From The Daily Mail:
Andrew Motion accused the Coalition of putting at risk Britain’s ‘great collaborative masterpiece’ – its countryside.
"The environment is foremost in people’s minds, not just because disasters like the recent flooding and ash dieback disease increase our consciousness of what is at risk, but because we’re hearing government pronouncements that betray a wider pattern of neglect for the landscape," he wrote in an article published in The Lady.
"By a thousand cuts, we will be left with a countryside so fragmented that it will be impossible to find a view unimpeded by pylons or warehouses."
... Sir Andrew said the planning system had historically prevented ‘needless urban sprawl while regenerating our cities’ and pointed to the Olympic Park as a good example of using brownfield sites.
He said: "Nick Boles seems determined to abandon this proven strategy, calling for developers to build on an area of open countryside two-and-a-half times the size of Greater London... Even that great icon of England, the village green, is under threat from the growth-at-all-costs culture."
Interestingly, the article is accompanied by a picture of him in a house; a picture of a power station with neat rows of electricity pylons leading away from it (pylons which might well be taking electricity to the very house he is pictured in); and another picture of him in what appears to be Venice, one of the most artificial and densely built up places in the world.
I'd also like to point out that 80% or 90% of us live in urban or suburban housing estates, and very few of us can see electricity pylons or warehouses from our back windows. So if you don't like looking at them, it is easy finding somewhere from where you can't see any.
One To Avoid....
29 minutes ago
28 comments:
"it will be impossible to find a view unimpeded by pylons or warehouses."
Poetic licence I suppose.
Rich, entitled git demands law and taxpayers money to protect view from his house.
The average street sweeper along with members of those awful “far right” parties were warning loud and clear ten years ago that mass immigration (surprise, surprise) leads to a population increase, which (surprise, surprise) leads to the country being covered in concrete.
But it seems that point is beyond the comprehension of the thickos who make up this country’s so called intelligentsia.
AKH, no, that's not "poetic licence" that is crass exaggeration, polemic and demagoguery.
CinG, exacrtly.
RM, whatever the merits or demerits of immigration are (and clearly there are demerits, in terms of social cohesion and Islamism and so on), in numbers terms, they have only contributed one-third to increase in UK population, even over the last ten years of open gates style policies, the rest is increasing life spans.
Further, it is a lie to claim that this country is "covered in concrete", less than one tenth is developed and only about six per cent is homes and gardens, with the "gardens" bit being rather more than half of that six per cent.
Have you ever looked up how many new houses were built in the last ten years (about 1.5 million?), divided that by ten to get the number of acres used up (0.15 million) then knocked off half for gardens (0.07 million), and then compared that with the total surface area of the UK (60 million).
To me, that looks like 0.1% of our surface area being "used up" (i.e. put to better use) and of that 0.1%, only 0.03% is down to immigration.
Glad to have cleared that up!
Sir Andrew said the planning system had historically prevented ‘needless urban sprawl while regenerating our cities’ and pointed to the Olympic Park as a good example of using brownfield sites.
£11bn to create 3500 homes. So, about £3m per home. I'm sure the homies would like that to be the norm so that housing remains prohibitively expensive.
"and pointed to the Olympic Park as a good example of using brownfield sites."
"Brownfield sites" are another political red herring. Developers are only too glad to turn former industrial sites into housing, where there is plenty of demand for housing - see examples in Inner London too numerous to mention. However, lots of people want to live in the country within commuting distance of the city. That is why developers want to build in the green belt. But they don't want to build all over the green belt as it becomes suburbia and the value of the land starts dropping away. It's the very exclusiveness of the green belt that makes it attractive.
OTOH, I have to agree with him about pylons. Not only are they unsightly, but you wouldn't want to live anywhere near one, a fact tacitly acknowledged by the CEGB when they built the grid: you don't see any pylons in cities.
TS, exactly.
B, electricity pylons are stunningly beautiful! It's a question of thinking about all those millions of lights, kettles, machinery and computers etc hooked up to them. Although there is some sort of rumour that if you live underneath them it is not very healthy.
Take trees for example, we know they provide shade, they are somewhere for small animals to nest, they supply us with oxygen (in the day time), we can use them for firewood and carpentry, excellent. We all love trees.
But what about a diseased tree that is right in front of your house, slowly demolishing your drains and foundations, threatening to topple onto your roof and filling your gutters with rotten leaves each year? That tree is not very attractive at all, is it?
You can't grow a tree underground, but you can run electricity underground.
Would you want to live in an electromagnetic field strong enough to run a fluorescent tube? Although I believe that if you live under the pylons you can generate your own free electricity simply by running a coil of wire around your loft.
