Name: People are going to be angry about pylons.
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T15:14:38.000Z
Duration: 7 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The technical term for these things is transmission towers, but here in Britain, we call them pylons.

And we've got tens of thousands of them across the country.

Past perfect

The first national grid was built in the interwar years, and it was the largest peacetime construction project Britain had ever seen, a single power network across the country.

Pylons became part of the landscape of Britain, just as they had around the world, despite the objections of many landowners, traditionalists, and poets.

These exist because overhead lines are a fraction of the price of underground cables, and they're much, much easier and faster to maintain.

If there's a fault, you don't need to bring in heavy equipment and dig anything up.

Instead, you dispatch a team to climb, and that team will have learned the job here at the National Grid Training Centre near Ekring in the East Midlands.

And today, one of those teams is going to take me up on the wires.

So here at the training centre, we have over 300 graduates and apprentices training in overhead lines and substation technologies.

The team that have trained here will undertake a range of roles.

They might be overhead line operators, so they'll be climbing towers, responding to faults.

We have a team of drone and helicopter pilots that keep the network operating.

And then we have substation teams as well, so they would look at cleaning and replacing different equipment within our substations.

I haven't looked at any point out or down to see how high I am.

I'm just kind of going, there's the next bolt, there's the next bolt.

And I'm aware that the professionals are doing this much faster than me.

We have a team of 2,400 people that monitor and operate, maintain the network around the clock, 24-7.

This might be in response to weather or faults on the network, and they keep the energy flowing.

Presumably, you're up here in all weathers.

In emergencies, we're definitely working bad weather.

You just take one more step up.  We'll attach you onto the actual tower.

Yep, bottom phase, middle phase, top phase.

Huh, it's different phase of power on each arm?

Right, that makes sense, because otherwise the three would kind of interact with each other on the wires.

Each pylon weighs approximately 30 tonnes, 4,500 miles of overhead line, and 900 miles of underground cable.

Because we're at our training school, we've got all different combinations of wires in different formations.

If you're wondering, this is the point where the nerves kicked in.

I don't know if that's coming across on microphone and camera, but the wind is whistling through the metal and through the wires.

There's plenty of people that don't get up here.

We own and operate the network in England and Wales.

This training centre was built in the heart of the country because a lot of the power stations were around here, in the Midlands, in Yorkshire, because a lot of the coal that fueled those power stations was being dug up around here.

There was plenty in Scotland and Tyneside and South Wales too.

And a cluster of power stations down on the Thames.

But if you were going to pick a spot in the centre of the power grid to have the best access of every pylon, you'd pick here.

But things are changing and have been changing for decades.

The only coal-fired station left in Britain is about an hour south on the other side of Nottingham, and that'll close down within a year.

The main replacement right now is gas, and those stations tend to be on the coast where enormous tankers of liquid natural gas can dock.

The nuclear plants are by the coast too, for easy access to cooling water.

Britain is a wind-swept island, and we already get a quarter of all our power from the wind, with half of that from colossal fields of turbines offshore.

And there are more and more and more of those being built.

Britain's entire power grid has been steadily turning inside out for years.

As anyone who lives in a former coal-mining community like this knows all too well, power generation just isn't happening here anymore.

Electricity isn't being pushed out from the centre.

Instead, it's being brought in from the coast.

Going to be honest with you, that ladder is swaying a lot more than I'd like.

I'm going to go down first, and I'll get it a lot more stable here.

National Grid's role is to move energy around the country.

We don't generate energy, we just connect it to our network.

It's weird to see all this infrastructure and not hear the buzz.

I mean, I guess if you hear the buzzing and you're on here, you're really in trouble, but...

In total today, we have 65 gigawatts of generation connected to the network.

That's a whole range of sources, so we have about 90 sources of generation.

And the government has a target to connect an additional 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

Like it's any normal ladder, a lot of metres above the ground.

In order to connect the 50 gigawatts of offshore wind that we're seeing out at sea, we need to create a series of subsea cables, new overhead lines, in order to move that energy across the network.

As it stands, we know that we need to construct five times as much infrastructure in the next seven years as we have in the last 30.

So if you just stop there for two seconds, you can stand on this, and it's pretty secure.

Whenever you feel comfortable, you're perfectly fine.

You didn't have to prove that by bouncing, though.

It's impossible to disentangle politics from the power grid.