Posted by Geekette 10/28/2025
> 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.
“These are the first two prototypes — which have already been developed and pre-tested for structural stability and high-voltage performance.”
That’s very weaselly of them.
People generally just want cables to be buried, but apparently this poses more problems than just added cost, so companies are reluctant to do it (as far as I understand it at least, I've only looked it up briefly in relation to the Ventilus/Boucle du Hainaut project here in Belgium).
It's concept art, it doesn't have to be structurally sound or even make economic sense - the creators got their clicks!
We ought to be more sceptical of this kind of thing :/
Moving the discussion to "we put some sculptures in your landscape, and in return those sculptures carry some cables" might genuinely help
If you have the Alps on your doorstep, you may simply want your landscape to stay the way it is, neither adding (modern) sculptures nor (overground) power cables.
Think of the Sierra Club.
Don't forget all the ski lifts in the Alps...
The big new power lines are needed to get electricity from offshore Windparks in the Northern and Baltic Sea to industrial zones south. The conflicts are with villagers in probably nice but not as special areas as the Alps.
Burying a cable is 3x to 10x more expensive than running it overhead. [1]
Although faults are less common, they become much more expensive to fix - digging the cables up to fix is expensive, and it's even more expensive when you don't know quite where the fault is and you need a bunch of exploratory digging.
And unlike California, Austria doesn't have a load of wildfire problems.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/111524_Un... https://www.theiet.org/media/ss5ndfti/electricity-transmissi...
I’m sure the equation is different when the cabling is following a route that’s already having earthworks done, but that would seem unlikely to overcome a 4-5x price difference.
Here it features the review by YD, so, yeah, that's not just not built, it's not buildable in principle :)
A few bird shaped pylons near busy roads is probably nothing compared to miles of HVAC or HVDC cable and normalized insulation losses spread over its lifetime.
Also the branches in the sculptures are used to break lightning into smaller electric arcs just like in regular pylons. Pretty cool. Very Victorian.
The stag is cool but the bird is not.
Yes.
There is some psychological advantage. These ideas might make the overland options more acceptable for the population.
Switzerland and other countries have nice looking (and sometimes expensive) sculptures in traffic roundabouts. For transmission lines, it might make sense, even if it is more expensive. Sure, it depends on the price. But it is much, much cheaper than burring the cables: underground transmission lines are roughly 10 times more expensive, due to cooling mainly (and sometimes this would require converting to DC). So there are three options: traditional (cheapest), such designs (more expensive), or hidden (10 times the price of traditional).
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Quite a lot of public art is not regarded as beautiful by everyone either and is certainly not regarded as worth paying for by even more people.
It's also cultural. One of the things that struck me when I visited the US (many times over a twenty year period) was how little public art there was compared to most places in Europe.
https://balticguide.ee/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Soorebane-...
[1] https://www.archdaily.com/956755/pylon-bog-fox-landmark-part...
https://grapevine.is/news/2015/10/16/these-human-shaped-pylo...
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?
This is concept art, no more, no less.
It’s better than a pylon but worse than a clear skyline.
The design agency gets their clicks, but this will never happen. The end.
Apologies for all those taken in by the concept art images who thought this kind of thing could/would ever be realised... Honestly, please DYOR.
