People are going to be angry about pylons.

The technical term for these things is 'transmission towers'. But here in Britain, we call them pylons. And we've got tens of thousands of them across the country. The first National Grid was built in the interwar years, and it was the largest peacetime construction project Britain had ever seen. A single power network across the country. Pylons became part of the landscape of Britain, just as they had around the world, despite the objections of many landowners, traditionalists, and poets. These exist because overhead lines are a fraction of the price of underground cables, and they're much, much easier and faster to maintain. If there's a fault, you don't need to bring in heavy equipment and dig anything up. Instead, you dispatch a team to climb. And that team will have learned the job here, at the National Grid Training Centre near Eakring in the East Midlands. And today, one of those teams is going to take me up on the wires. So here at the Training Centre, we have over 300 graduates and apprentices training in overhead lines and substation technologies. The team that have trained here will undertake a range of roles. They might be overhead line operators, so they'll be climbing towers, responding to faults. They also conduct visual inspections. We have a team of drone and helicopter pilots that keep the network operating. And then we have substation teams as well. So they would look at cleaning and replacing different equipment within our substations. I haven't looked at any point out or down to see how high I am. I'm just kind of going, there's the next bolt, there's the next bolt. And I'm aware that the professionals ...are doing this much faster than me. And I'm fine with that. We have a team of 2,400 people that monitor and operate, maintain the network around the clock, 24/7. This might be in response to weather or faults on the network. And they keep the energy flowing. Presumably, you're up here in all weathers. You'll have dealt with rain and snow. In an emergency, they definitely work in bad weather. Can you just take one more step up? Yep. We'll attach you onto the actual tower. Give you a bit more space. Thank you. Oh, it's not a bad view either, is it? Yeah, it's not bad around here. So what, this is first arm. Yep, bottom phase, middle phase, top phase. Huh, it's different phase of power on each arm? Right! That makes sense. Because otherwise the three would kind of interact with each other on the wires. So we have 22,000 pylons. Each pylon weighs approximately 30 tons. 4,500 miles of overhead line, and 900 miles of underground cable. Because we're at our training school, we've got all different combinations of wires in different formations. We've got our new towers there. Yeah, the T-pylons. T-pylons, yep. Which aren't as high. No, they're a bit lower. I'll keep climbing. Oh, it's getting real windy now! You're doing good, Tom. If you're wondering... this is the point where the nerves kicked in. I don't know if that's coming across on microphone and camera, but... the wind is whistling through the metal and through the wires. Okay. Well done, Tom. (laughs) Thank you. There's plenty of people who don't get up here. Mind the head. Oh, how's that? (laughs) We own and operate the network in England and Wales. We also operate parts of Scotland. This training centre was built in the heart of the country because a lot of the power stations were around here, in the Midlands and Yorkshire. Because a lot of the coal that fuelled those power stations was being dug up around here. Not all of it – there was plenty in Scotland and Tyneside and South Wales too. And a cluster of power stations down on the Thames. But if you were going to pick a spot in the centre of the power grid to have the best access of every pylon ...you'd pick here. But things are changing, and have been changing, for decades. The only coal-fired station left in Britain is about an hour south on the other side of Nottingham, and that'll close down within a year. The main replacement right now is gas, and those stations tend to be on the coast, where enormous tankers of liquid natural gas can dock. The nuclear plants are by the coast too, for easy access to cooling water. And then there's the wind. Britain is a windswept island! And we already get a quarter of all our power from the wind, with half of that from colossal fields of turbines offshore. And there are more, and more, and more of those being built. Britain's entire power grid has been steadily turning inside out for years. As anyone who lives in a former coal mining community like this knows all too well, power generation just isn't happening here anymore. Electricity isn't being pushed out from the centre. Instead, it's being brought in from the coast. Alright, next stop... Down on the wires. I've got to be honest with you, that ladder is swaying a lot more than I'd like. Aye, I'm going to go down first, and I'll get it a lot more stable for you. (laughs) Thank you! National Grid's role is to move energy around the country. We don't generate energy. We just connect it to our network. It's weird to see all this infrastructure and not hear the bu— I mean, I guess if you hear the buzzing and you're on here, you're really in trouble. In total today, we have 65 gigawatts of generation connected to the network. That's a whole range of sources. So we have about 90 sources of generation. And the government has a target to connect an additional 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Oh! Step down. Okay. Like it's any normal ladder. A lot of metres above the ground. That's fine. The ladder is angled the wrong way. My arms are further back than my legs. In order to connect the 50 gigawatts of offshore wind that we're seeing out at sea, we need to create a series of subsea cables, new overhead lines, in order to move that energy across the network. As it stands, we know that we need to construct five times as much infrastructure in the next seven years as we have in the last 30. So if you just stop there for two seconds... You can stand on this. And it's pretty secure. That was fun, okay. (clattering) (groans) Okay, one foot on each wire. Wherever you feel comfortable, you're perfectly fine. Alright. Wow! It's all pretty sturdy stuff. You didn't have to prove that by bouncing though! (both laughing) It's impossible to disentangle politics from the power grid. When the National Grid was first built, the government had to ignore so many complaints to push it through. But the benefits were obvious. And even the folks who rallied against pylons would have to admit that the result was probably worth it compared to no electricity. But now, and over the next few years, there are going to be political fights and protests, large and small. Because for the first time in nearly a century, there are some big and tough decisions to be made about pylons. [Caption+ by JS* caption.plus | @caption_plus]