I'm afraid the market is not with you, Mark: in the countryside, houses with a view of pylons are always cheaper than ones with a view not of pylons, all other things being equal, more or less
B: "in the countryside, houses with a view of pylons are always cheaper than ones with a view not of pylons, all other things being equal, more or less"
Good, then there is a market solution. Let those few houses whose views are "blighted" by pylons pay towards the £millions per running mile which it would cost to run cables underground.
My guess would be that if the electrical cables are underground rather than on pylons they might actually be closer to the houses?
BE
I love the sight of pylons bestriding a lonely moor like a line of giants trudging across the empty landscape. It adds a touch of engineering romance to what is often an otherwise desolate vista.
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My guess would be that if the electrical cables are underground rather than on pylons they might actually be closer to the houses?
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With the exception of a few remote dwellings, electricity is supplied to houses by underground cables. And?
Bayard,
The other problem with "brownfield" sites is that there aren't many left that can be easily built on in the places people want to live that are profitable for developers.
Duh. People are moaning about being close to high-voltage lines above their head. I reckon if they are in pipes underground they might be closer.
Another thing: Motion seems to be claiming that an area 2.5 times the size of Greater London will be swallowed up. Is he really suggesting that another 5+ million homes are needed?
BE
"£millions per running mile which it would cost to run cables underground."
It would not cost £millions to run new power lines underground rather than above ground. That's an exaggeration worthy of Mr Motion. Also, underground cables are maintenance-free, wheras overhead lines are not. In that sense, the use of overhead lines was a typical political solution: cheaper in the short term, but more expensive in the long term.
"My guess would be that if the electrical cables are underground rather than on pylons they might actually be closer to the houses?"
Underground cables are protected by steel wire armour, which also, being a conductor prevents the electrical field from leaking out. Also you can't have an potential difference (voltage) between a wire and the earth, when that wire is already in the earth.
BE, Nick Boles is being wildly misquoted by Bowel Motion.
What Boles actually said was:
"In the UK and England at the moment we've got about 9% of land developed. All we need to do is build on another 2-3% of land and we'll have solved a housing problem."
Mathematically, that 2 - 3%, if used solely for housing, would be enough for fifteen million new homes, for which there is clearly no demand whatsoever. (London itself is 3 million homes and 7 million people).
B, according to this report:
"The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has published a report comparing the costs of burying electricity power cables underground instead of using pylons to run them across the landscape.
The report suggests overhead cables are the cheapest at between £2.2m and £4.2m per kilometre.
Burying electricity power cables directly underground could cost between £10.2m and £24.1m per kilometre.
The report also considers a number of alternative methods including installing an underground tunnel for the electricity cables to run through.
However exaggerated those numbers are, overhead is far, far cheaper, and much easier to repair.
"you can't have an potential difference (voltage) between a wire and the earth, when that wire is already in the earth"
Hahahahahahahaha best internet bullshit I've read for a long time!
BE
BE, you obviously know almost nothing about electricity.
"and much easier to repair."
True, but an underground cable doesn't need repair unless it is dug up by mistake, in which case you both already have the hole and someone to pay for the repair, so that comparison is pretty meaningless.
I can see where you're coming from on costs, but forgive me if I don't believe those figures. For overhead, not only do you have to pay for the cables, but also for the pylons to support them. The labour to dig a few yards of trench cannot be much more than the labour to erect a pylon, plus unskilled labour can be used to dig trenches. Also, the National Grid has to rent the land the pylons stand on, whereas they don't have to rent the land the cables run under.
B, feel free to ignore the hard figures, but it is widely accepted as being true in most countries that tunnelling is very, very expensive and only done when really necessary, i.e. underground trains in cities, underground cables in densely built up areas, road and rail tunnels through mountains.
And I have read dozens of times that they used pylons because they were a lot, lot cheaper than underground. Quite how much cheaper, I do not know, but "a lot" in any case.
Either way, I invite the rural NIMBYs to pay for the cost of the tunnels themselves. Nobody is forcing them to live there.
So a wire underground cannot have a potential difference with the ground?
Let's take your theory at face value. Underground wires are at the same potential as earth.
How do you suppose the energy is transmitted along earth wires from the power station to the lightbulb in your house?
Maybe you are forgetting about the insulation that is wrapped around most wires?
Hahahahahaha. You don't need a physics degree to understand what you said was utter tosh. Get over it.
