, but aside from 343 partnering with me I don't see myself returning. Collabing with them has fallen through multiple times on their end so I'm not really sure what I'm working towards at this point. Refocusing my skills elsewhere, currently writing a novel. Might give away my 2 WIP's to the forge community soon so they can finish what I started maybe
21:27 Nico scratched his head in exactly the right moment XD
In the beginning when you checked out how lines connect to buildings, I realized that it's very different in Europe, because we often have underground cables, and the point of connection is just a small box in the basement. Of course it's different if you go further out from a city, there are some power poles, but even small towns run their cables underground around here.
What also happens (at least here in Portugal) is that you'll also have exposed power cables, but instead of being supported by utility poles, they are "glued" to the side of the buildings
OMG PRATICAL ENGINEERING YEEEES I LOVE GRADY.
Great video. I love how you dont use mods or cheats to get your footage. the fact that you hopped in a heli and flew around looking for locations has such 2009 energy and i respect you so much for because of it. Keep up the awkward content and ill keep consooming.