The looming battle over pylons for green energy
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby/Robin Guenier
This one got through the BBC censors!
The Great Energy Transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy has numerous dimensions: jobs lost and others created, electric vehicles, biofuelled planes, scrapped gas boilers and triple glazing.
But to those who live in rural communities near the picturesque village of Beauly, it means pylons and cables in four directions, a vast new substation, and the "Beauly buzz" that keeps some awake at night.
They are at the crossroads of a vast network of infrastructure being planned to bring power from where it will be generated within a decade, and to funnel it through the central Highlands towards the homes, businesses, hospitals and schools to the south where most of the demand is.
With a budget of £10bn, SSE Networks Transmission (SSEN) has a large share of more than £50bn that rewiring Britain is expected to cost. It is spending around two-thirds of its budget on sub-sea links, but it is the onshore links that are whipping up squalls of opposition.
Battles to protect scenic and environmentally sensitive areas from the march of ever-bigger wind turbines are now moving to pylons and cables.
And where these skirmishes used to be isolated to one or at most two communities affected by a wind farm, the campaigns are now strung along routes, like beacons.
Going south from Beauly, a high-voltage line has been part of the national electricity grid since 2015.
The Beauly-Denny line became famous and infamous as the battle over pylons of up to 60 metres (197ft) through the central Highlands, at their most obvious to road and rail travellers at the Drumochter Pass north of Pitlochry, and connecting to the southern network at Denny near Falkirk.
That took 14 years in planning and disputes, including five years for a public inquiry. Approval was given with numerous mitigating requirements to compromise with communities who did not want to see pylons and nature campaigners who worried about habitat.
That route is 130 miles long. The scale of what is now being planned is roughly three times as big. And following public meetings along the routes through spring and summer, campaigners believe they can tie this in knots if they secure public inquiries.
Some want the planned routes re-directed, away from homes, or at least away from their homes, or the cables undergrounded or laid under the sea.
Others are not interested in mitigations, but want the industrialisation of the Highlands to stop, saying the developer has not proven a need for so much intrusion into the landscape.
In an uncompromising campaign from the Kiltarlity and Kilmorie communities near Beauly, its leaders say they are getting regular contacts from others along these routes, now including those in the Mearns area south of Aberdeen.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-66336599
The whole concept of building huge amounts of wind power capacity in the remoteness of Scotland was always highly flawed. It was clearly never going to be economically viable when all of these infrastructure costs were added in.
Yet the policy was driven forward by both UK and Scottish governments, the latter in the inane belief that it would make Scotland energy independent.
Quite apart from the environmental devastation, there is also that cost of more than £50 billion to pay for rewiring Britain. We will all be paying the bill for this in years to come.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
There’s another pylons battle currently taking place in East Anglia.
Selfish NIMBY greens object to the most cost-effective infrastructure needed to get the outputs from their local offshore wind farms to market.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-66023678
The NIMBYs want all other electricity bill payers to fork out the extra £7billions for the requisite connector(s)to be routed off-shore.
National Grid plan to do both.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/network-and-infrastructure/infrastructure-projects/sealink
From near Sizewell to near the UK end of NEMO to Belgium between Ramsgate and Sandwich.
Hi IDAU you will probably know the Thanet end of that link. The lines are proposed to come onshore at Pegwell Bay by the old Hoverlloyd terminal. They then run to a new converter station at Minster Marshes then HVAC back down to the Richborough substation (alongside the Nemo Link converter).
They just seem to be moving the bottlenecks around. The Canterbury North/Kemsley link will struggle to handle this new load on top of Nemo, the London Array and (God helps us) Project Fortress. But getting nearer to London adding in BritNed, Damhead Creek, Grain, et. alia and I am sure they will not be able to simultaneously import just when they almost certainly will need to most.
What bugs me is that, regardless of future projections, the UK currently has much lower electrical demand than just 15 years ago
(Dec 2010 hit a peak of 61.5GW way ahead of anything in recent times and with no blackouts) yet the system had minimal grid constraints back then. All this decarbonisation scam is actually doing is massively increasing wires, pylons, management and balancing services and still doesn’ t work properly.
