Pylon Power
Has anyone thought of putting medium size wind turbines on electricity pylons?
Obvious advantages:
– the most expensive bit is already there
– objections to the tower being there can’t be raised
– the wiring could presumably be easily be modified to move the electricity.
Disadvantage:
– could only carry medium sized turbines because of the strength of the towers and the need for the blades to clear the wires.
I would love to work out a bit of the economics, but I can’t quickly find on the web how many pylons there are in the UK.
on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 11:28 am and is filed under Blowing in the Wind.
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April 14th, 2006 at 11:08 am
I’d guess the main problem would be the transformers and the links. Pylons normally carry very high voltage current, and the grid tends to be very careful about voltage + phase etc to ensure minimal energy loss. I’m not sure that it’d be very easy to drop the variable (but low voltage) power of a wind turbine in.
You might have more luck installing wind turbines on pylons when they go near to existing energy users. In that case, you’d be using the pylon to hold the turbine, but just feeding the (variable, low v) enery into the local 415/240V grid, rather than the kV grid the pylon’s actually carrying.