It'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 in subsea cables.
It will carry current at 400,000 volts, hung on huge pylons to get wind power 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."
For the past century, the National Grid was mainly powered by burning fossil fuels but now the high-voltage cables that keep the lights on are going through a radical change.
Instead of power being generated by coal and gas plants close to big cities, it is increasingly coming from renewable sources such as offshore wind.
This leaves the massive task of getting the power from where it is generated to where it is used.
In the north of Scotland, more than 1,100 huge pylons are being constructed to carry the highest-voltage cables for 460 km to bring power to customers in the south.
The cost for high-voltage rewiring of the Highlands, islands and north-east Scotland is being put at £22bn over the next five years.
In the south of Scotland, England and Wales, the investment bill is twice as much again.
But that's just the first phase, to replace fossil fuels.
The next stage will see much more electricity needed to provide the capacity for homes to shift away from gas heating, cars from petrol and industry, haulage and trains from diesel.
SSEN (formerly known as Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks) which runs the grid network in the north of Scotland knows its plans are controversial.
A previous power line upgrade - between Beauly in the central Highlands and Denny near Falkirk - was delayed for 14 years by opposition to it.
Its latest plans have also met opposition from local community groups, opposed to the visual impact and construction traffic they're going to see in some of the most scenic parts of Scotland.
A BBC Radio 4 programme - Power to the People - found communities feel they lack the power to challenge what they see as a policy juggernaut - and one which has failed to set out just how big and ambitious it may yet become.
Heather Jardine is a crofter and businesswoman in Strath Halladale in northern Sutherland.
As the pioneering female apprentice at the nearby Dounreay nuclear site, she has seen energy bring opportunity to the far north before, but sees SSE's plans as far more widespread and disruptive.
"This was designated as being almost the most scenic place in the world and certainly the most scenic road trip in the world," she says.
"And yet now there's barely a bend or a hill you can go over without sight of some pylons or turbines or substations."
She says people are frustrated that, despite consultations, they don't appear to be listened to.
"We don't have a voice," she says.
"We are being railroaded into having all this infrastructure for the benefit of other countries other than our own."
Ron Macaulay is chair of the Strathpeffer Community Council, one of many throughout northern and southern Scotland which have joined forces to put pressure on Holyrood and Westminster to put a halt to further developments until there's a clear national plan.
"We recognise there will be a need to reinforce the grid if we go down the route of relying on windfarm and solar power, what we're asking for is 'do it properly'," says Macaulay.
"We're going to have to live with this for the next 60 or 70 years - that's roughly how long the old grid network has been in - we want it to be done right."
He says he wants to know why we are generating power so far away from the place where it's needed.
"Why are we building these long transmission lines - where actually you could be building windfarms closer to the point of need, you could be building small nuclear power stations closer to the point of need.
"It just strikes me [that] people are rushing headlong into these things without stopping and thinking."
SSE pushes back at the suggestion that it isn't planning and isn't responding, saying it has run numerous public meetings and can point to many changes made to the original plan following external pressure.
It had to start the process with the most efficient plan, to reassure its regulator, Ofgem, that it has cost in mind. Mitigation tends to add costs, and costs are passed on to customers.
Greg Clarke, who has led the public information campaign, is repeatedly pushed back into justifying the case for building so much renewable generation infrastructure in the north of Scotland.
Yet that case has been made and is settled. He has the role of pushing forward what is already established policy for elected governments in Westminster and Holyrood.
"We have quite a robust planning system in Scotland," he says. "That forces us away from what we would consider the most precious and sensitive landscapes."
Clarke does acknowledge that there will be unavoidable "impacts" when you're talking about the critical national infrastructure of the scale required to meet the future energy needs of the country.
At Peterhead in Aberdeenshire construction is taking shape - on a site the size of 19 football pitches - on £4bn subsea cables that can shift vast amounts of renewable electricity between Scotland and England.
