Electrifying Sydney: 100 years

Transcription

Text-only Version
Electrifying Sydney
100 Years of EnergyAustralia
George Wilkenfeld and Peter Spearritt
EnergyAustralia
Sydney 2004
ISBN 0-9756016-0-1
(Printed Edition)
Introduction to the text-only version
This is a fully referenced, text-only version of the book Electrifying Sydney: 100 years
of EnergyAustralia, published by EnergyAustralia in August 2004. The book was
published without chapter endnotes and with minimal references, to make it as
accessible as possible to general readers.
This version contains all the main text of the printed version, but not the text of the
short essays on Pricing, Production, Appliances and The Second World War. It also
excludes illustrations, diagrams, captions, Appendix 3 (which consists of diagrams
only) and the index, which is only relevant to the printed version.
It contains an extended reference section, which covers all the references in the text and
in the endnotes that were omitted from the printed version.
Inquiries regarding the purchase of the printed version should be referred to
EnergyAustralia, the contact details for which are at www.energy.com.au.
Preliminary Sections of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia
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Contents of Text-only Version
Writing about EnergyAustralia
Terminology
1. The Coming of electricity
2. Production and distribution
3. Electrifying workplace and home
4. Owning and managing
5. Workers and customers
6. Challenges
Appendices
1. Interviewees
2. Office bearers
Sources and further reading
References
Author notes
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Preface
This book commemorates EnergyAustralia’s centenary. It reflects with clarity and
detachment our history, achievements, and some of our struggles which, together with
great technological and social changes, have contributed to shape EnergyAustralia into
the successful company it is today.
It was the 8th July 1904 when the first Sydney city electric street lights were turned on.
At the time, the promising electricity business was a department of the Sydney
Municipal Council and served a population of about half a million.
The introduction of electricity helped set the scene for the next century. Significant
technological advancements transformed the lives of the coming generations through
electric trams, radios, televisions, refrigerators and computers, to name a few. It was
also a time of two world wars, the great depression and dramatic social and political
change.
Over this time, EnergyAustralia – through its predecessor organisations – also
experienced numerous transformations, amalgamations and reorganisations to become
the longest serving electricity supply organisation in Australia. However, at its core, it
has continued to provide a safe, efficient and reliable supply of electricity to its
customers.
I’d like to pay tribute to all the staff, their families and associated people who have
worked with us over the past 100 years to serve our community and make
EnergyAustralia successful. You have provided the strong foundations to lead us into
the future.
Thanks also to Prof Peter Spearritt and Dr George Wilkenfeld for their dedication and
enthusiasm in producing a book which brings such character to our history.
EnergyAustralia will continue to adapt and change to the needs of society. We are
excited about the challenges before us and believe the next 100 years will be even
brighter.
Paul Broad
Managing Director
EnergyAustralia
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Writing about EnergyAustralia
This book traverses over a century of technological change. In 1900 Sydney’s streets
were lit by gas, its trains powered by steam, and poorer families still relied on candles
and kerosene lamps for light at home. Electricity remained a novelty, but would soon
produce energy for the city’s great tramway system, and for its streets, homes and
workplaces.
The introduction of a new energy source or of a pervasive new technology is usually
regarded at the time and by subsequent historians as an indication of progress. Few of
us could now imagine everyday life without electricity. It is seamlessly delivered to our
homes, factories, schools and offices and only the occasional blackout reminds us that it
is produced somewhere and has to be transmitted, sometimes over hundreds of
kilometres, to the consumers.
With the demolition of the great city power stations, to be replaced by new installations
near the source of their energy, coal and water, city dwellers have become less
conscious of the manufacture of electricity. One of London’s grandest power stations is
now the Tate Modern Art Gallery, a reminder that power stations like Pyrmont,
Bunnerong and Balmain – now gone – once towered over the Sydney landscape. The
Ultimo power station has survived as the Powerhouse Museum, and the White Bay
power station subsides into dereliction, awaiting its fate.
