[HN Gopher] Where else in London are there pylons?
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Where else in London are there pylons?
Author : zeristor
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-10-26 07:50 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (diamondgeezer.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (diamondgeezer.blogspot.com)
| kitd wrote:
| OT, but UK pylons are gradually being replaced by a new design:
|
| https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2...
|
| The current "Milliken" design as shown in the article has changed
| very little since 1928.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| This looks like it belongs on a set of a budget sci-fi movie.
| So bland, neither elegance nor character.
| exabrial wrote:
| not sure "making in pretty" and giving in a UI refresh every
| 5 weeks when the latest version of whatever js framework is
| released is really in the budget.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| It's for labor savings, not aesthetics.
| dcminter wrote:
| Allow me to quote to you from a Punch article by E. V. Knox
| written in about 1930 (collected in "Things That Annoy Me" of
| 1932): The Pylons (Being the transcript
| of an unwritten radiologue, dated A.D. 2129)
| Once again we are threatened with a historical calamity. It
| is proposed to uproot the graceful pylons which adorn the
| line of the Sussex Downs and are the sole relics of the
| electricity cable which carried light and power to our
| forefathers along the Southern Coasts...
|
| Plus ca change...
| wearsshoes wrote:
| Does this exist online? When I searched I only found
| physical copies
| dcminter wrote:
| I don't think so. He died in 1971 so it's still in
| copyright though I doubt anyone would care much. I don't
| know exactly which volume of punch the original article
| is taken from, and it's possible that that's up there
| somewhere.
|
| Oh, and I just double checked and my copy was published
| in 1930; the second edition was 1932. So quite likely the
| original article was in one of the 1929/1930 run.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Aesthetics of public installations has sharply declined
| since its heyday in the 19th century, so he was probably
| right.
| [deleted]
| detritus wrote:
| > So bland, neither elegance nor character
|
| Curious, I feel the exact opposite.
|
| I remember the competition that spawned these - they were, by
| far, my favoured option.. although the idea of wireframe
| giant humans and ants oVer the countryside was 'interesting'!
| :
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2011/sep/14/.
| ..
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I agree the others are even worse than this, but all of
| them really are terrible, did 5th graders make these?
| jstarfish wrote:
| Oval's is bleak. Looks like anti-tank caltrops strung
| together with barbed wire.
| OJFord wrote:
| Christ, seriously? I assumed they'd henceforth be underground
| everywhere - in Dorset some (Milliken) are being replaced with
| underground cabling, after a petition based on countryside
| views I believe, but it benefits/doesn't disrupt farmers'
| fields & future developments too. Presumably once you have that
| sort of underground trunking it's easier to add other utilities
| too (even if they don't share any hardware/boring, there's
| still the planning and mapping etc.).
| namibj wrote:
| Non-superconducting electrical transmission lines don't want
| to be buried, it's really expensive and harder to handle/deal
| with when stuff breaks. You also can't have forest on top of
| it.
|
| One can hope we get by with the current approach until
| superconducting lines have been sufficiently figured out (it
| seems they don't need to run the voltage as high due to
| current being somewhat easier to deal with than voltage and
| losses not depending (significantly) on actual current (so
| thicker cables don't loose as much of their current rating to
| thermal limits than with traditional cooper/aluminum)).
| brudgers wrote:
| Underground utilities are usually significantly more
| expensive to construct. That's why overhead power lines are
| so common.
|
| The installation cost is tends to be so much higher that the
| potentially lower maintenance costs due to less weather
| damage doesn't make underground lines lower cost in the two
| to five decade maturities of utility bonds used for
| financing.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I think you need to construct additional pylons!
| vr46 wrote:
| The most dramatic one I know of near a road in London is right
| here, I used to ride there everyday.
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/ucSf4m2TPhqZnDS99?g_st=ic
| walthamstow wrote:
| Lea Valley between Walthamstow and Clapton is full of them
| n4r9 wrote:
| That's a pity about the open infrastructure map not having the
| boundary for greater London. I'm not sure if it helps in any way
| but you can download an osm cut-out of greater London from
| Geofabrik: https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/great-
| britain/england/g... . You would then need a tool that loads an
| osm file and visualises the infrastructure components.
| pavia-20 wrote:
| The author gave an update at the bottom of the article: _Sunday
| update: Russ from Open Infrastructure Map has knocked up some
| code which generates a precise map of Greater London 's pylons.
| Thanks Russ!_
|
| Link to Russ' update https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1mYa
| londons_explore wrote:
| For anyone with time to spare, overpass-turbo is a great way
| to find/learn/do all kinds of things map-related.
| lepetitpedre wrote:
| Seems like most of London i supply blocked...
| shubb wrote:
| The deepest tunnels in London are the electricity grid tunnels.
| Inner London is served by a whole redundant network of them, and
| we only hear about it when the power (very occasionally) goes out
| because one catched fire and they have to wait for it to burn
| out. The last mile services are all burried too.
|
| It gives the city a very different look from what you get in Asia
| for instance, and I always ssumed it was because of the lack of
| earthquakes.
