Nice website
I couldn't help but chuckle at the "FAQ". Surely that must be stretching the definition of "Frequently" to breaking point?
National Grid's new designer pylon is 'too white and boring' – Pylon Appreciation Society
The UK's National Grid has planted the first of its new "T-pylons" — an elegant alternative to the traditional steel lattice monsters currently straddling Blighty's green and pleasant land. The T-pylon was born from a 2011 competition won by Danish architects Bystrup, who came up with a 35 meter-high monopole base design, …
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Monday 13th April 2015 11:32 GMT VinceH
Re: Nice website
"Is there one specific pylon in this country that's seen as the top dog or one which you particularly like?"
Heh!
Yup, I've actually been sitting here wondering about that for a very long time - so I'm glad that website exists to answer my question! And I'm sooo glad two that are almost on my doorstep - the two spanning the Severn Estuary - get a mention in answer to that.
No, really. Would I lie about something as glorious and beautiful as the pylon?
Why, yes, yes I would.
In all seriousness, though, if I was a member of that society, I'm afraid I'd be a dissenting voice - because I quite like the appearance of the new ones.
But then, I also quite like wind turbines, despite other people around me thinking they're ugly.
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Monday 13th April 2015 13:43 GMT disorder
Re: Nice website
If they look like wind turbines already you could think it may make sense to actually put a wind turbine on top too. If they can still claim land to plant pylons through eminent domain then surely, the only people that'd be offended by fixing our renewables obligations would be greens?
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Monday 13th April 2015 16:58 GMT Suricou Raven
Re: Nice website
Turbines can't feed into those transmission lines directly - serious voltage mismatch. You could almost make it work, but you'd need a bunch of switchgear and a big transformer down the bottom - and if you need that, it'd be more efficient to use multiple turbines all hooked up to a common substation.
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Monday 13th April 2015 10:41 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: White pylon
I think it's not my place to say what colours or patterns they should have. It should be thrown open to local communities. Schedule days when they can be turned off and provide some scaffolding and paint, and let people turn up and decorate them. What's the worst that could happen?
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Monday 13th April 2015 14:05 GMT BernardL
Re: White pylon
Nah, Flecktarn's too dark and it blurs to black past 100 metres or so. You want something more like Pletsloring for foresty areas. Or PenCott.
For something on a skyline, it would be great if there was such a thing as a light grey/green camo that was useless for anything else... Oh, wait, UCP.
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Monday 13th April 2015 08:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon
"Wind turbine efficiency is already pretty dire "
That's true. But you're assuming that they are intended to be efficient and effective. Any deductive reasoning leads to the conclusion that wind turbines are built solely for the sake of being seen to do something. Total UK spend on renewables to date is around £38bn, which has purchased around 20 GW of wind and solar PV capacity, with an average load factor (across onshore wind, offshore wind, solar) of around 25%, with around 6% load factor on the 100 coldest days of the year.
The same money would have bought 10 GW of nuclear plant (event at EDF & Areva's comically over-priced offer for Hinkley Point C), but that would have operated at around 90% load factor, and because outages are scheduled, close on 100% availability on the coldest days. So nuclear power would give you twice the total output of the crummy renewables, reliably and when you need.
So I come back to the tokenism of wind turbines. Monuments to muddle headed thinking, erected at the behest of civil servants and politicians spending other people's money.
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Monday 13th April 2015 11:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon@ Pen-y-gors
"Our great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to shovel a couple of kilos of nuclear waste into their hot water bottle and keep the bed warm without wasting any hot water"
Managing nuclear waste is a fairly straightforward concept. It has a cost, but ultimately it came out the ground, you shove it back into the ground. I know this is challenging for the calvinist-guilt ethic that seems to be an essential for all "environmentalists".
The UK's spiralling decommissioning costs reflect 1950's designs that have more irradiated mass than modern designs, and in particular the appalling practices at the Sellafield plant primarily related to nuclear weapons development. Sellafield alone represents 74% of total UK decommissioning costs, and that's virtually all down to research and armaments. Nuclear power decommissioning costs will turn out around £40bn (undiscounted) including the sites not included in the NDA portfolio. Over their lifetime the assets concerned will have generated around 3.2 PWh of electricity, so the decommissioning costs for nuclear power are about 1.25 p/kWh, and modern designs would probably be less than a quarter of that. It'd be even cheaper if the bunglers of the civil service could be kept well away.
