Austria: Pylons as Sculpture for Public Acceptance of Expanding Electrification

Posted2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago

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InfrastructureEnergyDesign

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Infrastructure

Energy

Design

Austria's power company is exploring the use of sculptural pylons to improve public acceptance of expanding electrification, sparking a discussion on the effectiveness and practicality of such designs.

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Discussion (56 comments)

Showing 56 comments

postepowanieadm

2 months ago

1 reply

Austria has a long tradition of making infrastructure attractive: from railway stations to electric substations.

logifail

2 months ago

1 reply

Apologies for raining on anyone's parade, but this is nothing more than concept art.

lostlogin

2 months ago

1 reply

I’m not sure it’s attractive either.

It’s better than a pylon but worse than a clear skyline.

logifail

2 months ago

> It’s better than a pylon but worse than a clear skyline

The design agency gets their clicks, but this will never happen. The end.

Apologies for all those taken in by the concept art images who thought this kind of thing could/would ever be realised... Honestly, please DYOR.

next_xibalba

2 months ago

3 replies

Amazing! Let's hope we get these in the U.S.

One thing that seemed ambiguous in the article: are these actually installed? The APG website [1] says "Two Austrian Power Giants — one in the shape of a stork and the other of a stag — were pre-tested statically and electrotechnically to verify their technical feasibility." So are the images just renderings?

logifail

2 months ago

> Let's hope we get these in the U.S.

This is concept art, no more, no less.

foxglacier

2 months ago

Yes, the author Kamrin Baker is clearly trying to fool readers into believing they're already installed. The "photo" captions are particularly misleading.

qwertz123

2 months ago

For now, it‘s just a potential concept. Article in German: https://futurezone.at/digital-life/strommasten-hirsch-stoch-...

fweimer

2 months ago

4 replies

The images are generated because it's a concept only:

> This is a design concept and no concrete implementation is currently planned.

https://www.apg.at/en/projects/austrian-power-giants-1/

They don't say whether their design takes practical concerns into account and preserve the functional aspects that gave the pylons their current shape.

seszett

2 months ago

3 replies

I'm sure something like this would be doable and I like the idea, but the stag doesn't seem structurally sound for example.

People generally just want cables to be buried, but apparently this poses more problems than just added cost, so companies are reluctant to do it (as far as I understand it at least, I've only looked it up briefly in relation to the Ventilus/Boucle du Hainaut project here in Belgium).

wongarsu

2 months ago

2 replies

Here in Germany there were still enough protests even against buried cables. The construction is still disruptive, and they aren't completely invisible afterwards (they emit heat that can lead to visibly different vegetation on the surface, and you can't plant trees on them) so they don't really satisfy the "but my property prices" crowd (of course they have a long list of real and imagined concerns, but imho they mostly boil down to disruption from construction, pseudoscience and property prices)

Moving the discussion to "we put some sculptures in your landscape, and in return those sculptures carry some cables" might genuinely help

logifail

2 months ago

3 replies

> Moving the discussion to "we put some sculptures in your landscape, and in return those sculptures carry some cables" might genuinely help [..]

If you have the Alps on your doorstep, you may simply want your landscape to stay the way it is, neither adding (modern) sculptures nor (overground) power cables.

Think of the Sierra Club.

usrusr

2 months ago

1 reply

The litmus test for all "oh noes! Don't put any engineering into our pretty mountains!" should always be a proposal to dismantle the Karprun reservoirs, the Landwasser viaduct and the Stelvio hairpins. Because visible engineering is bad, right?

logifail

2 months ago

> Because visible engineering is bad, right?

Don't forget all the ski lifts in the Alps...

scottlamb

2 months ago

I think this is one of many times it's not possible for everything to stay the same. If everyone fights and delays switch away from fossil fuels, the landscape will change in one way. If these lines are run, it will change in another. I have my opinions about which a true nature lover would prefer.

johannes1234321

2 months ago

The Alps are mostly impacted. Once you reach the mountains in Germany there aren't many consumers of electricity left requiring new power lines.