This history opens at a time when the Sydney Municipal Council built and owned the
power stations, sold household and industrial electrical appliances and supplied and
billed the customers. Other municipalities did the same, individually and later in groups,
in other parts of Sydney, the Hunter Valley and Newcastle.
Today, electricity supply is such a large undertaking that it is split up between
producers, most of them located near plentiful coal supplies, the government-owned
transmission agencies and companies that purchase electricity from the grid and
distribute it, via a complex web of cables and transformers, to homes and workplaces.
We tackle, in this book, the history of the organisations that have brought electricity to
Sydney and the Hunter, the largest electricity consuming region in Australia. This is not
only an account of technological diffusion, but of the people involved, from power
station workers and electrical engineers to the management and the customers.
As the book ranges over more than one hundred years of Australian history the great
events of that time – especially the two world wars and the great depression – are an
important backdrop to this account. Australian industry flourished under high tariff
walls in the l950s and l960s, and as Australia gradually opened itself to world markets,
some industries have almost disappeared while new ones have flourished.
The challenges for electricity, its producers and managers, have ranged from
competition from other energy sources, especially the rise of natural gas, to government
interests in efficiency, accountability and ownership. Governing political parties are
always very conscious of the price of electricity, and oppositions are always keen to
exploit price rises or blackouts. In the l990s electricity became the subject of even more
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political debate as Victoria and South Australia sold off their electrical enterprises. In
NSW a Labor government was unable to get widespread party support for a sale, so
EnergyAustralia remains a government owned corporation, but has an accountable
board and in effect reports to two sets of shareholders, the government of the day and its
customers - in one way or another, virtually the entire population.
In writing this history we have had access to the archives of EnergyAustralia and its
predecessors, including the excellent holdings of the Sydney City Council, which
owned the enterprise for its first three decades. The history is deliberately short because
it is aimed at a wide readership, and is published here with minimal references. The
fully referenced text with extensive footnotes can be found in its entirety on the
EnergyAustralia website at www.energy.com.au.
This book is arranged in themes rather than in strict chronology. In The Coming of
Electricity we describe how electricity transformed the way Sydney looks and works.
Production and Distribution details the technological development of the power stations
and electricity networks. Electrifying Workplace and Home describes how changes in
electricity use drove demand, and how the suppliers encouraged and promoted new
appliances. The legislative and corporate development described in Owning and
Managing is a microcosm of the evolution of public policy, corporate structures and
management paradigms in Australia over more than a century. Workers and Customers
gives a snapshot of the skills and interests of the people who have worked for the
organisation. In Challenges we bring our account of EnergyAustralia up to the present,
and speculate a little on the future.
We have been fortunate to be able to interview a range of current and former
employees, from Managing Directors to the shop floor. Most Sydneysiders will be
familiar with their local substation or with the discreet green transformer kiosks on
suburban nature strips. Few members of the public are ever likely to see inside the
Control Room at George Street, where weather patterns are monitored on a 24 hourly
basis, so that lineworkers can be forewarned of storms or likely lightning strikes. Even
fewer members of the public realise that the same building houses a ‘Trading Room’,
not unlike a mini stock exchange, where electricity is bought and sold from a variety of
producers under a huge range of financial instruments. Working life for the men and
women in the trading room can be as intense as life in the Control Room, but the crises
are not about lightning or equipment failure but about peak loads, for industry or air
conditioning, and the cost implications for EnergyAustralia and its customers if the
price suddenly skyrockets.
Behind the impressive safety record of successive electricity authorities – because after
all electricity can be fatal for both workers and consumers – is a level of training and
technical expertise to be found in few other industries. Wages and salaries are relatively
high compared to many other industries, but productivity gains have also been
impressive. Strikes, once common in the industry, are now rare.
We have had a free hand in our research and in our interviews for this book. The
analysis and the judgments are ours. We are grateful to our interviewees, listed at the
back of the book, and to George Maltabarow, General Manager Network, who made the
book possible, to Sara Hosking and Gayle Blayney and for their invaluable assistance
throughout the project, and to the many others at EnergyAustralia who have been so
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helpful at key moments. We owe a special debt of thanks to Bob Bolton, for his
generous help with the EA photo archive.