The two 315-mile (507km) cables will run to Drax in North Yorkshire.
The project will be the first of four subsea electricity links planned along the east coast with the eventual capacity capable of powering 7.5 million homes.
A similar "bootstrap" cable is already operating on the west coast between Hunterston in Ayrshire and north Wales.
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.
In the north of Scotland, it's a sub-division of SSE; in the south of Scotland, it's Scottish Power; and for England and Wales, it's the private company with the name (perhaps confusingly) of National Grid.
The UK government told the Radio 4 production team that all such projects are subject to rigorous planning processes, and the grid upgrade is to protect families from the shock of price hikes, such as we're seeing result from war in the Persian Gulf.
Most planning for Scotland, though not all, comes under Holyrood's control.
A Scottish government spokesperson said there is a need for community voices to be better heard, and it's setting up a forum for that purpose.
It wants to see mandated benefits for communities.
It was only last year, well into the process, that the UK government adopted guidelines of £200,000 per kilometre of a new cable route, plus more than £500,000 per substation.
So for a highly controversial 100km route through north-east farmland, that’s £23m.
Those with homes within 500 metres of a cable line should get a reduction in electricity bills of £250 per year for 10 years.
Will that be enough to head off opposition and show people the benefits?
There are some, including in governing parties, who believe more should be done to ensure community has a share of ownership as well as benefits.
An improved forum may be too late for plans already in system.
Of 11 'mega-projects' in north Scotland, five are held up by council planning committees, including a vast substation near Beauly, which is where four high-voltage lines meet linking to Caithness, the Western Isles, Peterhead and Denny (which is already in place).
They'll go to appeal and possibly public inquiries.
These will have to be speedy, as applications are supposed to be resolved by late summer.
It could be an early challenge for incoming Holyrood administration after May's election.
And the challenges won't end there.
This is just the first part of the programme for a fundamental restructure of the National Grid, 100 years after passage of the legislation that set it up.
A further expansion of its capacity is required after 2030 to meet rising demand for electricity from electric cars and home heating.
And yet another huge programme is already under way to prepare the lower-voltage distribution network.
Across southern Scotland, where Scottish Power has responsibility for both high-voltage transmission and low-voltage distribution, the company says it will have to build 70 new substations - one every month for the next six years.
Substations are arrays of galvanised steel transformers that step down high-voltage to lower voltage so that it is suitable for distribution to customers.
They can also step up from low to high which is a more efficient voltage for transmission over distance.
The cost of all this is piling new pressure on bills.
From 1 April, the part of electricity bill that pays for transmission is going up for business customers by an average of more than 60%. That puts up total bills by 5% to 10%.
Household costs are going up too, but UK government has opted to absorb much of that through tax and subsidy.
Already, one pound in every £40 on bills is spent on 'constraint payments' - the price for having too little capacity in grid bottlenecks to get power from north to south.
Much of this change could be foreseen years ago, but action on grid connections has been too slow to avoid this.
Last year, it cost £2.1bn to pay wind farm operators, mainly in Scotland, to unplug from grid because there was insufficient capacity; also including cost of getting operators of gas-fired power stations south of those bottlenecks to meet demand there.
Kate O'Neill is head of operations for NESO, the National Energy System Operator.
Set up two years ago, one of its jobs is to balance supply with demand and manage those constraints.
Upgrading grid for its 2030-31 net zero carbon target is a "Herculean task", she says,and it will retain some constraints.
To remove them all would require over-engineering and over-providing the system.
Better to reduce peaks of demand with incentives to use power when it's less in demand.
That's already on offer through many domestic and business suppliers,and it's about to get super-charged by a trial allowing wind farms in north to continue supplying grid when they would otherwise be paid to switch off.
They could then offer cheaper power to those who are north of bottlenecks.
That should be a welcome boost to Scottish customers,and if it's continued over time,it could influence decisions of energy-hungry industries,inclusive data centres,to locate nearer source power reduce need cabling.