The big new power lines are needed to get electricity from offshore Windparks in the Northern and Baltic Sea to industrial zones south. The conflicts are with villagers in probably nice but not as special areas as the Alps.

lostlogin

2 months ago

1 reply

Where I live there is a very ugly line of cables that follows a motorway. This motorway was built recently. Surely they could have put a cable duct, trench or similar alongside it, or an under the adjacent cycle path. Maintenance would surely be cheaper too.

michaelt

2 months ago

2 replies

> Surely they could have put a cable duct, trench or similar alongside it, or an under the adjacent cycle path. Maintenance would surely be cheaper too.

Burying a cable is 3x to 10x more expensive than running it overhead. [1]

Although faults are less common, they become much more expensive to fix - digging the cables up to fix is expensive, and it's even more expensive when you don't know quite where the fault is and you need a bunch of exploratory digging.

And unlike California, Austria doesn't have a load of wildfire problems.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/111524_Un... https://www.theiet.org/media/ss5ndfti/electricity-transmissi...

xg15

2 months ago

1 reply

Not an expert on this, but why do the cables have to be buried? Couldn't you put them into a trench with some kind of cover, that could be quickly be opened again for maintenance?

Jolter

2 months ago

That’s one way cables are often routed next to railroad tracks. A concrete trench with concrete covering slabs. I’m sure it’s more expensive than just digging, though it serves to make the cables serviceable.

lostlogin

2 months ago

Good links thanks.

I’m sure the equation is different when the cabling is following a route that’s already having earthworks done, but that would seem unlikely to overcome a 4-5x price difference.

whatevaa

2 months ago

1 reply

Burying high voltage lines comes with problems of isolation. Air is good insulator while still allowing heat dissipation, ground is good conductor. You can isolate but then you need cooling. It get's complicated and expensive.

atoav

2 months ago

Also it dries out the soil.

logifail

2 months ago

> the stag doesn't seem structurally sound for example

It's concept art, it doesn't have to be structurally sound or even make economic sense - the creators got their clicks!

We ought to be more sceptical of this kind of thing :/

petre

2 months ago

1 reply

It does. That was my first thought. Buried AC cables are not cost effective, DC is better but still more exprndive than aerial power lines.

lostlogin

2 months ago

2 replies

Please could you explain this? Does burying them effect performance or it’s just the added cost of a mega trench?

petre

2 months ago

Read on insulators and AC insulator losses, insulator aging, cost vs. air. Or ask your favourite LLM.

A few bird shaped pylons near busy roads is probably nothing compared to miles of HVAC or HVDC cable and normalized insulation losses spread over its lifetime.

Also the branches in the sculptures are used to break lightning into smaller electric arcs just like in regular pylons. Pretty cool. Very Victorian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWYxrowovts

padjo

2 months ago

Lines in the air don’t need any additional insulation. Cables underground need to be insulated. Now imagine how much insulation you need from 400kv, multiplied by hundreds of miles of cable and imagine how expensive that is. Now consider what happens if there’s a fault.

Jolter

2 months ago

1 reply

The linked article states implies they are built:

“These are the first two prototypes — which have already been developed and pre-tested for structural stability and high-voltage performance.”

That’s very weaselly of them.

xg15

2 months ago

The caption even more so "Photo courtesy of GP designpartners" - if this is not actually a photo.

abcd_f

2 months ago

1 reply

The rule of thumb is that if there's a mention of or a link to the Yanko Design website, you know it's a pipe-dream design concept detached from reality.

Here it features the review by YD, so, yeah, that's not just not built, it's not buildable in principle :)

wildzzz

2 months ago

Yanko my chain

ishtanbul

2 months ago

1 reply

Great, lets make transmission even more expensive. I can imagine the engineers having a field day maintaining one-off tower designs. How about using a simple white or light blue pole tower that blends in more.

The stag is cool but the bird is not.

thomasmg

2 months ago

1 reply

> The stag is cool

Yes.

There is some psychological advantage. These ideas might make the overland options more acceptable for the population.