This book gives a flavour of the organisation, not its definitive history. We hope that the
thousands of men and women who have worked faithfully for the organisation, often for
their entire working lives, will recognise something of their experience in it.
*****
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Terminology
EnergyAustralia is the successor, in an unbroken line, to the electricity supply business
started by the Sydney Municipal Council in 1904. Over the past 100 years it has
undergone several changes of name and structure, and the boundaries of its supply area
have changed several times. The name EnergyAustralia dates from 1996, and as the
business is now national, the significance of its ‘boundaries’ has also changed.
This centenary history draws on many documents and sources, including direct quotes,
which naturally refer to the organisation as it was at the time, and it would seem
artificial to refer only to EnergyAustralia. The following names are used in the text to
refer to the appropriate phase of the organisation and the other electricity supply
businesses which it has merged.
Sydney Municipal Council
The local government body administering the City of Sydney,
at the time the electricity supply business commenced (it
became known as the Sydney City Council in 1949).
Electricity Department
The electricity supply business when it operated as a
department of the Sydney Municipal Council (from the
appointment of the first Resident Electrical Engineer on 16
September 1902 to 31 December 1935). It was known as the
Electric Lighting Department and the City Electrical
Engineer’s Department before being known as the Electricity
Department. Sometimes called the Electricity Undertaking.
Sydney County Council
The electricity supply business when it operated as a County
Council under the Gas and Electricity Act 1935 (1 January
1936 to 1 January 1991).
Sydney Electricity
The electricity supply business when it operated as a
Statutory Corporation under the Sydney Electricity Act 1990
(2 January 1991 to 29 February 1996).
EnergyAustralia
The electricity supply business operated as a State Owned
Statutory Corporation under the Energy Services
Corporations Act 1995 (Since 1 March 1996).
St George County Council
The electricity supply business supplying the south-western
suburbs of Rockdale, Kogarah, Hurstville and Bexley.
Created 1919, amalgamated with the Sydney County Council
on 1 January 1980.
MacKellar County Council
The electricity supply business supplying the northern
suburbs of Manly and Warringah. Created 1951,
amalgamated with the Sydney County Council on 1 January
1980.
Brisbane Water County
The electricity supply business supplying the central coast
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Council
shires of Gosford and Wyong. Created 1942, amalgamated
with the Sydney County Council on 1 January 1980.
Newcastle Borough Council
The local government body administering Newcastle at the
time the Newcastle municipal electricity supply business
commenced operation on 31 December 1890. In 1912 the
business was designated the Electricity Supply Department.
Newcastle Electricity Supply
Council Administration
(NESCA)
The trading name adopted by the Newcastle Municipal
Council Electricity Supply Department in 1937.
Shortland County Council
The electricity supply business absorbing NESCA, supplying
the city of Newcastle and the surrounding shires. Created 1
September 1957, merged with Upper Hunter and Hunter
Valley County Councils 1 January 1980.
Shortland Electricity
The trading name adopted by the Shortland County Council
in 1987.
Orion Energy
The Shortland Electricity business when it operated as a State
Owned Statutory Corporation under the Energy Services
Corporations Act 1995 (from 1995 until its merger with
Sydney Electricity to create EnergyAustralia, 1 March 1996).
Council
The Sydney Municipal Council or the Sydney County
Council, according to the time period and the context.
Electrical and energy terms
AC
DC
kW
kWh
MW
MWh
GW
GWh
MJ
GJ
TJ
PJ
hp
V
kV
Amp
Alternating current
Direct current
kilowatt; a unit of power, or rate of energy transfer
kilowatt-hour; a unit of energy. 1 kW x 1 hour = 1 kWh
Megawatt; 1 MW = 1,000 kW
Megawatt-hour; 1 MWh = 1,000 kWh
Gigawatt; 1 GW = 1,000 MW
Gigawatt-hour; 1 GWh = 1,000 MWh
Megajoule; a unit of energy. 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ
Gigajoule; 1 GJ = 1,000 MJ
Terajoule; 1 TJ = 1,000 GJ
Petajoule; 1 PJ = 1,000 TJ
Horsepower; a unit of power, or rate of energy transfer.
