I can just imagine the letters to the T&A in 1928 when the first electricity transmission pylons strode vigorously across the rural landscape. Wilsden folk wouldn’t have liked what they could see, nor would those who looked across the canal in the Shipley area.

Later generations seem to have accepted the network of pylons bringing us power from the National Grid without much comment, and indeed most folk apparently accept them as a normal feature in the landscape and just don’t notice them.

It’s as though they are a necessity, rather like traffic lights, and they merit little comment.

It’s possible they are a good example of the way new developments raise considerable interest and opposition when first introduced – as with wheeled bins for household waste a decade or so ago – and then become less contentious over time. This certainly should be the case with wind turbines, and children yet born will be surprised at all the fuss.

The original pre-war pylons only came about when a nationwide grid of power stations began to replace the local, small scale generating systems, like the old coal-fired one in Canal Road.

Since then, we have become accustomed to the larger power stations, on coalfields, like Drax and Ferrybridge, and the nuclear ones dotted around the coasts, but all that is about to change.

Apart from the fact that decentralising electricity production in the future, using local hydro, solar, wind and bio-gas systems, partially or wholly owned by local communities is a certain way of reducing the amount of CO2 produced, there is the need for at least 20 new power stations by 2020, as demand increases and inefficient, dirty ones are replaced.

Most of the new nuclear plants will be on the same sites as the present crop, so there will be little need for new pylons, but the electricity from new tidal schemes and, from the large wind farms at sea, and in mid-Wales and highland Scotland will require a large extension to the distribution grid, and that means pylons. Already the opposition is in full voice.

Only in exceptional circumstances will the new cables be put underground as, at £22 million per kilometre, it is ten times the cost of a pylon system, though they don’t have to be the traditional latticework steel shape.

The Dutch have pioneered far more aesthetic shapes and materials for their recent additions, and there is a design competition in the UK for our proposed new models. You have until today to Google ‘Pylon Design Competition’ and comment on the six short-listed versions.

They are rather exotic for my taste, but electricity is too important to be too picky.