New electricity pylons will ‘carve up’ the countryside, opponents claim
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
Plans for a new overhead electricity line to run across south Norfolk, and beyond into Suffolk and Essex, have come up against opposition from campaigners.
National Grid is currently consulting with residents about their ‘East Anglia GREEN’ project, which they say is needed to help the UK achieve its ambition of net zero emissions by 2050 – and because the current infrastructure is not fit for purpose.
But the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) said the proposed pylons would have a "negative impact" on unspoilt countryside.
In a message on their website, National Grid states: “East Anglia’s 400 kV electricity transmission network was built in the 1960s.
“It was built to supply regional demand, centred around Norwich and Ipswich.
“With the growth in new energy generation from offshore wind, nuclear power and interconnection with other countries, there will be more electricity connected in East Anglia than the network can currently accommodate.”
The new proposed line would run south from a substation at Dunston, near Norwich.
The pylons would typically be 45-50m high, with the cable running parallel to an existing power line to the west, which is itself west of and parallel to the A140 road.
The railway line to London would meanwhile lie between the new and existing power lines.
At the county’s southern edge, it would exit into Suffolk by passing between Bressingham and Roydon, near Diss, before heading to its destination at Tilbury, on the Thames estuary.
The CPRE are among those with reservations about the proposal, saying it would damage the landscape.
David Hook, chair of the CPRE’s ‘Vision for Norfolk’ committee, said: “It’s a pity that when they’re doing all this new work to upgrade transmission, that they don’t use this as an opportunity to bury the cables – and also to bury existing cable lines.
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/planning/east-anglia-green-norfolk-cpre-national-grid-cable-8915454
Quite apart from the environmental impact, let us also not forget about the cost of building all of this, none of which will be paid by the offshore wind farms or interconnectors.
It’s a reminder of many hidden costs of renewable power.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Does David Hook have any idea how difficult and costly it would be to bury these cables? The CPRE are hugely in favour of “net zero” and vast swathes of wind turbines I suppose. How do they reconcile destruction of damage to the landscape by turbines compared to pylons. Absolute hypocrites!
Spot on!
The CPRE went totally and hysterically warmist years back (and, if anything, is worse today), leading to many like myself reluctantly stopping membership. Their beloved net zero – not least the move to total BEVs and heat pumps – would increase electricity usage in this country many times. Just how do they think this massively increased power can be generated in, and transported around the country without creating industrial eyesores thereby damaging “Rural England”?
They don’t mind at all especially if the wind turbines are built in Scotland 🙂
About half a mile up the road from me they buried the cables going to an ANGLIA offshore wind farm .
About 3 years of chaos on the roads , many hundreds of acres of farmland unusable for years, and a cost, [ seems to be well hidden ,] but over hundreds of millions of pounds for what is probably less than 15 miles of main transmission lines .
So the cost makes it just as insane as the whole idea of wind farms .Which are many times the price of reliable generation , but a lot of the time simply will not do the job required .
A DIRECT consequence of Greens & enviros demanding energy-dense fossil fuels be replaced by all those EVs & heat pumps.
To quote Ayn Rand:
“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
They also need to be reminded that gas pipelines are buried underground, so don’t blot our landscape.
“that gas pipelines are buried underground,” Strewth it would be a right bugger hanging them off pylons!!!
I dug a little further and found this:
The existing network in East Anglia currently carries around 3,200 megawatts (MW) of electricity generation. Over the next decade we expect more than 15,000 MW of new generation and 4,500 MW of new interconnection to connect in the region.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/network-and-infrastructure/infrastructure-projects/east-anglia-green-network-reinforcement
This is exactly why National Grid us quite unfit to be in charge of future energy scenarios and net zero planning: their solutions result in a massive expansion of grid assets at our expense.
“at our expense”, and to their financial gain, that is why they are so keen on cuddly green small local generation: lots of lovely poles and wires.
I find it laughable, that they are complaining about the ‘blot on the landscape’ of another set of pylons, yet they are quite happy for the landscape to be ‘blotted’ with wind turbines and solar panels, which, if produced in the numbers needed, will ‘blot’ the landscape far more than a new set of electric pylons.
Perhaps National Grid should suggest that the pylons to be attached to wind generators and see what the response will be.
EXACTLY!!!!!
The double speak and hypocrisy of the push for more renewables knows no bounds.
I am unsurprised by the idiot comment about putting the cables underground. Why do people whose opiniosn are considered reportable clearly understand nothing about electricity transmission? Or electricity in general?
Same right of way problems and the rather insurmountable problem of running at 275,000 400,000V in close proximity to the damp ground. If you have fatter wires so you can use lower voltage and deliver the same power at a higher current, they get too heavy. THey cannot carry high power at low voltage without being massive and having large resistive losses in the cables , which is why Tesla won the current wars in New York. You can’t transform DC.