1 hp = 0.746 kW
Volt; a unit of electrical potential
Kilovolt; 1 kV = 1,000 V
Ampere; a unit of electric current. A current of 10 Amp at 240V gives an
energy transfer rate of 2.4 kW. This is the highest rating generally
permitted for appliances designed to be plugged in to a standard 240 V
power point
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Hz
kVA
Hertz; a unit of frequency. 1 Hz = 1 cycle per second
kilovolt-ampere; commonly used for the power rating of transformers and
of substations. The power rating of a transformer in kW is the product of
the kVA rating and the power factor. Electricity supply almost always
deviates from the ideal power factor of 1, due to the characteristics of the
end user devices connected to the supply system
DC
Direct current; where the direction of current remains constant
AC
Alternating current; where the direction of current flow reverses, or
‘cycles’. In Australia the standard is 50 Hz
single phase
A two-wire supply having one wire connected to a phase conductor and
supply
the other to the neutral conductor of a three phase system. In Sydney the
single phase supply voltage is 240 V
three phase supply A system of supply having three related voltages with phase differences
of one third if a cycle. In Sydney the three phase supply voltage is 415 V
HV
High voltage
LV
Low voltage
Abbreviations
AGL
APESMA
BWCC
CoAG
EA
EAC
EANSW
ECNSW
ED
ELPSC
EnANSW
ESPOA
ETU
MCC
MEU
MLA
MLC
QVB
RC
StGCC
SCC
SE
SMC
SMH
Australian Gas Light Company
Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia
Brisbane Water County Council
Council of Australian Governments
EnergyAustralia
Electricity Advisory Committee
Electricity Authority of NSW
Electricity Commission of NSW
Electricity Department (of the SMC)
Electric Light and Power Supply Corporation
Energy Authority of NSW
Electricity Supply Professional Officers Association
Electrical Trades Union
MacKellar County Council
Municipal Employees Union
Member of the Legislative Assembly (the lower house of the NSW
Parliament)
Member of the Legislative Council (the upper house of the NSW
Parliament)
Queen Victoria Building (headquarters of the SCC, 1935 – 1968); The
QVB was also the title of the SCC staff journal
Railway Commission
St George County Council
Sydney County Council
Sydney Electricity
Sydney Municipal Council
Sydney Morning Herald
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Money
12 pence (d) = one shilling (s)
20 shillings = one pound (₤1)
After decimal currency was introduced (1966):
Two dollars ($2) = one pound (₤1)
One cent (c) = 1.2 pence
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1. The coming of electricity
For tens of thousands of years indigenous peoples around the globe have
associated light with fire. At first, natural light from the sun and the moon dictated
the rhythms of everyday life. Later, fire provided heat for cooking and light at
night. As historian David Nye has observed ‘for all of human experience light and
fire had been synonymous’. (Nye,2)
One hundred and twenty-five years ago the idea that you could turn on a light that
didn’t have a flame seemed far fetched, even magical. In Governor Macquarie’s
Sydney, light came from candles and lamps burning whale oil. Since 1841
Sydneysiders had seen the growing popularity of gaslights in the streets and in
shops, but only the wealthy could afford them at home.1 Even by the mid l860s,
when kerosene first became available, most people still persevered with candles at
night.2
Most households, whether in the city or the country, cooked on a wood stove and
had a woodheap out the back. Firewood merchants supplied the heating and
cooking needs of the city, just as the ice works catered for the need to keep milk,
beer, meat and fish cold.3 Burning wood and freezing water were elemental and
absolutely central to daily life.
NSW had richer coal resources than the other colonies and all of its fields, from
the Hunter Valley to Lithgow and Wollongong, were within easy reach of Sydney.
Coal replaced wood as the preferred fuel for steam engines, and more and more
Sydney households switched to coal for heating, whereas the other cities,
including Melbourne, remained much more reliant on wood.4 Because of the
proximity of coal Sydney also had cheaper gas than the other cities, so gas
gradually became more common for domestic lighting and cooking, and gas
powered engines began to appear in factories. (Australians 1888)
Even as the uses of gas multiplied, another form of energy was on the way.
