Austria: Pylons as sculpture for public acceptance of expanding electrification

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.

Great, 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.

Something similar was previously proposed in Iceland

https://grapevine.is/news/2015/10/16/these-human-shaped-pylo...

These 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.

Austria has a long tradition of making infrastructure attractive: from railway stations to electric substations.

Trying 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.

If the proposal gets accepted, would they need to construct additional pylons?

This 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-ta...

In Estonia a couple have been built.

https://balticguide.ee/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Soorebane-...

Nice, 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.

Have they tried burying the cables? Yes, it's more expensive, but if they care so much about the views...

Amazing! 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?

If 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.

They 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.