I note that all of the answers to this point are written by people who do not live here writing irrationally as apologists for pylons. None address the fundamental problem of numbers, that for every turbine there are probably hundreds or thousands of pylons (I've searched but not been able to find a figure for the number of pylons in Scotland).
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"Heading the list of things that most detracted from a visit to the country were electricity pylons and mobile phone masts followed closely by wind turbines and telephone poles. (It is not clear if respondents were aware, when questioned, of the height of wind turbines.)"
I don't agree with everything written in these links, but some of the pictures from both sites taken together as putative before and after do make the eyesore point quite well:
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With respect to the Scottish landscape, it's irrati> For example, he moans about the wind turbines on the landscapes he
Um, not completely. I would agree that pylons are a visual blight that we've all gotten used to BUT they aren't concentrated on hilltops and high moors like windmills are and certainly aren't anything like as visible at a distance. More often than not pylons run through valleys reducing their visual impact enormously.
Seeing if most all the windymills in the UK even if the wind was blowing at the right speed. I doubt that even one 400 kV twin wired line would be pushed to carry their output!..
Well I bet they'd all moan the more if their mobiles didn't work and they had to use candles to see by etc..
Well if the stupid idiot government would see sense about these idiotic things and get on with building a few more Nuclear stations then we wouldn't need them:)..
Whatever they might have said, pylons are a *necessary* evil. There's not an economic alernative if you want affordable electricity in your home.
Which just goes to show that two blights *do* make a wrong.
Again true.
I'm no fan of pylons but I accept their necesssity. I *like* reliable affordable electricity. Without subsidies, windfarms wouldn't exist and they do not provide secure or affordable power. As we *don't* need them, it's perfectly reasonable to rail against windmills but not agains pylons (which we do need).
Irrationally? That's merely your opinion. I don't find it irrational to prefer one thing rather than another. Given the choice, I'd rather have a pylon within view that a wind turbine. At least the former is doing something useful.
FACT: as I write this, our wind fleet is producing 0.3GW. That's a shortfall of some 3.7GW, assuming the fleet is rated at 4GW (a shortfall of 4.7 is you assume 5).
Since every pronouncement from wind proponents says that this or that new addition to the wind fleet will produce enough power for x number of homes, and since those x homes need power 7x24, it seems reasonable to expect that the wind fleet produce power 7x24, at the rated output. That's what we, the public, have been sold.
Any shortfall, therefore, should result in a rebate and questions asked, f'rinstance as to why wind appears unable to emulate good reliable old nuclear, which *has* been producing over 9GW for some considerable time now, day in, day out.
Perhaps Java Jive could tell us where the country should apply to for its rebate due to apparent unreliability of wind generation.
Not a meaningful sentence, but I think I can guess at the sort of irrelevant thing you were trying to say.
Perhaps, but the point at issue is that the survey showed that pylons are considered at least an equal blight on the landscape as wind turbines, yet are usually ignored when people complain about wind turbines being a blight.
That's just the sort of irrationality to which I refer. The means of generation is irrelevant to the blight caused by pylons - whatever the generating source, we'd still need a means of distributing the electricity, so we'd either still have pylons, which are at least a great a blight as wind turbines, or would have to pay to bury the cables instead.
Oh, and BTW:
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"However The Times reported the cost of building each EPR reactor had increased to £7 billion, which Citigroup analysts did not regard as commercially viable, projecting a generation cost of 16.6p/kWh for private-sector financed reactors."
... in a little more detail ...
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"A report from the Times newspaper on Monday said French nuclear developer EDF had raised the cost of building a nuclear power plant to
7 billion pounds from 4.5 billion pounds last year.
"If the latest cost figures are true, new nuclear power plants in the UK are not commercially viable," Citi analyst Peter Atherton told Reuters. Based on the new figures, nuclear would be the most expensive form of electricity generation, exceeding even offshore wind, he said. "The only way they could be built is if the construction risk was transferred to the taxpayer," Atherton said, equating to a multi-billion pound government insurance policy.
EDF's Flamanville reactor, which is under construction in France, is running four years late and at least double its original budget."
Note: The figure of £7bn does not include the costs of decommissioning at end-of-life and handling waste; it is unclear whether or not the 16.6p/kWh unit cost of electricity does so.
They bury the cables in the towns and cities, why not in the countryside?
:-)
So do I. I'm just pointing out that to criticise wind turbines for being a blight on the landscape but not to complain about the much larger number of pylons is nothing more or less than bias, pure and simple.
Without subsidies, and being an offshoot of the nuclear arms race, nuclear power certainly would never have come about. Without subsidies, no new nuclear power stations are likely to be built in this country, see the projected costs given in my reply to Tony.
But it's only your opinion that we don't need wind turbines and do need pylons, and, although it's an opinion widely shared within this group, it's perhaps not as widely shared elsewhere, and even if it is, it's still only an opinion.
All I'm trying to point out that this complaint about wind turbines being a blight on the landscape is one of several common examples of bias both within this ng and the wider media when discussing such issues.
It seems that when discussing power generation, the mortar boards are cast aside and replaced by the pointed hats and druidic robes. Here are some more examples that spring to mind:
Pejorative terms like NIMBY are applied to those who are anti nuclear power or shale gas, but not to those who are anti wind turbines.