Experiments in electro-magnetism in the 1830s saw Morse build the world's first
telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore in 1844. In October 1872, after the
completion of an overland telegraph line from Port Augusta to Darwin, and a
submarine link via Java, the Australian colonies were, in the words of Charles
Todd, Post-Master of South Australia, ‘connected with the grand electric train
which unites all the nations of the earth’.
Leaving the gas age
The first practical means of electric lighting was the arc lamp, first demonstrated
by Sir Humphrey Davy in England in 1808. Early lamps relied on the current
produced by electrochemical action in huge batteries such as the ‘Voltaic Pile’
invented by the Italian Alessandro Volta in 1800.
The development of electric dynamos in the 1870s enabled the economic
production of electricity for lighting, but the electric arc was so intense it could
only be used outdoors or in large spaces such as factories. For many years,
The Coming of Electricity (Chapter 1 of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia)
1
engineers and inventors worked on ways to ‘subdivide the light’, to find a safe
means for using electricity in lamps that were small enough to compete with gas.
The concept of the incandescent filament lamp, developed simultaneously by
Swan in England and Edison in America, found its first practical implementation
in London and New York, among the fasting growing cities in the world. In April
1881 the New York City Council awarded the first electricity franchise to the
Edison Electric Illuminating Company, and a little over a year later the company
opened its first power station, at Pearl Street. (Dunsheath,128)5
In February 1882 one of Edison's electric lamps was exhibited in the Sydney
Town Hall:
The lamp consists of a glass bulb about four inches high fitted to a brass
socket and hermetically sealed by means of white cement. In the interior
are two wire uprights the thickness of a sewing needle with a carbonised
filament curling between the two, fitted into a small glass standard. The
light of the filament is equal to that of eight candles and lasts for six
months before it has to be replaced….The light provides no sensation of
heat and the electricity can be run into a block of houses in the same
manner as gas. (ATT,72)
Shortly afterwards the stately GPO in Martin Place, the centerpiece of the
Colony’s postal services and telegraph system, replaced its gas lights with a 16
horsepower gas generator which provided power for its new electric lights, day
and night.
Six and a half years later, on 9 November 1888, Tamworth became the first
settlement in the southern hemisphere to light its 13 kilometres of streets with
electricity. Even though the local gas company had reduced its prices in a bid to
head off the move, the city aldermen did not regard the quality of the gas light as
‘commensurate with the price’. Indeed, after 10 o’clock at night, the gas light ‘did
little more than make darkness visible’.(SMH 10 Nov 1888) So 54 gas lamps were
replaced by 78 electric lanterns, with 220 bulbs. The lamplighters, who had lit the
gas lamps at dusk and extinguished them at dawn, disappeared overnight from the
streets of Tamworth.6 These new lights - lights without a flame - could be turned
on and off with the flick of a switch at the powerhouse.
News of Tamworth’s triumph spread quickly through both city and bush. The
Sydney Morning Herald reporter in Tamworth wrote that with streets lit by
electricity, Tamworth had ‘outstripped all competition in the race for colonial
progress’. On its front cover of 1 December 1888 the Sydney Mail, a glamorous
weekly circulated throughout the colony, featured a line drawing of the Tamworth
Post Office at night. The illustration captured the power and the mystery of
electric light, which could turn night into day.
By contrast, a visitor to Sydney in 1888 still saw a city lit by gas lamps. Gas was
made from coal at Mortlake, Neutral Bay and Manly and gasometers (storage
cylinders) dotted the landscape from Woolloomooloo, Balmain, Darling Harbour
2
and the Haymarket to Mortlake and Manly. The gas supplied street lamps,
gaslights in homes, shops and offices and cookers in wealthier homes.
It is hard to overestimate the impact of gas on 19th century society. Gas provided a
reliable light source for fifty years before the coming of electricity. The gaslamp
was a great improvement on candles, with their constant threat of fire, and even
the somewhat safer but smelly kerosene lamp.
