National Grid has announced plans to spend £460m burying power lines that will go through the Lake District to connect a proposed nuclear power station to the electricity grid.
More than half of the £2.8bn being spent on the 102-mile cabling scheme to link NuGen's Moorside plant in Cumbria to the wider network will go towards putting sections of the connection out of sight, at an estimated cost of £1.9bn, the grid operator unveiled today.
National Grid's "extensive measures" are aimed at reducing "the impact of the project on the landscape of Cumbria while balancing this with the need to keep energy bills affordable".
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A £1bn to £1.2bn tunnel will be constructed under Morecambe Bay to avoid the south park of the Lake District national park, while plans to take down existing low voltage pylons, owned by Electricity North West rather than National Grid, and to replace them with fewer, new pylons will cost around £450m.
The £460m National Grid will spend on burying cables under a 14.5 mile stretch of the western Lake District park is around seven times more than building pylons through the area, which would have cost between £58 and £70m.
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Last year, National Grid said putting the cabling underground was unlikely because of the high costs involved. However, local campaigners including Friends of the Lake District have hit out at plans for new pylons and claimed overground features could harm the park's bid to gain Unesco World Heritage Status.
A consultation on the proposal will be launched on Friday for 10 weeks until 6 January.
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National Grid project manager Robert Powell said:
Balancing the impact of the project on the landscape against its cost has involved making some difficult choices as the cost of building a connection is ultimately passed on to energy bill payers.
We believe the proposal we are going to consult on over the coming months strikes the best balance.
National Grid is confident that along the approximately 164km (102 mile) route of the proposed connection, it can remove many of the existing pylons owned by Electricity North West which carry low voltage power lines around the west coast of Cumbria. It will replace them with fewer, taller pylons carrying lines of its own operating at a higher voltage.