Pylons – should they be beautiful or cost effective?

Wouldn’t like to work on most of them in inclement weather.

Safety should be king on this one – and the current (pardon the pun) design appears to have been proven pretty safe over 8 decades.
If a safer design is available then by all means go for it.
Design for the sake of it or design to try to be “fashionable” has no place in such a situation. To quote a famous titled lady [things go wrong when]”you value form over function”. Functionality & safety are the only two considerations that should be on the table surely?

The present safe design is mainly due to the design of the insulators to withstand various severe weather conditions. The number of insulators often indicate the actual voltage of transmission.

The open girder structure make the pylon easier to build on site with transportation of the individual girders easy to manage on our narrow UK roads. Though I suppose they could be transported by huge helicopters.(look at the human figure in some of the photos as indicator of scale)

Frankly cost is certainly a really major factor in the design – open network steel frames are also cheap to construct.

Leave them as they are. Any changes will draw attention to the fact that they are spoiling our view. We also don’t need anything that will increase electricity bills.

I think the standard British design of pylon is quite attractive given the demands placed on them – to hold safely aloft the extremely heavy cable and insulators, withstand the forces acting on them from the swaying cables, endure extreme weather conditions, function with minimal attention in remote locations, cope with undulating ground, deter access by people and animals, and not spoil the view too much. France does have some attractive pylons but it also has some extremely ugly ones and many European contries seem to have less concern over appearance and landscape than we do. Showing the short-listedmodels with silver paintwork and computer adjusted design to present a filligree apearance of the wires is somewhat deceptive. I am not sure that some of the columndesigns could carry such long spans as the existing types so more pylons would be needed for a given distance. If the present ones were painted silver instead of grey they might look more pleasant, especially in sunlight. Even if undergrounding the cables was only marginally more expensive than stringing them from pylons I would still favour overhead power lines as more practical since they can follow an “as the crow flies” route. The obvious option of laying ducts alongside all new motorways was passed over when the opportunity arose and it is probably too late now; dissipating the heat generated by high-tension current transmission would have been a major factor counting against it.

I find the figure of £20m per kilometre of buried cable hard to believe. Years ago I was told Hong Kong had lots of power cables in trenches because of the high-rise buildings, and that these ran much hotter than UK underground cables because of the high ambient temperatures, but Hong Kong doesn’t seem to be short of electricity (and looks better for tourists, than much of Scotland will if NG/Scottish Power complete their proposed long high-pylon run from Inverness to Denny). This high cost per kilometre may be for very specialised completely enclosed tunnels in UK cities, but what about using open or loosely-covered trenches instead, in the countryside? The estimated cost sounds a bit like the very high costs quoted for every new mile of railway track by private companies in the UK, compared to the costs paid in Europe by countries that genuinely value their public transport.

I am very surprised by the voting results to date:

Yes – 28%
No – 28%
Only if it costs no more – 44%

Is this because most people live in urban areas where most people do not endure the blight of ugly pythons?

I am a townie, nearly always have been and I am now, but I am not that selfish. Fortunately townies benefit from urban regulation where most cables are required to be underground. Townies should remind themselves of what it is like in the places they go on holiday where all too often roads are littered with poles and wires.

Maybe country people would object to the placement of powers stations in the countryside. Most electricity users are in cities. Shouldn’t power stations be located in cities? That would substantially reduce distribution costs and the number of pylons that blight the countryside.

With the designs depicted in the preamble above one can confidently say that only an idiot would wish to implement any one of them. In that case we can be sure that the Minister and DECC will be in favour of the most pretty and least suitable design.

To- Patric Steen, Please consider the following before making any more comments on this subject.
The idealistic setting shown by the artists impresion of a line crossing a meadow on a sunny day may look pretty, but the funcion of an overhead tower is to carry the conductors over all types of terrain in all types of weather,snow, ice ,gales and hurricanes in any combination without failing. In order to do this the cross arm would need to look more like the arms of the Angel of the North than the slimline arms shown. The conductor suspension depicted would also allow to much swinging and swaying of the conductors which in turn would increase the dynamic forces imposed on the structure not to mention the increased likelyhood of the conductors short circuiting to each other and to the vertical pole. History shows that single pole towers are more likely to fail than lattice towers due to adverse weather. The comment by a panel member that the winning design should result in smaller towers shows how little they know of the subject, the size of a tower is basically dictated by the operating voltage and the need to maintain electrical and safety clearances under all conditions.An overhead line pole of the winning type may be suitable for low voltage 400/230v lines at increased cost but not for 400kV and 132kV lines. No thought appears to have been given to the erection and maintainance of the lines.
In conclusion I consider that of the judging panel up to seven of the members were, in this context, stylists with no knowledge of designing overhead line towers,I would go so far as to say that some of them I would not trust to provide me with a garden washing line.