As residents of the world’s twentieth largest city, Sydneysiders had become
almost inured to the pace of technological change. The great inventions earlier in
the 19th century – the steam engine and the railway locomotive – had
revolutionised manufacturing and the movement of people and freight. By the
l890s the railways had already transformed Sydney, linking country freight to the
city’s great wharves and warehouses. Passengers could move with ease between
Sydney and the major country towns, and within the metropolis new suburban
lines reached out to the north, west and south.
Yet Sydney was slower than most to embrace electricity. Visitors from Tamworth
or Young were immediately confronted with a conundrum. Their streets were
already lit by electricity, and some of their houses, but in Sydney gas light still
reigned supreme. Indeed some parts of Sydney, including Parramatta, Gladesville,
Hunters Hill and Ryde were still to introduce gas street lighting.
In May 1890 the SMH reported that both provincial and suburban alderman were
taking to the ‘novelty’ of electricity as a ‘child takes to a new toy’.
(Broomham,87) AGL tried to head off this growing municipal interest by
changing the price structure for its public lamps and by publicising the financial
difficulties being encountered in Tamworth and Young. But electricity also
appealed to country and city municipalities because they could own this new
technology and it gave them independence from the gas companies.
The managers and shareholders of AGL, including members of the Fairfax family,
owners of the Sydney Morning Herald, were conscious of the threat posed by
electricity and attempted, in 1891, to claim the new light source for themselves.
The advantages of electricity were eloquently put by E.C.Cracknell,
Superintendent of Telegraphs, who told the Select Committee of Enquiry into the
AGL Electric Lighting and Supply Bill in 1891 that ‘There is no question that
electricity is a far superior illuminant than gas’, and that an open gas flame was
much more likely to cause a fire. In cities where many buildings were still made
of wood, fire remained a daily possibility. Cracknell pointed out that gas ‘is very
destructive to decorative work, pictures, books and wallpaper’ and that in
Sydney’s summer a room lit by gas quickly became ‘stuffy and unbearable’.
(Broomham,88)
Six bills to enable the supply of electricity were introduced into the NSW
Parliament between 1887 and 1893. The first two came from opportunistic
promoters but four came from credible and distinct competing interests, including,
in 1891, the Sydney Municipal Council itself, which the engineering press had in
1890 accused of ‘arm-folding apathy’.
3
By the l890s many councils saw the manufacture and sale of electricity not just as
a public good but as a route to independence, avoiding the need for further
contracts with the gas companies. Almost all of these municipalities or shires had
been proclaimed within the past three decades, so they were keen to embrace a
new technological and financial endeavour, especially one synonymous with
progress.
The Sydney Municipal Council's Electric Lighting Bill finally passed in October
1896. In the same year AGL fitted new high efficiency mantles to its street lamps
and reduced its street lighting rates. But it took the Council another three years to
appoint British electrical engineers to draw up a specification for a power station.
The proposed power station site at Kent Street on Darling Harbour had been
resumed during the cleanup of Sydney after the outbreak of bubonic plague, so the
Council had to select a new site in Pyrmont.
Sydney was still a gas city at the start of the 20th century. Seventy per cent of gas
production was still used for lighting, and AGL went to great lengths to shore up
its gaslight business, with upgrades of existing installations and a continuing
search for new customers. In 1901 the Wynyard lighting system was improved
and in 1904 more than half of AGL’s municipal customers entered new five year
agreements for gas street lighting.
Most households still cooked with either wood or coal, but AGL proved keen to
increase its share of the domestic cooking market. In 1893 it offered free cooking
lessons at its new gas showroom in the Haymarket, and advertised that ‘Cooking
by gas is far superior, cheaper, and cleaner than cooking by any other means. The
gas is always ready for use day and night at a moment's notice. Its use for cooking
purposes renders the Mistress of the house almost independent of servants’.
(Wicken) At a time when servants were hard to find, this line of advertising had
obvious appeal.
