National Grid: bringing power lines to a village near you whether you like it or not

One of the challenges of changing the energy mix is that you need infrastructure to support it. So, if you're going to build a swathe of new offshore wind power generation, you need to get that electricity onshore and to the places that it is desperately needed. And, in Suffolk, that means that we're a bit in the way. 

We get that, we really do. However, what we'd really like is that, if you're going to run overhead cables across the countryside, we'd like to be consulted and we'd like them not to run over the village. We aren't even a big village, so it wouldn't take an awful lot to meet our wishes.

I ought to admit that, when the East Anglia Green project was first mooted, I wasn't terribly engaged. In the absence of a Parish Clerk, I was rather more focussed on keeping the Parish Council show on the road and my "bandwidth" was somewhat limited as a result. But, now that I have taken a closer look at it, one thing stands out. Whilst, in the rest of the county, the preferred route for the new overhead transmission lines avoids villages, in our case, the graduated swathe (the purple stripe on the map) passes straight over us. And yes, the darker colours (where they would ideally route the pylons) are just to the east of the village, but they might well be very close to our small community.

So, because I'm curious like that, I rang the East Anglia Green consultation hotline three weeks ago. I reached a recorded message thanking me for my call but, at the end of that message, instead of encouragement to leave a message or, better still, a human being to talk to, there was silence. I waited for a while but nothing seemed to be happening. Perhaps there had been a glitch and I had been cut off so I rang again, only for the same thing to happen. This time though, I waited... and waited... and waited... for more than two minutes until, suddenly, another recorded voice invited me to leave a message.

A little bit later, I received a telephone call, apologising for the fact that I hadn't gotten through. A very polite woman listened as I explained the problem with their telephone line and assured me that someone would call me, either later that afternoon or on Monday, to answer my question and any others I might have.

Fair enough, I thought, and awaited a call. I'm still waiting for it.

My suspicions should have been aroused by what happened when I rang the hotline in the first place. It did seem as though, by accident or design, that it was a means of putting off potential questioners. And, if they hadn't noticed the problem already, it offers a sense that they don't really care.

I'm not opposed to having pylons. They've got to go somewhere, and the existing infrastructure means that a north-south route across Mid Suffolk is inevitable. But we'd like to talk about the type of pylons used - we'd quite like the more modern T-shaped ones - and we'd like to input our thoughts into the exact route.

But I have a nasty feeling that being reasonable is, in their eyes, the same as being a doormat. And they wonder why local communities are so opposed to major infrastructure projects on their doorsteps...