I'm slightly confused by the "New Cross substation in Southwark" whilst the map immediately above clearly shows it in Lewisham[0][1].
Best I found was a page talking about vertical boreholes on Old Kent Road (opposite Commercial Way which is just inside Southwark) but nothing about a substation there on any page.
[0] Estimating off the National Grid map, it's roughly vertically centred between Lewisham and Greenwich DLR stations - absolutely not in Southwark!
[1] I feel like I'm going mad - the number of pages I found whilst trying to find the exact location that said the same thing under the same map is honestly discombobulating.
This view is just very extreme, it is much less zig zag. It is just mounted to the wall at the high points and slack in between. Certainly there is also a reason for the exact amount of slack like thermal expansion.
* The amount pictured is in excess of that required for thermal expansion. The excess is to have some spare length in case of modifications. For example if you have to replace the transformer and the terminals are not in the same location. You cannot extend a massive cable like that easily or without degrading its specs.
* The sine wave pattern makes it into AC of course (/s)
Impressive piece of work, first time I’ve heard of this.
I had heard that tunnels were a good first step for rolling out super conducting cables, but that doesn’t seem to be a thing.
Superconducting cables have progressed a lot. I’m assuming that setting up a cryogenic system to keep cables cool enough, in a confined space wasn’t thought to be worth it.
The tunnels look tight enough, and boiling liquid nitrogen from a leak could cause asphyxiation I imagine.
"I had heard that tunnels were a good first step for rolling out super conducting cables, but that doesn’t seem to be a thing."
Yeah tunnels underground would be better for superconducting cables, but it is indeed not really a thing as the cooling and installing and maintainance would be waaaay more expensive, than just using higher voltage. Or if one really cares about the loss, use direct current - but we are talking aber very small distances here.
If superconducting would be easy, we likely just would have fusion plants everywhere with no need for transporting electricity long distances.
There's a cool effect where if you hold a fluorescent tube under a high voltage power line, capacitive coupling from the varying electric field causes it to light up. Some energy is continually leaking out via this route, the tube just reveals it. (Magnetic induction too)
An interesting article, I’ll download the IoP report and maybe read it.
But it talks about doing the hard work to improve the Technological Readiness Level from 7 to 9. Although these cables need rare earths so might be problematic.
> Superconducting cables have progressed a lot. I’m assuming that setting up a cryogenic system to keep cables cool enough, in a confined space wasn’t thought to be worth it.
Yeah, the cost isn’t worth it.
Buying two transformers to step up the voltage on one end and step down the voltage at the other end is going to be several orders of magnitude cheaper than actively cooling cables to 20K for their entire length.
Cables on overhead high voltage lines are mounted using stacks of ceramic insulators, but here they seemingly just sleeved in some protection and hang on a tunnel wall. Why is that?
The cost of oil insulated cables that can do 132kv is about £900 a meter. Whilst there are HV cables that exist on the outskirts of london, they are much rarer in zones 1-3.
I assume that the cost of pylons with raw cables is much much cheaper. The problem is planning permissions, physical clearance. planning permission and now one wants to live near HV cables (that they know of. There are a bunch of 33kv cables buried outside posh people's houses in zone 5, and a bunch in canals.)
Overhead conductors use air as the insulator. Underground cables use an insulating jacket. In the past it was really difficult to build cables with voltage ranges in the 10s of thousands of volts without additional complexity like a dielectric oil being pumped through the cable. I think modern dielectrics are significantly better though.
Overhead high voltage conductors are not insulated with a coating, probably for many reasons but certainly for cost and heat dissipation.
That means the path through the air to some conducting materials needs a certain distance, and that even when wet or iced over or whatever can happen up there.
Overhead lines need big ceramic stacks because the air is the insulation. In tunnels, the insulation is in the cable itself, and the tunnel just provides structure, cooling, and controlled geometry
"In total, the £1 billion London Power Tunnels 2 (LPT2) project, which began in 2019, spans 32.5km across seven South London boroughs from Wimbledon to Hurst."
In spite of devolution and the so called "levelling up" programme for other parts of the UK, London obviously continues to be heavily subsidised by the rest of the UK.
"London obviously continues to be heavily subsidised by the rest of the UK"
This is a farcical comment. Were you being sarcastic? The tax revenue from London massively subsidises the rest of the UK. The investment happens in London because you can guarantee it will make a return, and quickly.
The real reason London is rich at all is because it was a trading depot with the continent. It made money from goods leaving England, and entering England. Later on, like Paris, it became wealthy off running an overseas empire, and when that empire vanished it turned to nearer territories.
London has centuries worth of investment from everywhere else based on that. That money has stayed there, and money is spent constantly on infrastructure which helps it make more money. Contrast this with Liverpool, Cardiff or Belfast which suffered decades of decline for various reasons and a fraction of the investment.
