Burying is more expensive, but you eventually earn the money back. Density is so low in the country it could be 50+ years before you pay it off.
This is part of the trillion dollar sprawl problem we have. We have built a massive amount of infrastructure as cheap as possible, and now we cant afford to built it correctly. People would have never built houses in many places if they had to pay the actual costs.
Something I was reading recently claimed that total operational costs on underground lines also higher in the long run - dielectrics break down, faults are much more expensive etc. Found it counterintuitive, but hard to counter.
It would be interesting to see the cost comparison between an urban distribution line and one that is going through the Sierra Nevada mountains. Each has it's own challenges.
In Denmark, it appears to be about US$800,000 per kilometre.[0] The article mentions, that 17 billion DKK has been invested to dig down 3,200 km overhead wires. It further notes, that 5.7 billion DKK of the budget is spent on buying the cables from the regional owners, before they can be dug down.
The article further talks about people outraged by the amount spent on digging down these cables, as they are generally high voltage cables, and not those that actually reach houses. So I'd imagine regular wires cost less than the above calculation (which includes the 5.7 billion for purchasing the original wires).
3,200km is very little distance in the context of the USA and it's rural town sprawl. 3,200km might get you from coast to coast in a straight line, but 3,200km probably wouldn't even service every town in California once you take the landscape and numerous dotted towns.
Edit: A commenter further down noted:
> PG&E has 81,000 miles of distribution lines
So that's 130,357 kilometers. So at the same cost per km as Denmark, 5,312,500 DKK /km, that's 692,521,562,500 DKK or $105,117,847,971.88 USD, ($105.12 billion) USD.
Not considering how many miles of that is actually through mountain ranges and the extra cost of doing highly remote work.
I don't deny that the US is far bigger. And its density far lower, even in individual states. I'd imagine that does raise costs. But the US is also proportionally richer than Denmark, per capita ($62k vs $52k), not per square km, mind you.
That being said, I do get an impression that more money is lost in bureaucracy/company "fees" in the US than in Denmark.
