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Passage 4
Directions: For question 1—5, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A—G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraphs A and D have been correctly placed.
[A] The contest has been held in anticipation of a new era of pylon building. By 2020, a quarter of the country’s current generating capacity will need replacing; the government hopes the new supply will come from renewable sources such as onshore and offshore wind farms. Today’s offshore capacity is just 7% of ministers’ targets for the end of the decade—and all of the new generation out to sea will need to land transmission cables ashore. The existing electricity grid is in the wrong place for many of these new sources of power. That creates a paradox: trying to save the world by cutting carbon emissions means scarring particular bits of it by dragging new power lines through scenic countryside.
[B] This is an old problem. The launch of Britain’s national electricity grid in 1933 was decried for desecrating the landscape. More recently, the location of wind farms has prompted similar debates. The difficulty with pylons is that they go everywhere. Scotland has had nearly five years of disputes over the planned 600pylon upgrade of a transmission line running from Beauly in the Highlands to the central belt where more electricity is used. The same clashes will now play out in England and Wales. A new planning commission was set up in 2009 to speed up the glacial pace of infrastructure decisionmaking. But weighing economic demands against beauty remains a thorny and potentially time-consuming job.
[C] Opponents of towering pylons say the answer is to bury power lines: at present only 950km of Britain’s 13,000km of highvoltage cable runs underground, most of it in urban areas. But sinking wires, which means clearing a corridor 17m to 40m wide and cannot be done in all terrains, carries an environmental toll too. “You are effectively sterilising land use in the area,” says Richard Smith of National Grid; no planting, digging or building is allowed. That makes installing subsurface cables 12 to 17 times as pricey as overhead lines, according to National Grid (they also need replacing sooner). Since consumers pay for this through their electricity bills, everyone would have to fork out to protect the views and house prices of a few people.
[D] So finding a new shape for pylons may be only one aspect of the coming power rows. But it will be a tricky one. Typically the best designs combine elegance with utility. Yet rather than being a feature in itself, the optimal pylon blends in with nature. That’s a tough task for 20 tons of steel, however impressively shaped.
[E] The skeletal, lattice design of Britain’s electricity pylons has changed little since the first one was raised in 1928. Many countries have copied these “striding steel sentries”, as the poet Stephen Spender called them; more than 88,000 now march across the country’s intermittently green and pleasant land.
[F] Now six new models are vying to replace these familiar steel towers. The finalists in a governmentsponsored competition to design a new pylon include a single shard spiking into the sky and an arced, open bow. After a winner is picked in October, National Grid, which runs the electricitytransmission network, will decide whether to construct it.
[G] But the price of despoiling pretty scenery is hard to calculate. The risk is that the cost of damaging the landscape is ignored because it is not ascribed a monetary value, says Steve Albon, coauthor of a governmentcommissioned report on how much the natural environment contributes to Britain’s economy. As yet, though, no one has found an easy or accepted measure of this worth to help make decisions.
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