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I like pylons.

I used to despise pylons and the way they ripped through the countryside, however as I have come to realise how important electricity is to my life and am now aware just how impractical it is to bury the cables I have grown to appreciate the role pylons play and look beyond them.

Excellent video - thanks.

I'm curious about the physics of the 'lights' on sections of the power lines between pylons that I've seen in some places in France. They glow (by ionisation?) apparently without a return path.

Your info on the additional cost of underground cabling seems very small. I've been budget documents that use estimates of 14 to 20 times the cost depending on topology and have been told by grid engineers that even those numbers might be too low.

Great. Yet another autistic niche special interest to collect. *Puts on mental shelf next to Phone Kiosks*

Tower fun fact is that the nut is on the lower part of the bolt on the bolted joints. The thread is centre punched so the nut can not unwind as the lines vibrate in the wind. If the nut came loose and dropped to the ground the bolt would remain in place under gravity. Still in the bolt hole of the components of the bolted joint. I inspected 840 towers on a 1,700 tower line.

400 Volts in my UK House? No wonder my pc keeps blowing up LOL

As a young kid my favourite bits of TV programmes like Playschool were the ones where they showed you inside a factory (funnily enough I became an engineer...) so I enjoyed this a lot, thank you.

As you know, ROI is at the centre of all infrastructure investments. Return On Investment. The Australian national electricity is 1million km. $1million per km. $1TRILLION infrastructure investment. Cashflow max is 25gW ×24hrs ×50cents kWh ×365 = $110 BILLIONS ~~ 10% Less running costs. Less financing costs. Generation costs 5cents kWh. As you can see dirt cheap 5cents kWh electricity is 50cents kWh supplied from the grid. For Australia, NO GRID costs rooftop PV is dirt cheap. For the fixed grid infrastructure costs, relying on constant cash flow at the lowest supply $kWh it will be a disaster economically when the sunshines 🌞 ☀️ 😊😮 Cash grid flow will crash. $kWh supply rate will have to increase and more customers will get rooftop PV and BVs with it's oversized battery. V2G, V2Home, V2Building will be a popular feature 😎 😀 😉 😮😊 You should do a video on this extremely important future. Warming latitudes solutions for cold latitudes. 😮😮😊 Only when the sun shines. And when the sunsets the BVs oversized battery can supply. Happy days.

As you said in the video, the number of discs of the glass / ceramic insulators depends on the line voltage. As a minimum, we use one disc for every 11 kilovolts of line voltage. There can be exceptions if the line is close to the sea, where more discs are needed. You mentioned high voltage underground cables, costing - per kilometre - ten times the cost of an equivalent aerial line. That is a minimum, the price is usually higher. Also, being the HV underground cables being filled with dielectric oil, they are very hard to maintain in case of failure. Thank you for the video. Anthony

Tubular pylons are a big improvement visually.

The architectural origins of pylons is evident near me, if you know where to look. An early 33kv line from Luton to Aylesbury still has some towers with finials at the end of the cross arms.

"Pylon" in this context isn't really a word known in the USA.

In the late 1970s there occurred a major blackout along the south coast of England in an incident which doesn't seem to have made the normal reference sources. It was, as these things often are, a combination of circumstances. It all started late one summer's morning when one of the supergrid transfomers at Feckenham, south of Birmingham, failed. That took out the 400kV circuit which goes via Minety to Melksham. (The remaining Feckenham southbound circuit goes to Walham near Gloucester.) Melksham is one of a series of grid substations broadly along the M4 corridor. It stands at a "crossroads" and much of the power for the south coast of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall in those days was kept going by that link with Melksham feeding Exeter via Hinkley. Coincidentally, though, half of the 400 kV circuit from Canterbury going round East Kent to Lydd was down for maintenance and some silvering of the pylons, so capacity was really reduced and not much extra could be drawn round from there. It was before the days of the Sellindge converter and the DC links to France. The only other link from the M4 corridor to the south coast was the twin-conductor double-circuit line from Bramley via Fleet to Lovedean. The circuits along the south coast were all quads and expected to be high capacity. That Bramley-Lovedean line was put under maximum strain trying to compensate for the loss of both Feckenham-Melksham and half of Canterbury-Lydd, and it also quickly tripped out. It was summer. Generative capacity along the south coast was seasonally reduced, much of it still using coal, and it would have taken days to get that up and running. The result was that from areas like Fokestone west through Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth, Weymouth and almost to Exeter there was no power for almost 8 hours. It was before the days of people having PCs or being personally dependant on electronics, so there was far less public consternation about it than there would be nowadays. We just shrugged our shoulders! At least central batteries and generating sets kept the plain old telephone system going.