Illuminating public space
The transition in Sydney from gas to electricity is superbly captured in Louis
Stone’s novel Jonah, set in the working class suburb of Waterloo in the early
l900s. Jonah, the protagonist, a hunchback who has been taught his trade by an
immigrant German bootmaker, wanders the streets at night with other larrikins. In
the streets of Waterloo most of the light comes from the gas jets in the shops. In
the terrace houses wood stoves, candles and kerosene lamps are the only sources
of light and the inhabitants often rely on the ‘dim reflection’ of a gas lamp in the
street.
The local pubs stand out in their dusty, terrace house landscape, with their
‘powerful lamps’ which ‘dazzle’ prospective customers. Once a week the locals
go to the Haymarket to shop, where three long ‘dingy arcades’ are lit by ‘naked
gas jets’.
Jonah manages to escape his employer, and set up as a bootmaker on his own
account. Introduced to modern marketing techniques, he starts selling mass
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produced shoes and is so successful that he opens ‘The Silver Shoe’, a new
emporium in Regent Street. The shop first opened:
precisely on the stroke of seven, the electric lights flashed out, the curtains
were withdrawn, and the shop stood smiling like a coquette at her first
ball. Everything was new. The fittings glistened with varnish, mirrors and
brass rods reflected the light at every angle, and the building was packed
from roof to floor with boots…At eight o’clock another surprise was
ready. A brass band began to play popular airs on the balcony, hung about
with Chinese lanterns, and a row of electric bulbs flashed out, marking the
outline of the wonderful silver shoe, glittering and gigantic in the white
light. (Jonah, 1911)
Electricity enabled outdoor, commemorative and commercial lighting on a
previously unimagined scale.7 Every time a new king or queen was installed on
the imperial throne in London, public buildings, especially the Sydney Town Hall,
would dress themselves electrically.
Electricity also transformed interior social space. With the transition to talking
pictures in the late l920s the new picture palaces were entirely reliant on
electricity, not only for their external and internal lighting, but to operate
projection machinery, refreshment equipment and air ventilation systems, before
the coming of air conditioning.
Suddenly the cinema strips in the city centre were alive with light at night. In the
suburbs the cinemas and the pubs were the best-lit structures. The new picture
palaces from the State in Market Street to the Orpheum at Cremorne and the Ritz
at Parramatta were temples to the electrical age. Ablaze with lights on the outside,
their foyers and their ceilings were lit with superb art deco light fittings. Light
levels were manipulated as the curtain opened at the beginning of a movie and
closed at its completion. Playgoers familiar with gas lit stages marveled at the
dexterity of the new electric lighting regimes. These new entertainment palaces
had entered the electric age. (Sydney Mail 21 August l929)
Most of the live theatres surrounded themselves with globes in an effort to
compete with the cinemas but the audience for live theatre in NSW fell from four
million to just over one million between l920 and l930, with many live theatres
submitting, according to those who regretted the trend, to ‘the indignity of
wiring’. (Spearritt 2000, 55)
Any new form of entertainment relied on electricity to run its equipment, and on
the dazzle of the globes to attract patrons at night. Ballrooms, including the
Trocadero, competed with each other for the fanciest light fittings. By the 1930s
electricity was also amplifying singers’ voices and dance-band instruments. When
Luna Park opened in l935 on the site of the engineering workshops for the
Harbour Bridge, its giant face radiated electricity. Children and families came on
electric trains or trams from every suburb to this new fun park in its harbour
setting. As Dymphna Cusack and Florence James describe it in their novel of
wartime Sydney, Come in Spinner:
5
The huge grotesque face of the park entrance grinned across the
water…Down both sides of the park the sideshows beckoned in brilliant
electric light….The octopus swung squealing couples on the ends of its
giant arms into the darkness of the harbour. (Come in Spinner, 1951)
Other recreational pursuits also embraced the night time possibilities provided by
electricity. Sporting contests, especially cricket and rugby, could be viewed at
night from the l930s, as could the dogs and the trots. Neon signs started to appear
to advertise sporting facilities, cafes and even particular products, from
toothbrushes to stoves.