Wind turbines are widely criticised for being heavily subsidised, but it is equally widely ignored that the nuclear generating industry has gobbled up more than half of the world subsidies to the power generating industry to date (note: when I last checked this link thoroughly and extended Table 1 as below, there appeared to be summation errors in it, nevertheless the overall point stood and still stands that fission has gobbled up half the total R&D subsidies known to IEA, equalling all the other areas, including fusion, added together):
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Table 1 (extended with summation errors corrected, and this will wrap of course - you'll have c'n'p into Notepad or equivalent and replace any spurious newlines by tabs) Year 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Total Percent Consvn 333 955 725 510 1240 1497 1075 6335 9.74% Fossils 587 2564 1510 1793 1050 612 1007 9123 14.02% Renews 208 1914 843 563 809 773 1113 6223 9.56% Fission 4808 6794 6575 4199 3616 3406 3168 32566
Another point about subsidies that is widely overlooked is that generations indefinitely (for all practical purposes) into the future will have to bear the cost of managing, storing, and guarding (against potential terrorist attack) nuclear waste, but, unlike us creating the waste now, will have zero benefit from so doing. In effect it is being demanded of the future, without being given any say in the matter, that it should subsidise the present. This too is never mentioned when subsidies to wind generation are criticised.
Cost and appearance. And safety, as underground cables are much less likely to be damaged than overhead ones when there is a of of traffic.
Cables aren't always buried in town, either. I know of many towns in France, and not a few large villages in the UK where power is run in to the houses from poles set at the side of the road.
Pylons are a passive part of the landscape, in a way like trees or even large fenceposts. My brain can easily almost "tune them out" of the scene. Wind turbines are an active part of the landscape, as they should be moving at all times. My brain is constantly forced by this motion to notice them and keeps trying to ignore them.
So you'd like to do away with pylons and replace them with wind turbines?
Or would you like to do away with both?
So, which would you rather have? The minimum number of pylons necessary to transport energy from a small number of centralised power stations, or a much larger number to transmit power from many small, unreliable sources of electricity, as well as the ones needed to transport power from the back-up energy sources and the wind turbines themselves? Either way, the wind turbine alternative ruins far more skylines and countryside.
Speak for yourself. They're *all* NIMBYs as far as I'm concerned, as are those who want HS2 and wanted HS1 to run along routes away from their homes. They don't care *where* they go, other than it must be far away from their back yard.
If they'd buried it all in the first place, we'd've been reaping the benefits ever since of having more reliable supplies in winter. Taking into account all those costs since, perhaps it might even have been cheaper in the long run.
If that's really true, I don't think you should assume that anyone else has that happy facility - certainly I do not.
Both are equally visible, and equally noticeable, from my house.
No. And as you don't appear to have a substantive rebuttal of what I have actually said, I have to presume that you are instead trying to put words into my mouth that you think you can rebut.
I am merely pointing out ... oh, hold on, you've left it quoted ...
An intelligent unbiased discussion.
I always do, or hadn't you noticed ?-)
In any issue like this, there are always TWO sides, BOTH of which have merit. One is, as the saying has it: "You can't halt progress!", but the other is that if the majority hoping to benefit from a proposed development truly want that development, then they should be prepared to pay a reasonable compensation to those whose lives would be blighted by it.
Suppose you've sunk your entire life's savings into a property in a quiet nook of the world, and then five years later someone comes along and says: "Sorry, chum, but there's going to be a railway (or motorway, or wind-farm, or whatever) right outside your front door!", then you'd expect to be compensated sufficiently to enable you to go and find another quiet nook to live out your days. That doesn't strike me as being an unreasonable position. A property to live in is the biggest single investment that most people make. It's only fair that they should be compensated if their property is going to be significantly devalued in the name of progress.
Except that it wasn't a rant, and only 'anti-nuclear' to the extent of pointing out some facts about nuclear power that are habitually 'overlooked' as part of the general bias in this ng.
At a first guess - the land is more expensive in cities and distances short er, so it makes more sense to bury the cables. You could get quite a substa ntial house into the footprint of a 400kV pylon. In addition, I suspect the re may be fewer complaints of electric / magnetic field induced illnesses w hen the wires are out of sight... In fact there are pylons - and quite a bit of lower voltage distribution - coming a fair way into many cities and towns. For example, this one is in Mitcham, which while not exactly central London , isn't exactly rural either.
Where the biassed writer (of the original article linked up thread) drove, part of which is here near where I live - I drive some of that route weekly for my shopping.
It's not just *one* pylon to be preferred over a single turbine, but a whole line of them right across your view, and right up the next glen, and the one after that. In terms of impact on the landscape, pylons outnumber wind-turbines *many times* to one. To complain about a wind-turbine and not have anything to say about many times more pylons is irrational bias.
Fascinating to others perhaps, but completely irrelevant here as I'm not arguing about how effective or otherwise wind-turbines are, or even could potentially be, but what is their impact on the landscape compared with many times more pylons.
Again, not relevant to the point I was making, but see the costs for nuclear power that I posted in reply to Tony.
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