Well. I thought I was going to bored with this but no! As my Dad worked with the CEGB/Grid and did a lot of work in Germany post war this was quite interesting. He used to supply industrial switchgear and helped design power supply set ups and distribution. Where I lived in rural Norfolk for a while we had a huge pylon at the end of the road and we all liked it was annoyed when they wanted to move it. Those familiar with Bedford will know the old Igranic Works that became Brookhurst Igranic that made huge contactors and swing rotary open switches for power stations. As a kid I often went with my dad "on calls" to various power stations including the new hydro ones in Snowdonia. He went on to invent colour proximity sensor equipment and pioneered heavy electrical equipment. He was a child of Aston University that was the main uni for electrical engineering. After he graduated his first job was in Germany to rebuild the power grid after the war. He worked with AEG(Telefunken), Siemens, Brush, the then Cutler Hammer, GE and Whetstone. I remember as a kid playing with all the equipment lying around the house. During the power cuts in the 1970's we were the only house in village that electricity as he ran a system from the Ford Cortina to an inverter and powered the house! At one point the local doctor took over the lounge as a makeshift surgery. I recall him rewiring the house and every wire, clip, JB and ChocBox had to exactly in the right position and the wiring out of the CU was a work of art!

We won't talk about the pylon in New Zealand that toppled over because some brainiac maintenance worker undid all the nuts at the base. Rumour has it that they thought it would be easier to clean the insulators if it was laying on its side 😮

Fun fact: Pylons/Transmission Towers are painted yellow before the grey is applied. The reason yellow is used is that it is the primer and it becomes very noticeable from the ground or air when repainting of the grey topcoat is required. National Grid have their own helicopter fleet and one of their tasks is to fly along parts of the network to visually inspect the lines and towers (looking out for yellow paint showing through for example). They dont hang around either, the pilots are incredible, circling around the pylons as they go along the line - its really impressive to witness to be honest!

Very interesting.

We are going off the electric grid with solar and will add wind in the future( non grid tied) we use very little electric, sometimes the standing charge was more than the amount used ! So they can go do one! Will not be paying through the nose for the nouveau EV brigade restructure !😎 Gaz UK

For long distance transmission lines, it is necessary to transpose the position of the phase conductors two times on the pylons, so that each conductor occupies a different position for a third of the total line length. This is done to balance the inductive and capacitive reactance .

You mentioned the earth at the top. I've been trying to find out about that without success. It seemed strange to me as they seem to be tying the metalwork together, but they are all tied together anyway "at the bottom" - I supposed maybe a ground impedance thing. Lightning protection makes more sense. But I have seen two parallel rows of pylons and one had an earth and the other not. I could not never figure out why that would be.

Monty Pylon, If I had a pound for every person who lived adjacent a pylon who called it Monty. RIP Tony Seddon

As an ex NGC employee, CPS, SAP, AP, CPIC & live Linesman, I can see you have done some really good and thorough research. Well done. BTW All things with wires within them will fail when within 1m of any bare conductor of a live 275~400kV OHL Cct. I know from experience

275Kv uses twin conductors, 400Kv uses quad conductors in a bundle connector.

