A different approach

16 July 2025 · Updated: 22 July 2025

This from Nesta, which describes itself as the UK’s innovation agency for social good:

A different approach would be to avoid transmitting high voltages over long distances wherever possible. While it would require a radical system overhaul, greater decentralisation of distribution-level electricity generation and consumption, for example, through community generation, could mitigate the need for long stretches of ungainly overhead cables. Greater investment in community generation schemes would be required, as well as consideration of altogether new challenges, like security of supply in a world without HV transmission networks, or the fact that the grid isn’t set up to send electricity two-ways. There may well be anti-pylon-esque campaigns focused on different kinds of infrastructure, such as onshore wind turbines or space-intensive solar panels. Trade-offs are inevitable in any version of an electrified future.

The piece goes on:

Anti-pylon rhetoric from 1928 to the present day accuses pylons of “striding through the landscape", being “a giant latticework intruder", and creating “visual damage" by “scything through the countryside in great ugly swathes". The problem with pylons clearly hasn’t been solved over the National Grid’s near century of existence.