Marginally less daft than paying £1Billion for a cross channel cable under the water, which does not mix with electricity either. So the power cord costs more than the same capacity power station on the grid we already have, etc. There is very little engineering entering into electrical choices these days, because most people, especially thos making statements about it, are too ignorant and/or opinionated to understand, or want to try, they prefer their baseless opinions. You can’t build what won’t work. CEng, CPhys
PS If we were to be stupid enough to electrify transport and heating , which is far better done on cost and efficiency grounds with oil and gas, they will need to triple the grid, and the local low voltage cables under the ground, at least.
The reason pylons are so tall is simply to keep a large separation of the cables. Burying them still requires large separation, so you either go very deep indeed or very wide. Either ways it is massively more expensive.
I notice though the commenter had to slip nuclear in there to make out it is the bad boy when in fact it is dispersed renewables that cause by far the most increments in local overhead cabling.
+ as you mention nuclear wasn’t the grid connection sized for Sizewell being expanded https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/sizewell-is-targeted-for-nuclear-expansion-1540797.html as they don’t need to expand it for Sizewell C plus you have the redundant capacity built for the magnox reactors (Sizewell A & Bradwell A) – the line from Bradwell A is only 132 kV so could be upgraded to 400 KV & I suspect was sized for expansion. Then you have Tilbury which clearly was sized for both Tilbury A & B and it would make more sense to leave new HVDC interconnects as cables until your closer to London than add them to the wider East Anglia network so this is clearly about offshore wind and a cost of adding offshore wind to the system (is this being paid by the wind farm?) which at best has a capacity factor of 40% vs 90+% for new nuclear.
I was having a beer with a guy who was working on a large local pylon project and I asked him why they didn’t bury the cables. Apparently he was a senior engineer and he said the cables would have to run through an oil filled pipe which was constantly being cooled to dissipate the heat. I didn’t check that but it runs true to my way of thinking. He also said it would be massively expensive with major on costs.
Similar hypocrisy from Rspb, suddenly worried about kittiwakes.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10745163/New-offshore-wind-farms-rushed-catastrophic-impact-Britains-sea-birds.html
‘New electricity pylons will ‘carve up’ the countryside, opponents claim’
It’s a bit late for that argument. Have a look round today’s countryside.
The A9 Inverness to Perth would be the first place to look. Disgusting!
Off topic, but worth filing away, this poor image quality graphic from NASA earth science site for the decline of the peak of Kilimanjaro. If accurate, it shows much the same thing as tide gauges, ie a trend established long before man’s co2 emissions became significant, and constant throughout.
The government are putting significant investment into Small Modular Reactors (SMR) that are being built by a consortium lead by Rolls Royce. Each SMR is built on site from modules produced at various sites around the country and will take 500 days from start to completion
Each SMR can output a steady 470MW and is small enough to fit into a 10-acre site. Seeing as the government intends to power the UK with a large number of these small reactors, surely this new electricity pylon initiative will be a waste of money….
Thats a good question as I suspect these grid upgrade are about transporting offshore wind to London than local demand and no-one seems to have factored in local demand increases & increase capacity needed for electric vehicles let alone heat pumps (which are both being pushed) without considering the redundant peak transmission & generating capacity we would need just in case we had a 1947 style winter and the COP of heat pump drops to only 1.
I suspect Small Modular PWRs will initially be built in communities who actively want new nuclear e.g Dungeness and Anglesey (are the ones I can think of at the top of my head) to avoid NIMBY opposition but as replacing natural gas space & to some extent water heating (because of the effect electric vehicles will have on off peak & the need for a hot water tanks) with electrification is unworkable due to the scale (think of the labour needed to do this) & cost of the local grid upgrades the only realistic solution I can see is a district heat system which aims initially to cover enough heating demand we become self sufficient & in the medium term extends to cover the 85% of home currently on the gas grid (powered in the short term by natural gas/oil fired heat pumps & coal and long term by Small Modular nuclear reactors & waste heat – e.g supermarkets).
one thing I think would should aim for is to start charging for electricity by the KVA supply i.e. per xKW of simultaneous demand based on initially on what the local grid can handle eventually reaching a cost effective level (so cover electric cooking & electric vehicles) I’m thinking 10 KW (as 30KW+ we would need for space heating in extreme weather will result in to much redundant capacity so would be more expensive vs CHP & district heating) but this needs to be studied.
Looking at London this could be done with around 40 GWe in or around the city as combined heat and power Small Modular nuclear units. To the question of if new electricity pylon initiative in East Anglia will be a waste of money it depends on how it could be used to supply local demand (does anyone know why great Yarmouth CCGT is embedded? – my guess is access to a gas pipeline) and we may get the a reversal of where power stations are located if combined heat and power Small Modular nuclear units are adapted from suburban/city where there is demand for heat to rural locations.
Someone really need to study all of this.