I think of the sky high cost of all this when just putting SMRs on the old coal and oil redundant plant’s sites would have decarbonised the grid with no extra wires. Expensive? – I don’t think so.
Shame that article doesn’t highlight that many more jobs get lost than created
>>jobs lost and others created
The new design of pylon is a triumph of elegance compared with the ugly ’20s design. I wish they would replace ours here in South Wales.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60754357
Can you get 6 feeds all with 4 wires, that the existing lattice towers can handle plus the weight of an engineer or two servicing the line, there is only one central support rather than one in each corner, It may be less of an eyesore but is it robust in an ice storm?
“Can you get 6 feeds all with 4 wires, that the existing lattice towers can handle plus the weight of an engineer or two servicing the line,”
Yes …
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fthumbs.dreamstime.com%2Fb%2Fpylons-power-production-old-new-sited-next-to-future-eakring-nottinghamshire-first-new-pylon-type-52624627.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=0ced581635f100fbc263ec3d44221944df4a631f2bdb04960756c1b952bb9f0a&ipo=images
The tight web of steelwork of the old pylons causes huge turbulence in and around the pylon, making the whole front almost effectively solid in the top half. So the new design will have less wind resistance.
looks to be less distance between the phases, i wonder how they will perform in a short circuit, before the breakers trip, huge magnetic forces.
The ‘T’ pylons are more intrusive both visually & constructional wise
I prefer these
Yes, I would prefer those.
A crop of new Facebook groups has sprung up across Aberdeenshire in the last 2 months galvanising opposition to SSEN’s proposed new 400kV OHL and sub-stations. SSEN claim it’s all been okayed by Ofgem already so there’s nothing to argue about save the specific details of the chosen route/sites. And the SNP/Greens have, via NPF4, just loaded the planning dice heavily in favour of any development that involves renewable energy or grid upgrades to facilitate it. So despite the local opposition, it seems unlikely it will have any impact since the Scottish Government are the decision-makers and the next Scottish election won’t be until 2026.
Surely the government only has to tell Zuckerberg to close those pages down or does that only work in the US?
Only briefly mentioned in the article is the prospect of no new Nuclear in Scotland. But why? because the SNP/Greens don’t like it. But energy policy isn’t even devolved. So the existing grid connections at Torness etc, will presumably lie unused
Once Torness is shut down, possibly next year Scotland, will only have a maximum of 1GW of dispatchable power, including hydro that is mainly used to help balance the grid during daily periods of peak demand such as early evening. So much for being energy independent during periods of low wind speeds.
Paul: you omitted the article’s last two paragraphs:
A pity. Lyndsey Ward – a tireless campaigner for the protection of the countryside against the encroaches of “green” energy – is a climate heroine.
Following on from the other post about the cost of renewables, the cost of changing the grid to suit is why our electricity costs will stay high in the years to come keeping the UK as a poor location for manufacturing.
Problem we already have is the amount of wind thats being constrained off the system daily 22GWh yesterday alone and much of it in Scotland because they’ve allowed the windfarms to be built despite the transmission system being unable to shift the power. Of course wind farm owners aren’t bothered they save wear and tear on the machines when they are constrained and get paid for the privilege based on what they said they were going to generate. They should be an immediate ban on adding any more wind generation where the transmission system is at capacity.
Paul,
The article in question was written by Douglas Fraser. If only the BBC had more journalists like him. Having read quite a lot of his work at BBC Scotland I would say he does his research well, writes about both sides of any dispute with balance, and doesn’t toe the BBC party line. A proper journalist, in other words. All power to his elbow.
As Robin Guenier commented above, the redoubtable Lyndsey Ward gets quite a write-up in that piece, and she thoroughly deserves it. A tireless campaigner doing much good work against the odds. All power to her elbow too.
I wrote about all this stuff earlier this month, here:
No mention of the fact that what was possibly the UK’s largest ever wild fire earlier this year was very close to if not underneath the Beauly Denny line. It’s unlikely it was started by the line itself, but could of been caused by a cigarette discarded by someone working on the line.