| zeristor wrote:
| Do you mean like this:
|
| "Inside National Grid's Power Tunnels"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSzxTgDq3hM
| voxadam wrote:
| And by extension, "Power, Politics and Pragmatism: The
| British National Grid" by Tom Scott
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5khEUIBx0
| zeristor wrote:
| I was after the Tom Scott video but thought I might have
| dreamt it.
|
| Mind you Geoff Marshall vs Tom Scott.
|
| I think Geoff Marshall would win a Tunnel off.
| Gys wrote:
| Pylon:
|
| 1. a tall tower-like structure used for carrying electricity
| cables high above the ground.
|
| 2. a structure on the wing of an aircraft used for supporting an
| engine or carrying a weapon, fuel tank, or other load.
| FractalParadigm wrote:
| Here in Canada we refer to "traffic cones" as pylons. As
| someone living in London, Ontario, the first couple paragraphs
| of the OP was particularly funny to read; some sentences could
| be changed very minimally and apply all the same - "yet in a
| few places pylons are an intrinsic part of the landscape, like
| here along the edge of the Royal Docks almost every road, due
| to construction."
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| My first reaction to the article was "We don't really use the
| word 'pylon' to describe these things, at least not here in
| the southern United States," though the term makes sense and
| doesn't sound strange to me at all. But now I'm struggling to
| thing of what term I personally would use, and honestly, I'm
| having difficulty. "electrical tower?" "transmission tower?"
| mikestew wrote:
| "High tension line towers", or...hmm, I guess I don't know
| what the common usage would be in the U. S., southern or
| otherwise. And we live a block from a local Redmond, WA
| trail that follows the line of...high tension towers for
| miles in either direction.
|
| But between my spouse and me, if we need to refer to them,
| we just call them "towers". "Pylons" are short little
| things, such as traffic cones (to borrow an example from
| another commenter).
| elihu wrote:
| 3. a Protoss building which costs 100 minerals and supplies 8
| psi and allows you to warp in other buildings. Protoss
| executors are frequently reminded to construct more of these,
| though in my experience the effort might be better spent
| reminding them to build additional photon cannons instead.
| sklargh wrote:
| > Sometimes the best questions come while waiting for a train.
|
| Very much yes. Maps to the theme of thinking space we've brought
| up here over the past 4-5 days.
| bcraven wrote:
| There is one next to the O2 which is upside-down!
|
| https://www.alexchinneck.com/a-bullet-from-a-shooting-star
| gnfargbl wrote:
| This is the first time I have seen the Open Infrastructure Map,
| and I was particularly struck by the global solar distribution:
| https://openinframap.org/#2/49.5/-53.93/S. Not what I expected,
| at all.
| te_chris wrote:
| Wow. Really emphasises the opportunity for more solar in most
| of the world!
| Sharlin wrote:
| Assuming the map reflects the territory, obviously. Which is
| a rather huge assumption.
| OJFord wrote:
| On the power layer, it seems the national grid is generally
| 400kV nominal, with regional sub-grids at 132kV and then towns
| with 33kV & 11kV. Is that 3x 11kV phases = 33kV? And then 33kV
| = 1/4 tap of the 132kV? '400kV' is actually 396kV?
| starsep wrote:
| There are many solar plants not mapped due to lack of high
| quality, up-to-date aerial/satellite imagery, or volunteers.
| Germany is country mapped best, not necessarily having
| significant share of solar.
| Retric wrote:
| Might also be how it's displayed. Germany has quite a bit of
| solar but its less concentrated in giant solar parks and the
| country is smaller than US, China, or India.
|
| So for example US has multiple solar farms over 500MW and
| several over 200MW but none of Germany's solar farms are over
| 200MW and only 4 are over 100MW.
| nicoburns wrote:
| A quick google tells me that as of 2021, the US had ~23GW
| of installed solar generating capacity, and Germany had
| ~59GW. As the US has roughly 4x the population of Germany,
| that means that Germany has roughly 12x the amount of
| installed solar capacity per capita.
| Retric wrote:
| Wikipedia gives different 2021 numbers including
| (percentage of global solar installed)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
| China: 306,973 MW (35.8%) United States: 95,209 MW
| (11.1%) Japan: 74,191 MW (8.7%) Germany:
| 58,461 MW (6.8%) India: 56,951 MW (6.6%)
|
| With 2020 numbers for percentage of electricity
| generation by solar: Germany 9.7%, Japan 8.3%, India
| 6.5%, China 6.2%, and US 3.4%
| rootusrootus wrote:
| In addition, the US govt says [0] this year should have
| added 46,100 MW to the total. Electrek, if they are
| accurate, predicted an additional 5,600 MW on residential
| rooftops in 2022 [1].
|
| [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
|
| [1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/29/american-residential-
| solar/
| nicoburns wrote:
| Interesting. Looks like in my haste I may have been
| comparing Germany's total installed capacity with the
| US's newly installed capacity.