“Does anyone know why great Yarmouth CCGT is embedded? – my guess is access to a gas pipeline”
From Wikipedia:
“It is a CCGT type power station that runs on natural gas supplied via a 12-inch diameter high pressure (69 bar) pipeline from the Bacton Gas Terminal 27 miles to the north-west”
I recall (although neither Wiki or RWE mention it) that this pipeline supplies relatively “Dirty” gas (which, presumably, is cheaper) than the more purified stuff Bacton pumps into the national gas grid. Quite what clean-up measures were employed at the power station to reduce resultant pollution going up the chimney I don’t know…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Yarmouth_Power_Station
https://uk-ireland.rwe.com/locations/great-yarmouth-ccgt-power-plant
“I suspect Small Modular PWRs will initially be built in communities who actively want new nuclear e.g Dungeness and Anglesey (are the ones I can think of at the top of my head) ”
Wylfa is almost certainly destined for a large power reactor not an SMR. The nearby site of Trawfynnyd is highly likely to be RR’s prototype test site. Hartlepool has huge support as does Dungeness as you say (I used to work there). Beyond these I suspect further SMRs will focus on CHP so are likely to be mostly “new” sites or rather former coal or. oil or gas sites.
Wow that CCGT is 420MW pretty large to be embedded in a DNO. Doesn’t appear to be part of the BM either. Very curious.
It is not unusual to have CCGT embedded in the local networks. There are over 4.5GW of CCGT currently embedded and this has actually reduced over the last 10 years. Go to DUKES 5.11 and 5.12 for details.
A similar example is Shoreham CCGT.
O/T I see that it’s being reported that a certain member of the Climate Change Committee has been caught troughing again. I bet no one here could possibly guess the identity of the owner of the errant snout?
There have to be many more pylons as the gas supply infrastructure is being phased out.
The energy has to come from somewhere.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/gas-transmission/land-and-assets/network-route-maps
Exactly. Phasing out gas is insane.
” The gas supply infrastructure is being phased out”
If you saw how many roads are being dug up for gas main replacement work round here you would find that very hard to believe…
There is no long term planning going on for maintaining and replacing the gas supply pipelines, the equipment is being left to life expire.
The decision has already been made, the gas supply infrastructure will become dilapidated and the cost to re-new will be declared uneconomic.
That is how Gov.UK operate.
If there is a gas main on the same route shove your electricity cable up it.
I know that plans to run fibre optic telecoms cables within water & sewer pipes are afoot, but putting high voltage electricity inside gas pipes strikes me as asking for trouble – especially if those pipes are carrying hydrogen!
O/T a syndicated article from The Press Association :
Ditching net zero could cost Tories 1.3 million votes
got a guffaw here
Yes it’s in the Wiltshire Times – but give them a break! – they’ve not got any full time reporters left!
And gain them 15 million…
Quite off topic but refreshing nevertheless. These are only one liners but it might be useful in argument.
This is a useful grid map.https://openinframap.org/#2/26/12
You can zoom in right down to minor local lines
Recent 8.8 km of cable burial in Dorset near Winterbourne Abbas is costing £116m.
Umm NG are forecasting an in service date of 2031 so they better not allow anymore wind farms to be built in E.Anglia beyond current grid capacity otherwise we will be paying out even more in constraint payments.
“New electricity pylons will ‘carve up’ the countryside”
Action packed electricity pylons.
Anyone else thinking “Godzilla vs Pylons?”
This has been known about for so long:
Eon-Netz Wind Report 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20070611194151/http://www.eon-netz.com/Ressources/downloads/EON_Netz_Windreport2005_eng.pdf
“Outlook: Threefold increase in wind power in Germany by 2020
According to grid studies by the Deutsche Energie-Agentur (dena), wind power capacity
in Germany is expected to increase to 48,000MW by 2020, around a threefold increase since 2004. The possibility of integrating this generation capacity into the supply system remains to be seen. There is a need for considerable changes to the extra-HV grid alone, of around 2,700km.These measures will affect the whole of Germany, not only coastal areas.”
“The dena grid study estimates the costs of this wind power-related grid expansion at over €3 billion by 2020. Further expansions of the subordinate HV and medium-voltage grids are likely to be needed in addition to the expansion requirements for the extra-HV grid, since this is where the greater proportion of the onshore wind farms are connected.”
“Overhead lines or underground cables:
When planning the current grid expansions, E.ON Netz examined closely whether underground cables were an option. The technology would essentially already be available. However, the use of cables is not advisable, for the following reasons:
Underground cables in the extra-HV grid (380/220kV) are more expensive than overhead lines by a factor of 7 to 10, and even in the HV area (110kV), the difference in cost is still a factor of 2 to 3.
Failure times of underground cables in the event of problems (component faults, damage due to overground work) are significantly higher than in the case of overhead lines.
In the HV and extra-HV grid, even laying underground cables encroaches on the countryside.
Legally, E.ON Netz is required to make the transmission grid available in the most cost-efficient manner possible. Since overhead lines are the most economically efficient solution, these will be used during the requisite grid expansion.”
CPRE has become very politically correct in recent years so for them to criticise a green agenda issue it must be starting tio hurt.
Quietly slipped out by OFGEM while other things were in the news was this
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/ofgem-eyes-creation-of-independent-bodies-to-operate-local-energy-systems
Replacing local distribution companies with quangos, which doubtless would be empowered to force through the march of the pylons.