Originally Posted by
MechEngr
There appear to be about 700k miles of main transmission line, estimate roughly 10 towers per mile, that's 7 million points/line segments. say 24 bytes for lat, long, alt, and 4 for width - that's 200 MBytes and covers within a couple of meters for the entire continental US. Make that 10 times that for secondary lines and guy wires, et al, and it's 2 GBytes.
500kv lines have about 7 structures per mile, however, when you get to the lower voltage transmission circuits, 65kv lets say, there will be 20-30 poles per mile. And then there is distribution circuits, best estimate is about 5-6 million miles. Then add the service lines that go to buildings and you double that.
In reality, there are very few power-line structures above 300 ft AGL. A standard 500kv transmission tower structure is below 200'. Valleys are another matter---if there is a crossing over a valley, the structures on either side will be below 300' agl.
My advice, unless you need to be down there, stay above it.