| [deleted]
| LeanderK wrote:
| I wonder whether this is due to unreliable data. I am not sure
| where this is sourced from since tracking all the solar
| installations seems like a lot of work.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Yeah, given how abruptly the density of the data shifts based
| on borders, I strongly suspect there is a data quality
| problem. The available information is interesting, but
| comparisons pretty meaningless.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I'm surprised the electrical demands of Greater London can be
| supplied with so few transmission lines. For comparison the city
| proper of Toronto has slightly less with a fraction of the
| population.
|
| Surely a significant portion has to be underground?
| changadera wrote:
| This squashes the idea of some Londonites to become an
| independent city state. Try doing that with no electricity
| generation of your own, and nowhere to build one.
| zeristor wrote:
| Pretty easy to run a cable in from France n'est pas?
| walthamstow wrote:
| Where does Singapore get it's electricity from?
| lucidguppy wrote:
| They must construct additional pylons.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Speaking as a human/Terran I am very much against this.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| They want to make "pylons" - not "cylons". One is good for
| supplying electricity.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Silly Earthling. The Pylons were built by the ancient
| Altrusians, who devolved into the Sleestak. Do not tamper
| with the Light Crystals in the Matrix Table, or that will
| disrupt the weather and summon the Skylons.
|
| https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Pylons
|
| https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Altrusian
|
| https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Crystals
|
| https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Skylons_(episode)
| bagpuss wrote:
| this is an interesting art project from 2004 using the EM field
| around these lines to induce current in an array of fluorescent
| tubes
|
| https://vimeo.com/11137816
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Is there a way to watch this without creating an account?
| bagpuss wrote:
| strange, I was able to view without login. Search "field" by
| Richard Box, it is on youtube
| bj-rn wrote:
| You can use: https://player.vimeo.com/video/11137816
| yardstick wrote:
| The most frustrating thing about these pylons and cables pictured
| in the article is they come ridiculously close to the buildings
| beside them.
|
| At one point I was looking at renting an apartment in a building
| right beside them (Hoola), ultimately didn't, in part because of
| the power lines. Turns out there is no/little regulation in how
| far away these lines must be from other buildings.
| toss1 wrote:
| And those power lines can have very real effects.
|
| When I had a computer network/support business, a somewhat
| competing business (they were mostly Mac, we were mostly
| Windows) with strong marketing and weak tech decided to move to
| a new location. The new location was on an upper floor of a
| converted old mill building near the river, railroad tracks,
| and high-voltage power transmission lines, which were just
| outside the windows on that floor (like only a few meters
| away).
|
| Several months later, they were out of business. The rumor
| around town was that they'd frequently lost large amounts of
| data and/or customer's entire drives (floppy and hard).
|
| I'm not sure if this was because they were all marketing and
| weak technologists and it just caught up with them in higher
| error rates with more biz, or if it was just one big error of
| being ignorant of the EM fields from the power lines outside
| windows (which I did hear second-hand that they'd started
| having random data loss in the new location, took too long to
| understand it, and were doomed by the time they figured it
| out).
|
| I'd also read about when the Tennessee Valley Authority started
| installing some of the first high-voltage transmission lines in
| the US, a clever adjacent homeowner buried a long wire in a set
| of coils under the lines and ran it to his house to supply
| power. He was eventually caught and argued that he wasn't
| stealing electricity because he was only collecting ambient
| power. He lost, as although the device was not mechanically
| contacting the lines, it was still of course
| electromagnetically coupled -- the phenomena of which he was
| taking advantage.
| rbanffy wrote:
| When I joined a web portal, that was part of Brazil's second
| largest telco, to manage a couple project teams (in 2008), one
| thing I got was a nice coffee table book describing that telco's
| data network in exquisite detail, down to detailed maps of fiber
| placement, routers, radio towers, and repeaters.
|
| I called it the "modern terrorist handbook" because, with it,
| anyone so inclined could almost completely cripple Brazil's
| communications.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| We've seen multiple acts of telecoms sabotage in the past
| month. Shetland and Marseille cables cut.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Putin's a high tech terrorist with lots of technical
| expertise, who regularly destroys so much infrastructure
| and shopping malls and murders a hell of a lot more people
| every day than you can by driving a car into a crowd.
| jzellis wrote:
| We've got a line of em out between Watford and Rickmansworth
| along the Colne. (Just outside of Greater London but inside the
| Orbital.) One is my favorite - it's in a field by itself next to
| where I walk for exercise, and something about it is weirdly
| peaceful, like a remnant of a vanished civilization.
| Steve44 wrote:
| I'm not too far from you, there are quite a lot in the Iver
| area. One comes in and crosses the M25, then there is quite a
| lot of them between Iver Heath and Uxbridge.
| dazzawazza wrote:
| There is a string coming in from Colne valley to Harefield.
| There are some lovely walks next to the Grand Union Canal
| there.
|
| They recently had to divert the power lines for the HS2 line
| ripping it's way through.
| dumb1224 wrote:
| Plenty if you ride your train further south enough. Starting from
| Wimbledon substation.
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.4307/-0.1884
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