A Towering Beauty

Time and again, trans­mis­sion tow­ers are viewed as “spoil­ing the land­scape” and become the sub­ject of oppo­si­tion by many. And with more and more tow­ers required to advance the ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion, these lev­els of resis­tance to them could even be set to increase. With the Com­pos­ite Pylon, BYSTRUP is aim­ing to offer an alter­na­tive to con­ven­tion­al trans­mis­sion tow­ers whose appear­ance is less than attrac­tive. For this ambi­tious project, the Dan­ish design com­pa­ny has joined forces with Val­mont SM, Nex­ans, Der­vaux, and Pow­er Com­pos­ites (PC).

“We are delight­ed to be part of this excit­ing project. The Com­pos­ite Pylon aims to make a con­tri­bu­tion that will accel­er­ate the expan­sion and con­ver­sion of pow­er grids—something that is urgent­ly need­ed to dri­ve the ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion for­ward,” says Matthias Domm, Tech­ni­cal Project Man­ag­er at PC. Togeth­er, all five project part­ners sub­mit­ted an appli­ca­tion to the EU for a new pylon design that would blend into the land­scape bet­ter. Approval was grant­ed in Novem­ber 2019 and three pro­to­types are now being pro­duced.

PC is respon­si­ble for the cross-arms—a key ele­ment of the pylons. These con­sist of hol­low com­pos­ite insu­la­tors encased in sil­i­cone and have a design that enables them to not only absorb the loads of the over­head line con­duc­tors and con­vey these to the tow­er, but also pro­vide elec­tri­cal insu­la­tion at the same time. This means that no addi­tion­al sus­pen­sion insu­la­tors are required, as they would be on conven­tional steel lat­tice tow­ers. As a result, the Com­pos­ite Pylon is con­sid­er­ably small­er than 56 meters.

Fur­ther ben­e­fits include the fact that the pylons are eas­i­er to main­tain and quick­er to install—the aim is that it should be pos­si­ble to erect a pylon in one day. The pylons do not require the large foun­da­tions that con­ven­tion­al 400 kV tow­ers do and are easy to trans­port by heli­copter, mean­ing that it will be pos­si­ble to place the pylons of the future in dif­fi­cult-to-access loca­tions. Three of the new pylons are set to be erect­ed in Den­mark for demon­stra­tion pur­pos­es in 2021. A num­ber of oper­a­tors are already con­sid­er­ing inte­grat­ing some of the first mod­els into their exist­ing grid in order to test them out.

YOUR CONTACT

Do you have any ques­tions about hol­low com­pos­ite insu­la­tors?
Manuel Sur­nic is here to help:
M.Surnic@reinhausen.com