Our Electricity Transmission Network in 2020

Those in the congregation who haven’t nodded off (Wake up and sit up straight at the back, and those in the aisle, stand in a polite line, thank you) might recall me talking of the growing unpleasantness of these new wind farms. Yes. They are sprouting up all over the shop, in all our lovely little places. All quite nasty, really.

Well: Brace yourself, Sheila, because that’s nothing compared to what’s coming next.

If you build these wind power stations in out of the way, windy places to make electricity so we can all have toast and coffee for breakfast, it’s going to be quite important to ship the stuff to the places where we are eating breakfast. Electricity is tricky stuff to shift. You can’t load it into wagons and send it on the motorway down to London. It needs cables. In fact it needs lots of cables. The cheapest way of doing this is to sling the cables from giant pylons and straddle the country with them, the cables hanging out of the way of the cars and bicycles up in the air.

There are already thousands of miles of these cable routes all over Britain. However, with the new wind power stations being nowhere near the old coal, gas and nuclear power stations, there needs to be a complete new set of cable routes to link up the new wind power stations with your toaster and coffee machine.

So, the government got together a group of clever chaps to look at this problem and come up with possible solutions and cost it all out. The fellows who owned the network (the three “Transmission Owners”) got together with the Electricity Networks Strategy Group and came up with their plans. The group was chaired jointly by the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) and the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem)

They are proposing “strengthening” the network with a mass of new pylon runs:

And the estimated cost? At current estimates a mere £8.8billion. When the pro-wind lobby talk about the cost of wind, they never ever include this figure. I wonder why?

It looks like the Lake District, Snowdonia and mid Wales are about to be trashed.

You can find the very readable summary by clicking HERE. Get yourself a pot of tea and some iced buns. It’s a good half hour read.