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Monday 13th April 2015 08:59 GMT Mike 125
Re: White pylon
@Ledswinger
Cool. And even better, we can just let the kids worry about the decommissioning and clean up, somewhere down the line. They'll thank us for keeping the lights on. And in any case, there's no problem with any of that sh't, right, nothing a good, stiff broom can't budge, right?
Ahhh... amortising costs out to the future, to screw up the future - it's so great.
Now, back to a serious question: how do you actually measure the efficiency of a wind turbine? Power out / Power in, but how do you measure the Power in?
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Monday 13th April 2015 09:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon
"Cool. And even better, we can just let the kids worry about the decommissioning and clean up, somewhere down the line. "
If we keep burning fossil fuels because renewables arn't up to the job then the kids will have more urgent things to worry about than a few hundred tons of nuclear waste which could happily fit in a few railway wagons.
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Monday 13th April 2015 12:23 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: White pylon
"If we keep burning fossil fuels because renewables arn't up to the job then the kids will have more urgent things to worry about than a few hundred tons of nuclear waste which could happily fit in a few railway wagons."
Whilst I agree with you on principle, it's probably only remotely sensible to put the low level waste in this sort of containment (stuff like gloves used to handle the outsides of the containers of higher-level stuff, etc.)
With high level waste, like spent fuel, you might find you end up with a couple of railway-carriage shaped holes emitting a strange blue glow.
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Monday 13th April 2015 09:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon
"erected at the behest of civil servants and politicians spending other people's money."
For once don't blame the politicians. These absurd situation has resulted from endless eco-mentalist pressure groups pushing renewables and causing endless trouble whenever nuclear is put on the table. If any government even attempted to build a nuclear plant at a new site the rent a crowd would immediately descend and cause chaos and meanwhile the suited mentalists would be throwing every legal obstacle and nimby found under a rock at it that they could find.
The end result - you end up with the situation in germany where despite an EU pledge to reduce carbon emissions the idiots there are closing their nuclear plants and opening coal & gas fired plants because their grand renewables schemes won't keep the lights on on their own. Well who knew?
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Monday 13th April 2015 12:57 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: White pylon
"If any government even attempted to build a nuclear plant at a new site the rent a crowd would immediately descend and cause chaos"
It does make one wonder why they don't just build on MoD land. There's plenty of it around the country and already secure in many cases and with specific laws regarding access. Not just huge training areas but disused army and RAF bases.
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Monday 13th April 2015 13:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon@ John Brown (no body)
"It does make one wonder why they don't just build on MoD land. "
This was looked at when they were considering plans to build new nuclear, as you say it would be sensible. But even more sensible to build next retiring nuclear plant (eg Wylfa, Oldbury, Bradwell) because these have some form of grid export capability and so don't require new power lines to the same extent, and the local communities generally accept nuclear power as safe.
So with the limited level of ambition for new UK nuclear there wasn't really the need to use old military land.
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Monday 13th April 2015 09:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon
Here's a potential safer nuclear alternative. I'm not qualified to determine it's viability but there is much work worldwide in the pebble bed and thorium reactor field and so remain hopeful.
http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2012/10/12/what-to-do-with-135000-pebbles-generate-a-lot-of-c02-free-safe-nuclear-power-says-south-african-startup/
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Monday 13th April 2015 11:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon
"Here's a potential safer nuclear alternative....."
PBMR has been around for many years now. It's proven at concept level, it works, and it lends itself to much smaller scale plants than say the huge EPR plants that Areva are struggling to complete and commission in Europe.
There's certainly reason to believe it would be less prone to the sort of catastrophic meltdown of Chernobyl or Fukushima, but against this the proportionate overheads of smaller nuclear plants will be much higher, and certain operational, security and logistical details really don't work in favour of smaller nuclear plants. So as a result it has never really managed to make itself economically viable, and the idea has repeatedly been passed on.
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Monday 13th April 2015 15:12 GMT Androgynous Cupboard
Re: Pebble Bed Reactors (was White Pylon)
I understood that there were still a bunch of issues with the pebble bed design that came to light in the german AVR reactor, and that it's not quite the panacea that it's been made out to be...
Only source I can find is this slashdot comment.