Switzerland and other countries have nice looking (and sometimes expensive) sculptures in traffic roundabouts. For transmission lines, it might make sense, even if it is more expensive. Sure, it depends on the price. But it is much, much cheaper than burring the cables: underground transmission lines are roughly 10 times more expensive, due to cooling mainly (and sometimes this would require converting to DC). So there are three options: traditional (cheapest), such designs (more expensive), or hidden (10 times the price of traditional).

reverendjames

2 months ago

1 reply

No it doesn't make sense. Transmission lines should be a boring as possible so you're eye is not drawn to them. There is no way to make them look beautiful. Good designers try to make them disappear to the extent possible.

ninalanyon

2 months ago

> There is no way to make them look beautiful.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Quite a lot of public art is not regarded as beautiful by everyone either and is certainly not regarded as worth paying for by even more people.

It's also cultural. One of the things that struck me when I visited the US (many times over a twenty year period) was how little public art there was compared to most places in Europe.

flaboonka

2 months ago

1 reply

Something similar was previously proposed in Iceland

https://grapevine.is/news/2015/10/16/these-human-shaped-pylo...

gus_massa

2 months ago

1 reply

At least the version you linked look buildable, they don't have huge unsuported parts like the wings of the bird.

nullhole

2 months ago

They also appear at a glance to use a lot less metal in their construction.

robjeiter

2 months ago

3 replies

If only Austria would do nuclear than the grid would not need an expansion and electricity would be way cheaper. Or alternatively fracking could be used to increase the domestic gas production. There are plenty of reserves.

earthnail

2 months ago

1 reply

And where exactly does Austria plan to dump its nuclear waste? Which beautiful mountain should become unclimbable?

Nuclear waste storage has way higher public acceptance problems than power cables.

herewulf

2 months ago

1 reply

You took the wrong bait. Fracking is far worse for mountains than the relatively tiny amount of impact that nuclear waste has. Look it up.

earthnail

about 2 months ago

I don’t disagree. But good luck explaining that to the general public.

Jolter

2 months ago

Surely Increased amount of small to medium solar installations would reduce the need for major transmission lines even more?

nixass

2 months ago

> If only Austria would do nuclear

Now you're just talking crazy.

People, we have crazy over here

jnsaff2

2 months ago

1 reply

In Estonia a couple have been built.

https://balticguide.ee/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Soorebane-...

Animats

2 months ago

1 reply

The "Bog Fox" is a great design for a corner pylon, but it is a one-off.[1] Too bad it's not widely used for corner pylons, which tend to be ugly due to extensive bracing.

[1] https://www.archdaily.com/956755/pylon-bog-fox-landmark-part...

jnsaff2

2 months ago

There are three of them all kinda one off I guess.

https://elering.ee/en/design-towers

itronitron

2 months ago

Nice, they could put a sled after the 6th deer.

My only concern is that a lot of people would probably be more inclined to play on them than the standard high-voltage pylons.

empiricus

2 months ago

This looks nice, but somebody should pay the difference, and maybe it should be those that oppose the normal looking supports.

Animats

2 months ago

This might be worthwhile for special situations, such as river and canyon crossings. There, the towers are huge and the spans are long.[1]

Those super-tall towers are one-off designs and striking structures. Just putting a stork-shaped tower in the middle of a long line in open terrain looks silly.

[1] https://transmissionlineworld.blogspot.com/2020/08/worlds-ta...

xeonmc

2 months ago

If the proposal gets accepted, would they need to construct additional pylons?

cma

2 months ago

They say they statically and electrically verified, but say with the stag design. But are there reasons on the main tower the lines other than structural efficiency that they are set vertically on each side? With the stag they are spread out horizontally and I'm wondering if that has implications like much harder to service the lines by helicopter.

mips_avatar

2 months ago

These sculptures are beautiful, I wish there was a way for public infrastructure to get more love (part of that love is building it quickly) in America.

aramattamara

2 months ago

Have they tried burying the cables? Yes, it's more expensive, but if they care so much about the views...

reverendjames

2 months ago

Trying to make them look interesting is a bad idea, tried numerous times in the past. The best a designer can do is to make them disappear and not draw your eye. Trying to make them look interesting generally isn't the way to go. It's been tried and abandoned in California and numerous other places. I'd add some citations, but most writing about transmission lines is internal to the companies building and maintaining them. You can't make them into a beautiful sculpture because you ultimately need their utility of supporting the conductors, and that hardware is difficult to make aesthetically pleasing.

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