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Comment by fweimer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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).

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.

Also it dries out the soil.

> 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 :/

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

> 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.

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.

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?

> Because visible engineering is bad, right?

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

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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?

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.

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 :)

Yanko my chain

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.

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

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.

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

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