Edit: found a few more authorititive links:
http://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurepbr-safety-revisited/
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Monday 13th April 2015 15:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: White pylon
Re: Wind power: "Such places are not in the UK"
Don't believe the NZ propaganda! They're claiming a load factor of 32.4%, which is good for onshore units, but not so good compared to the 37-39% year round average achieved by UK offshore units. And whilst not universally true, as a general rule it is often impracticable to build decent size (5MW+) turbines on land, so you'll see the NZ site has poxy, short-bottomed 1.65 MW units - they're letting more than half the wind energy drift on by.
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Friday 17th April 2015 20:49 GMT Tom 7
Re: White pylon
You have seen that the people who may possibly make the new plant at Hinkley are currently 3 times over budget on their current french plant and the pressure vessel is just a tad leaky. It was made the same way as the one they've already made for Hinkley apparently....
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-nuclear-strategy-faces-meltdown-as-faults-are-found-in-identical-french-project-10186163.html
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Monday 13th April 2015 11:56 GMT anothercynic
Re: White pylon
You'll find that the VAWT resolves many of the 'dead return' issues by using more than 2 blades (the classic design just uses 2) and by curving them around 60 degrees. You don't have to build a 200m tower to connect a set of 60m blades either... But that said, VAWTs like the QR5 do have some design issues, and QuietRevolution, the company who sold the QR5, went bust because the QR5 did in fact not deliver the 5kW it was supposed to have (it delivered around 15% less), and there were some construction flaws that caused corrosion (and lots of subsequent fun with centrifugal forces). There are some buildings on the M25 (somewhere between the M3 and the M23) that have a set of QR5s installed (which sadly don't rotate because QR went bust).
I agree that a row of QR5s on their 14m stalks would be nicer to see than one massive 60m wind turbine quietly rotating in the wind. Smaller or larger versions (QR built the QR20 too) in windy places would be less obtrusive than say a forest of big turbines (drive through Saxony in Germany sometime, you'll soon realise what I mean).
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Monday 13th April 2015 13:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: VAWT@ anothercynic
"I agree that a row of QR5s on their 14m stalks would be nicer to see than one massive 60m wind turbine quietly rotating in the wind"
But unfortunately the boundary layer effects mean you'll always get less output from any wind turbine closer the ground (or even sea surface). This really mitigates against VAWT, which lends itself to smaller scale units.
That's why the latest designs are offshore monsters HAWT up to 220m tall.
In theory VAWT could be built offshore, but nobody's done anything at any meaningful scale, despite some tens of millions of dollars thrown at research into offshore VAWT.
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Monday 13th April 2015 17:03 GMT Suricou Raven
Re: White pylon
Vertical turbines do have one advantage though: Reliability. They have one moving part. A pivoting turbine has the rotor, usually angleable blades, slip rings designed to handle the weight of generator and gearbox, more complicated lubrication that needs monitoring. They actually need servicing, a vertical rotor turbine is almost fit-and-forget. That's a big advantage in small-scale installations where you don't want the cost of on-site engineer visits.
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Monday 13th April 2015 08:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Metal tree
"I hate the idea of bright white,"
It's actually a light grey, and the colour is not dissimilar to the "air superiority grey" used on combat aircraft. That's chosen because the usual backdrop against which you want low visibility is the sky. Painting either pylons or military aircraft green or brown would make them stand out like a sore thumb in most viewing situations.
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Monday 13th April 2015 11:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Metal tree
It's actually a light grey, and the colour is not dissimilar to the "air superiority grey" used on combat aircraft. That's chosen because the usual backdrop against which you want low visibility is the sky. Painting either pylons or military aircraft green or brown would make them stand out like a sore thumb in most viewing situations.
Tiny problem: you don't want them to be wholly invisible either in case of air traffic. One of the *major* benefits I see of the new style is that they are much smaller and thus less of an obstruction.
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Monday 13th April 2015 10:01 GMT TitterYeNot
Re: They're not bottom of the [boring] food chain by a long way
"http://www.telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org"
And they even have a 'Pole of the Month'!
"Phwoar, look at the skirts on those insulators!" Erm...
On a more serious note, I'm guessing the light colour they're using for these new pylons will help prevent them from being infested with low flying helicopters and microlight aircraft.
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Monday 13th April 2015 10:04 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Re: They're not bottom of the [boring] food chain by a long way
"http://www.telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org"
And they even have a 'Pole of the Month'!
There's a Pylon of the Month site too!
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
