Electricity pylons: our need for energy must not overwhelm the landscape

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2015/apr/19/big-issue-electricity-pylons-energy-environment

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Catherine Bennett is right to draw attention to a lack of a vision for our beautiful landscapes from any of our political parties (“It’s not just these new pylons that blight our land”, Comment).

She is a little harsh, however, on the National Grid for its recent attempts to reduce the visual impact of its transmission lines, including the new T-pylon. As our former president Bill Bryson has said, much more needs to be done on this, particularly in the planning of new transmission infrastructure. Significant progress has been achieved recently, following lobbying by CPRE and others, to reduce the impact of transmission lines in some of our finest landscapes as part of Ofgem’s price control review. Work is now well underway by National Grid and others, which is expected to lead to the burying of significant stretches of pylons in a number of national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty in the next few years.

CPRE’s hope is that this will stimulate other infrastructure providers and their regulators to consider more carefully the visual impact of their operations. It would help if our political leaders showed as much appreciation as the electorate of the huge value of our landscapes which contribute so much to our quality of life.

Neil Sinden

Policy and campaigns director, Campaign to Protect Rural England

London SE1

Catherine Bennett’s complaint about electricity pylons reminds me of a need for journalists to learn something about physics and engineering before going to work.

Electricity distribution cables can be put underground in cities and towns because they carry current at a comparatively low voltage, from 11-33kV, which is not reduced very much by the cable losses before it reaches the sub-stations. To carry large amounts of electrical power from generating stations over long distances, the loss of power due to heating the cables would be unacceptable, so the voltage is boosted to 440kV. Potentials as high as this are very hard to contain safely in insulated cables, and underground lines would need enormous tunnels to carry the current safely, which would disturb the countryside a lot more than pylons, as well as making repairs difficult and dangerous, and adding enormously to the cost of the installation.

The only alternative to overhead cables would be for each town and city to have its own power station, as they did in the days before the electricity grid. Small nuclear reactors, such as those used in submarines, would be a neat, non-polluting solution to this problem. Perhaps Ms Bennett would prefer that? The National Grid is a great engineering achievement, as important as the development of the railways. Silly jokes about designing electric kettles simply expose the ignorance of the writer.

John Hewson

Leicester

Catherine Bennett does well to remind us of the “democratic deficit” represented by the new T-pylons to be erected across the land if the National Grid has its way. This is not the first time, of course, that our own “unelected quango chiefs” (and where have we heard something like that before?) have ridden roughshod over the wishes of ordinary people. Some decades ago, the wind turbine industry, sensing a good thing when it saw it, capitalised on the green agenda to carpet the countryside and coast with wind farms, notwithstanding their ugliness and inefficiency.

It is only recently that the oceanic tidal stream alternative has managed to secure some of the funding hitherto directed towards the fickle source of energy represented by wind turbines. In many areas around our coasts, tidal streams flow with significant energy four times a day, 365 days of the year and harvesting that energy can be done naturally with no visible evidence of the endeavour. Is it too much to hope that this alternative will arrest the continuing blight of our landscape by yet more wind farms?

Michael Benoy

Cranleigh

Surrey