BE
Mark, who said anything about tunnels? AFAIK, the national grid within London is simply buried cables. However, that does show how the IET, who were obviously asked to come up with figures showing that underground cables were a lot more expensive than pylons, managed to do so.
BE, Why do you assume that I am talking about the inside of the cable? Is the house of which you spoke earlier inside the cable? No of course it isn't. It's the electrical field outside the cable, including its insulation, that affects us and that electrical field can generate no potential difference with the earth, because it is already in the earth. If you want to jeer at people on the 'net, try to choose a subject you actually know something about.
B, OK, I retract the "tunnels" bit and will henceforth refer to "underground" as against "overground". But apart from you nobody has ever disputed that it is "a lot" cheaper to have overhead cables for long distances. Whether that is hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds per mile is irrelevant.
Not even the hard core NIMBY wankers have ever made the outrageous claim that it would be cheaper to put them underground for the whole distance.
If you are building a new housing estate and all the roads are up anyway for water and so on, it is quite possibly cheaper to chuck the electric cables into the same trench than to build overhead, but that is not a like for like comparison and those are only very short distances.
BE/B, as to your bizarre spat, could it be that the difference is because overhead cables are not insulated unlike underground cables? (or less insulated).
And/or that the earth acts as an extra insulator (or a better insulator than the air - or is is a worse insulator, I would suspect far worse, having given it a few seconds thought)?
I have no idea or opinion either way, I am asking out of academic interest.
It was quite obviously cheaper to distribute electricity via overhead lines, which is why so much of it was done this way, but that was back in the 50's. Wherever possible, the electricity distribution companies now prefer to use underground cable, as these don't get blown down in high winds, have trees fall on them etc. BT has the same preference. If you look at old photos, you will notice that, in the 50's, every rural A road and every village had a large number of wires running along it or through it. These have largely disappeared as both electricity supply and telephone cables are put underground. The politically-motivated project to connect the countryside to electricity was deeply unprofitable and subsidised, and so it's never going to be worth undergrounding all the 11kV and 33kV distribution network, let alone the 400kV national grid. However, things are different today and I cannot see why, if it is cheaper to run a new 240v or 415v supply underground, it is not cheaper to run the 400kV grid underground, though cooling may have something to do with it , also politics and legal differences between digging a trench across someone's land and running wires over it. That's why I'm sceptical.
Re the "bizarre spat" (indeed!), the overhead conductors are not uinsulated, but it wouldn't make any difference if they were, there would still be an electrical field round them. If you have a voltage of 400kV at the conductor and 0V at the earth, then the voltage between any point in between and the earth is proportional to the distance between that point and the earth as a fraction of the distance between the earth and the conductor. So, if you hang a fluorescent tube vertically under a 400kV power line, the voltage difference between its ends is enough to keep it burning once lit. Similarly, the voltage difference between your head and your feet is enough to drive a small current through your body. As far as I know, thanks to research carried out in Germany in the 30s or 40s, we know how much current it takes to kill someone (a few milliamps across the heart), and the current is obviously not that large.
It is not that the earth acts as an insulator, but that it acts as a conductor. Quite apart from the fact that the armouring removes most of the electrical field, it is impossible to insert yourself between the point at which the voltage is at 440kV and the point at which the voltage is zero, which is the earth adjacent to the cable.
B: "It was quite obviously cheaper to distribute electricity via overhead lines, which is why so much of it was done this way, but that was back in the 50's."
I rest my case - it was cheaper - only the National Grid was mainly built back in the 1930s not the 1950s.
"Wherever possible, the electricity distribution companies now prefer to use underground cable, as these don't get blown down in high winds, have trees fall on them etc. BT has the same preference. If you look at old photos, you will notice that, in the 50's, every rural A road and every village had a large number of wires running along it or through it."
Agreed on the old photos. But the chances are that the utilities ended up sharing the same trenches. It might not make sense just for electricity, but if you can bung electricity, telephone and internet into the same trench as gas and water, clearly it's a lot cheaper.
AFAIAA, there is very little overhead gas or water.
"but if you can bung electricity, telephone and internet into the same trench as gas and water, clearly it's a lot cheaper."
So you might think, but no. No sooner have the water company finished digging up the road than the gas distribution company dig it up. Once they've finished, the electricity company has a go, etc etc. Next time you see the road being dug up, count the number of companies actually working in the trench. I'd be very surprised if it is more than one (or possibly two, the groundworker and the utility company).
So no they didn't share the same trenches. Nor, unlike those sensible people the other side of the Channel, do we construct services tunnels under our streets.
B, no, they have shared trenches ever since that Carling advert twenty years ago recommending the same. Or was it Heineken?
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