Let's face it, the lattice tower pylons are very, very, ugly, and were controversial when they started being erected in large numbers after WW2. However we can't do without them. What would be nice would be a rolling programme to start converting lines to the new more elegant pylons, but I suspect this will never happen due to the cost of it.

Cool video, always wondered about these 😊

Excellent video- well-researched, nicely presented. You've earned a sub from me.

Very interesting video. Would have been nice to include the "super pylons" that are going to be up soon, and have been very controversial, as major interconnects from my limited understanding.

Part of the “Great Grid Upgrade” is projected to have 110 miles of new 50 metre high pylons between Norwich and Tilbury, to feed power to London from the wind farms off the east coast.

You have 400 volts in your house ???.

"These pylons known as 'L2' are very common indeed, this house has one in its front garden." - that line is why I liked and subscribed.

01:37 we don't have 3 phases "thanks to Nicola Tesla", but thanks to Friedrich-August Haselwander. Guess native english speakers can't say his name and ignore him therefore :-) Haselwarder built the first synchronous 3 phase generator, that was in 1887. Now, Tesla made something similar: he studied (!) multiple phase generators in 1882. And in 1887 he built one, too ... but only a generator with 2 phases. So we don't owe 3 phase generators on Tesla. Oh, and the first asynchronous 3 phase generator was built in 1888 by the german company AEG, here Michail Ossipowitsch Doliwo-Dobrowolski was the leading engineer. He was a russian that fled his country after the assisation of "Tsar" Alexander II.

I thought domestic mains voltage was 240V off 415V three phase supply.

The National Grid wws completed just in time for WW2. It is one of the unsung heroes of the Battle of Britain.

2:13 It also comes with the fact that they closed their nuclear power stations, which although environmentalists love to bash them as dangerous dirty places, are much cleaner than coal if you’re being safe about it, and produce much more power

7k views in 2 days on a video like this is really impressive. I hope you will stop doubting your abilities now Martina!

If Tesla's design had gone according to plan, three-phase current would have 6 cables today. It was the Russian Mikhail Doliwo-Dobrowolski who introduced three-phase current with 3 cables in Germany. In contrast to Tesla, he not only had a theoretical drawing, but was also able to demonstrate a functioning system with a three-phase generator, three lines and a three-phase motor. Tesla, on the other hand, insisted that it was the first to come up with the idea of ​​6 cables for three-phase current. Even Westinghouse built the system with only 3 cables, according to Doliwo-Dobrowolski.

more wires on same phase is also used to reduce corona discharge effect. Thats why 400kV lines always use 3 or even more wires per phase. For example, here in middle of Europe is often in use this configuration - 1 wire per phase 110kV, line, 2 wires per phase 220kV line and 3 wires per phase 400kV line.

I used to live near 400kV pylons, with one of them a terminal. The terminal we named "Monty Pylon"

Too fast talking, too fast!

Don’t say Truss! It still makes me tremble with fear.

Excellent documentary, whatever is said the country cannot do without pylons.

I grew up next to an L6 line of pylons. To date (50 years later) no deleterious effects apparent.

electric trickery,..its the work of lucifer, i tell you,..

The new T design is much less offensive that the old pylon style.

The number of the conductors for one phase in one circuit has not only to do with the current, but also much with the voltage. The keyword is "corona discharge".

UK electricity demand is actually dropping, mainly due to efficiency improvements, in 2012 it was 318TWh but by 2023 it was 250TWh. So despite there being 1 million EVs on the road, there is plenty of spare capacity at the macro level, it's just that more and more of the generation is in Scotland and the far North of England. People in the South East complaining every time that someone wants to build a solar farm or wind turbine are being the ultimate NIMBYs, most of their power has been generated in the North from coal, but because they can't see that, and it only affects Northerners, they think that they have a right for this to continue. Love from an anonymous power engineer.

The 3000MW can also be denoted as 3GW.

“The normal UK mains voltage in your house is 400 volts” absolute epic fail?