If the capital had been moved to Liverpool back at some point in the Middle Ages, then that would have remained a wealthy city instead of becoming a basket case in the eighties. The presence of the civil service and government alone would have kept Merseyside wealthy, and would have made it a huge tourist centre. Bigger than now, and even that was mostly to do with the Beatles.
By the way, the state funded Wembley refit cost more than the construction of the Scottish Parliament. Guess which one got all the negative press?
Let me put this another way. If I got given a very well paid civil service job, I would end up paying a lot of tax in return. And if someone paid for my house to be renovated and build the best utility and transport connections, then the value of it would go up.
And if mass media continued to promote my area continually then the value of my home would also go up. I would get given higher wages to cope with the increased cost of living there. We would get more tourists visiting my area, and firms and non-doms would set up there because of the positive image.
essentialy no choice in putting infrastructure underground as the cost's and
delays in putting a power corridor right of way through is unthinkable, they will almost certainly be useing old established locations for transformer substations that have the required set backs and other services, which must from time to time, come to the frenzied attention of developers, agast ,that they cant relieve someone of this "vacant" land
This should not come as a surprise. Many Londoners lose 35% to 40% of their income to income tax and National Insurance.
Looking at the UK as a whole, London (one city) alone contributes around a quarter of total tax revenue. The South East adds roughly another fifth. That means close to half of all tax revenue comes from Londoners and people in the South East. Given that, is it really surprising that infrastructure investment is concentrated in these regions?
I do not understand the persistent London-critical sentiments. If the government stops investing in London, many high earners will simply move abroad and take their tax contributions with them. That risk is already growing as taxes in the UK are significantly higher than in many other countries.
There are strong reasons why people choose to stay in London despite the exorbitant taxes: infrastructure, culture, and opportunities. If the government stops investing in London, Londoners and South Easterners will simply move away to other countries and a substantial share of NHS funding would vanish. Without that tax base, the NHS would struggle to survive.
This region is by far the most heavily subsidised in the UK in reality, which is confirmed by the number of expensive infrastructure projects there such as this one.
London is effectively kept going by these infrastructure projects and so many UK government agencies and businesses being headquartered there. Even the monarchy plays a role, as a massive gravy train mostly based there. All that money keeps other businesses in London going. Every time someone pays UK taxes in any form they are supporting jobs and physical facilities based there. The BBC is another one. People throughout the UK are forced to pay a licence fee that is mostly used to produce content in and about London.
This is part of a repeating pattern. London took massive amounts of resources such as coal, metals and manufactured goods from other parts of the UK which are now in poverty. The North Sea Oil boom of the 1980s, was used to prop up the London stock market, and only a fraction of that money stayed within Scotland which was suffering industrial decline at the time. (Aberdeen has surprisingly little to show for the oil boom and is now a city in heavy decline.)
And I wish people would understand how costs work.
Pylons need space right, they also need maintenance corridors and access. Every ~360m you need a space to put a pylon[1]. Can you imagine the cost of buying 400m2 every 360 in zone 1?
what about the scaffolding when you need to re-string the cables? can you imagine how expensive that would be? what about if a lorry smacks into it? Its just not practical.
I grew up in norfolk, next to a bunch of HV pylons. No-one commented on them, because they were always there. THey are going to put some more in, and suddenly "its a blot on the land scape" and its "ecological damaging" Then its proposed that the cables are buried. apparently a 200 meter clearing 30km long is more ecologically friendly than pylons ever n hundred meters.
Sounds like you are trying to compare the many hundreds of miles (thousands?) of transmission cables needed to cope with the massive geographic change of generation sources to this ~20mi cable system.
There are many examples of how the UK is London-centric. This isn't one of them.
The UK is run as a city state for London's behalf.
The odd thing is that it makes fun of all those coal mining and oil producing areas whose wealth it has been only too happy to steal. A sort of internal colonialism.
People move to where the jobs are. That's how most English towns came to exist in the first place in the industrial revolution.
We're ~30 years into a new information/digital revolution and London is a world centre of it. There's plenty of wealth generation happening. People are welcome to sit and wait for it to come to them if they want.
Can you give me some examples of wealth generation from London?. You can exclude the massive amount of Financial Services that they shout about so much, that is just a way of skimming wealth of real businesses.
Best I found was a page talking about vertical boreholes on Old Kent Road (opposite Commercial Way which is just inside Southwark) but nothing about a substation there on any page.
[0] Estimating off the National Grid map, it's roughly vertically centred between Lewisham and Greenwich DLR stations - absolutely not in Southwark!
[1] I feel like I'm going mad - the number of pages I found whilst trying to find the exact location that said the same thing under the same map is honestly discombobulating.
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