The huge task of rewiring Britain's electricity grid from top to bottom

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t's hard enough to get an electrician these days - and they cost a lot - but Britain needs to train up thousands of them and it's spending more than £60bn on the first stage of a major re-wiring task. The project stretches from the north of Scotland, marching across hill and glen, striding into the cities while further cables will be buried under the sea as they travel down to England.

The upgraded power lines will carry current at 400,000 volts, hung on huge pylons to get wind power from the north of Scotland to homes and industries in the south.

A project on this scale was bound to spark criticism and opposition on the journey.

According to Prof Paul de Leeuw, from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen: "We are seeing the biggest plumbing, rewiring and repurposing of our energy system for many generations."

It's one of the curiosities of this vast programme of new cable routes – that for something this important to the nation's future, the UK government has contracted out not only the job of engineering the grid upgrades but of making the case and taking the heat for it.

Source: Wikipedia