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Austria: Pylons as sculpture for public acceptance of expanding electrification
- postepowanieadm 11mo agoAustria has a long tradition of making infrastructure attractive: from railway stations to electric substations.
- logifail 11mo agoApologies for raining on anyone's parade, but this is nothing more than concept art.
- lostlogin 11mo agoI’m not sure it’s attractive either. It’s better than a pylon but worse than a clear skyline.
- logifail 11mo 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.
- mips_avatar 11mo agoThese 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.
- next_xibalba 11mo agoAmazing! 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?
- qwertz123 11mo agoFor now, it‘s just a potential concept. Article in German: https://futurezone.at/digital-life/strommasten-hirsch-stoch-zukunft-oesterreich-konzept-apg-red-dot-design-award/403096558 https://futurezone.at/digital-life/strommasten-hirsch-stoch-...
- logifail 11mo ago> Let's hope we get these in the U.S. This is concept art, no more, no less.
- foxglacier 11mo agoYes, the author Kamrin Baker is clearly trying to fool readers into believing they're already installed. The "photo" captions are particularly misleading.
- fweimer 11mo agoThe 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/ 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 11mo agoI'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 11mo agoHere 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 11mo ago> 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.
- ishtanbul 11mo agoGreat, 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 11mo ago> 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 11mo agoNo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoSomething similar was previously proposed in Iceland https://grapevine.is/news/2015/10/16/these-human-shaped-pylons-were-never-built-but-they-might-be/ https://grapevine.is/news/2015/10/16/these-human-shaped-pylo...
- robjeiter 11mo agoIf 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.
- Jolter 11mo agoSurely Increased amount of small to medium solar installations would reduce the need for major transmission lines even more?
- nixass 11mo ago> If only Austria would do nuclear Now you're just talking crazy. People, we have crazy over here /s
- earthnail 11mo agoAnd 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.
- Animats 11mo agoThis 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-tallest-power-transmission-towers.html https://transmissionlineworld.blogspot.com/2020/08/worlds-ta...
- jnsaff2 11mo agoIn Estonia a couple have been built. https://balticguide.ee/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Soorebane-1.jpg https://balticguide.ee/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Soorebane-...
- Animats 11mo agoThe "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-architecture https://www.archdaily.com/956755/pylon-bog-fox-landmark-part...
- jnsaff2 11mo agoThere are three of them all kinda one off I guess. https://elering.ee/en/design-towers https://elering.ee/en/design-towers
- cma 11mo agoThey 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.
- itronitron 11mo agoNice, 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.
- aramattamara 11mo agoHave they tried burying the cables? Yes, it's more expensive, but if they care so much about the views...
- xeonmc 11mo agoIf the proposal gets accepted, would they need to construct additional pylons?
- reverendjames 11mo agoTrying 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.
- empiricus 11mo agoThis looks nice, but somebody should pay the difference, and maybe it should be those that oppose the normal looking supports.