Pylon proposals for the 'Great Grid Upgrade' spark protests

My belief is that we Brits have a proprietorial attitude towards the countryside.

- John Craven

We don't own it – at least most of us don't! – but we have a clear vision of how it should look and want to protect it from anything we perceive to be a threat to its beauty. Literally high on the list for some people are the twin giants: wind turbines and electricity pylons.

I've written about turbines before but never about pylons, so I'll correct that because they are much in the news: hundreds more of them could soon be striding across the landscape.

Controversial structures since the first ones appeared almost 100 years ago (Rudyard Kipling reportedly once condemned them in The Times as a “permanent disfigurement”), there are now more than 90,000 of these pylons across the UK, carrying 4,300 miles of cable. Many are linked to now-defunct fossil-fuel power stations which, from the 1800s until the last one closed in September last year, had burnt 4.6 billion tonnes of coal and emitted 10.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

In this new age of ‘clean power’ produced by wind, solar, nuclear and biomass from burning wood, waste and crops, the race is on to provide 95% of our electricity from renewables in five years' time; right now the figure is around 50%. And demand for power is expected to double by 2050.