Pylon of the Month

Pylon of the Month - January 2012

Happy New Year to Pylon fans everywhere!!

We start 2012 with a Kenyan pylon (not the first to be featured, see October 2009 for the first Kenyan pylon). The wind and rain are rattling against the window as I write this and so after a rather miserable start to the year on the weather front, I thought that a clear blue sky was just what was needed to raise spirits everywhere. Sadly, I haven't been to Kenya but fans of the website sent this pylon picture in after spending a few weeks out there in 2011. As the safari jeeps drove slowly through the bush with everyone keeping a keen eye out for wildlife, a shout of "STOP" caught everybody's attention. Was it a lion, a cheetah or an elephant? No, it was this rather spendid pylon and so a photograph was taken and 'Pylon of the Month' was explained to some rather bemused fellow travellers .  Those with an interest in electricity generation will be keen to know that 80% of electricity consumed in Kenya is produced by the state owned Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) and that they run fourteen hydropower plants, three thermal power plants, two geothermal power plants and one wind farm.  

If a Kenyan pylon on its own isn't enough to get 2012 off to a flying start, pylon fans with an interest in art will be delighted to know that there is an exhibition this month in London (Camden to be more precise) of paintings by Joe Simpson.  The exhibition is called "Everything is Electrified" and it runs from January 20th-30th.  The  website has this to say about the paintings:

In a departure from his normal figurative paintings, Joe created the pieces with a range of media – including oil paint, marker pens, acrylic paint, ball-point pens and crayons.

Which all sounds very promising and one of the pictures is here to whet your appetite.

That's all for this month, but keep coming back during 2012 as there are lots of great pictures in the pipeline.

Pylon of the Month - February 2011

This month's sees Pylon of the Month in the southern hemisphere for the first time.  A fan of the website from Australia sent this picture with the following information:

"Here are a few snaps from a recent road trip from Adelaide, South Australia to Melbourne, Victoria."

I use Google Analytics to see where my blog traffic is coming from and having just checked it, I can see that out of 32,781 visits since I started in June 2008 only 42 are from Australia.  If you really want to dig into the detail, 30 are from Adelaide, 8 from Sydney, 2 from Brisbane and 1 each from Perth and Melbourne.  The average time on the blog is just over a minute from Adelaide, but the lightweights from Brisbane can only hack it for an average of 27 seconds.  I'll be watching over the next few weeks to see if this changes.

Like the UK, Australia has 240V 50Hz electricity, and here are a few electricity factoids for Australia (from the World Nuclear Association website, so perhaps not entirely independent).

• Australia is heavily dependent on coal for electricity, more so than any other developed country except Denmark and Greece. Three quarters is derived from coal. 
• Natural gas is increasingly used for electricity, especially in SA and WA. 
• Australia has 27,640 km of transmission lines and cable (220 kV and above - 10,300 km 330 kV and above), mostly state-owned and operated, transporting 209 TWh* of electricity per year (2008-09).  There is no connection between the east of SA and WA.

*TWh is Terawatt hours where Tera means 1 x 10¹² or a thousand billion.

Pylon of the Month - November 2010

After last month's rock and roll pylon, I decided to head abroad again with this picture submitted by yet another fan of the website.  The pylons are in the Arizona Desert near the City of Page ("the center of canyon country") and almost certainly carry electricity away from the coal fired Navajo Generating Station.

You can tell that pylons aren't in the UK just from their design and after watching the fantastic Secret Life of the National Grid on the BBC this month, I am a little more aware of the thought that went into designing the UK pylons.  I have mentioned the the man behind the design before, architect Giles Gilbert Scott, although he is more famous for designing the famous red telephone box and Battersea Power Station.  What I didn't know until I watched the programme was that the word pylon comes from the Greek word for the monumental gateway to an Egyptian temple.

I have to thank the BBC website for quite a lot of traffic recently (average page views per day is now at 28.93) and the Independent newspaper has also featured the blog in a couple of articles.  The first one brought to my attention was by Terence Blacker and was about the 'Secret Life of the National Grid' mentioned above.  Entitled 'Pylon fanciers will love this BBC propaganda'.  He says 'There are those who love pylons for their own sake. The more beautiful their rural setting, the happier the pylon-fanciers are.'  Whoa; steady on Terence.  I happen to be a passionate hill walker and climber and would not want to see pylons in the more beautiful areas of the UK.  In fact I'm inclined to agree with the point in your earlier article, that we put too low a value on the effect of pylons when doing the cost-benefit analysis, but there has to be a degree of realism.  I don't love pylons for their own sake, but I do think that we take the National Grid and the associated pylons for granted.  I also think that we undervalue engineers and the amazing things that they achieve in the UK.  And for what it's worth, I think we have the most aesthetically appealing pylons in the world.  At least, the TV critic of the Independent, Tom Sutcliffe, saw me in a more favourable light.  When reviewing 'The Secret Life of the National Grid', he wrote "I am grateful to it, though, for indirectly leading me to the Pylon of the Month blog – a celebration of global pylon design which proves that no object, however unlikely, is exempt from human enthusiasm." 

There you have it in a nutshell. Not love, not worship, but enthusiasm.  An enthuiasm for pylons.  

Pylon of the Month - August 2010

Another August and another holiday pylon.  Like 2009, this one is from Turkey although from the Mediterranean rather than the Aegean coast.  The picture was taken overlooking the Roman theatre at the ruins of the Lycian town of Myra.  We were actually staying in Kalkan, about 90 minutes away, but a day trip allowed us to take in both Myra and the sunken city of Kekova.  For those keen to see even more Turkish pylons and who like the pylons to be more in the foreground than in this month's picture, look here.  Saint Nicholas (of Santa Claus fame) was the Bishop of Myra in the 4th Century and was a representative at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325.  It was at this meeting that the timing of Easter was decided and which we still follow today.  Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox (when day are night are of nearly equal length) which is why the date changes every year and is sometimes inconveniently early or late.  In the Gregorian calendar,  the latest it can possibly be is April 25th and this will not happen again until 2038 (it last happened in 1943).  Next year (2011), however, will see Easter Sunday fall just one day earlier on 24th April.  All this from a picture of a pylon.....