Friday, October 14, 2011

FFF55: Pylons

Electricity pylons. Nearly 100 years since they were designed, and now they want to change them. Practical, efficient, elegantly supporting cables as they march across the land. Why do they need to be changed? Because some people think they are ugly. But they have a skeletal beauty, if only people would look at them differently. 

55 words for the G-Man.

A word of explanation. The UK's electricity pylon was designed in the 1920s and has done an effective job ever since. Now someone has decided that they are ugly and out of date, and that we should have a new design. There are some pretty ugly new designs on offer.  I say leave well alone. They really aren't that bad!

8 comments:

snafu said...

The technology exits to get rid of them altogether, but it means digging trenches for thousands of miles and very expensive converters to be built each end of these buried lines. This would eliminate the huge power losses created by the present ancient system (invented in the 1890s) and it would eventually pay for itself but accountants only live for the short term and the NIMBYs would stop complaining about pylons and start screaming about long trenches cutting across the land instead, so pylons will stay in one form or another.

MorningAJ said...

Ah well, as an archaeologist (honest - that's what I'm trained for)I have a problem with lots of digging. I have a problem with the fact that they'll have to dig huge holes to put up new ones anyway.

Maybe if we all switched off a few lights (and computers!) we wouldn't need to update them

Sandra Davies said...

My instinct says the lobbying for the new design is almost certainly led, invisibly, by the folks who'd get the contract to build the new version.

Bubba said...

Some people aren't happy unless they're forcing their viewpoints upon everyone.

And even then, they're never satisfied, because they're always looking for the next thing to complain about... and thus will always find something.

hedgewitch said...

The idea of replacing one set of pylons with another because of appearance seems farcical--if they're going to go to that expense, they should bury them and modernize them. Thanks for the informative 55.

Monkey Man said...

So true....beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We have wind turbines in our eastern rolling hills and they look pretty cool to me, but others see them as an eyesore.

Brian Miller said...

i think they are cool and have a certain nostalgia to them...but them again another thing we dont think much of until someone makes a stink

G-Man said...

Annie...?
Why does this bother you?
Did you freak when they replaced The Telegraph with the telephone?
I Think Not!
Loved your 55 though.
Thanks for playing, and have a Kick Ass Week-End