The city itself shed the dim and dingy sense of a gaslit city, as not only street
lights, but more and more buildings used lighting to create a nighttime personality
they had not had before. As the skyline of Circular Quay rose above the four or
five storeys of the warehouses, Sydney began to look a little like the great cities
that were always in the public eye, especially New York which, with the Empire
State Building, boasted the world’s tallest skyscraper.
The electrification of public transport
The streets of Sydney and its suburbs in the l880s and l890s were crowded with
cabs, drays and carts. All were horse-drawn and any large residential or
commercial establishment had to provide stabling facilities. Larger groups of
terrace houses often had stables at the back, as did factories, pubs and merchants
involved in deliveries. Horses were smelly, dirty and hard to manage. They had
to be fed and watered regularly and their manure dotted the cobblestone streets of
the city and the suburbs.
Horse-drawn carts brought milk, bread and to ice to the door, and took away the
night-soil in the many suburbs that had yet to be connected to the sewer. With the
building of new wharves following the outbreak of plague, rail connections
between the docks and city warehouses became common, but for short-haul
cartage there was no substitute for the horse until well into the 20th century, when
the internal combustion engine took over.8
Horses also helped to move people, although walking was the most popular means
of travelling shorter distances. The first modes of public transport – cabs, buses
and the first trams – were all horse-drawn. The transition of the tramway network
from horse, steam and cable to electricity ushered in a new, cleaner, more
predictable and much more efficient form of public transport. In 1881 Sydney
had 9.5 miles of tram line, all operated by steam. After flirting with cable on some
of the steeper grades in the l880s and l890s, by 1904 the city and suburban
network offered over 73 miles of track, nearly all electrified. The State
government found itself the owner of a huge electric tramway system, the first
sector of Sydney’s economy to be fully electrified.9
From the mid l890s the electric power for the tramway system was generated at
the cable engine house at Rushcutters Bay and from 1899 at the new Ultimo
Powerhouse and its subsequent extensions. (Much of that building can still be
seen, as part of the Powerhouse Museum overlooking Darling Harbour. The
6
Museum has also reused the old tramcar house for the storage and conservation of
artefacts).
By 1904 electric trams were carrying nearly 106 million passengers per year,
representing 200 trips per head of Sydney population. Cable trams still carried 10
million per year and steam nearly 12 million, but both were soon phased out, so
by 1914 all 282 million tram trips were electrically powered. Up to the end of
World War I, the tramway system accounted for the majority of electricity use in
Sydney.
The trams had a monopoly on leisure traffic to the southern beaches, and to those
other great leisure sites, the Cricket Ground, the Royal Easter Show and the race
tracks. ‘Toast-rack’ trams, without doors, were able to move thousands of people
per hour. Electric trams were clean and relatively nimble, able to follow the street
pattern, from the tram-dependant shopping strips to the more treacherous descents
to the north shore ferries. It was not unknown for a tram to plunge into the water
on some of these steeper descents, especially from Bradley’s Head Road down to
the Zoo ferry at Athol Wharf. Newspapers seized the opportunity to capture the
ignominy of a half-submerged tram. The passengers usually escaped.
The railways served the inner west and some of the more far flung suburbs on the
north shore and in the south. They were not nearly as well patronised as the trams,
but caught up slowly. In 1904 they carried 30 million Sydney passengers (about
24 per cent as many as the trams), increasing to 77 million by l914 (27 per cent as
many as the trams). Steam trains were less subject to the vagaries of weather and
terrain than trams, but they were dirty. The soot invaded the carriages and all the
premises – houses, schools and factories – located near the rail lines.
The growth of Sydney created an enormous demand for travel and put great
pressure on both public and private transport systems. Sydney overtook
Melbourne in population by 1900 and by l921 became the first Australian city to
reach one million. (Spearritt 2000,32) To help the tramway system cope with the
demand for public transport, the Railway Commissioners decided to electrify the
suburban rail system as well, a step which may well have been taken much earlier
but for the interruption of the Great War. Sydney’s rail system, electrified
between l926 and l930, suddenly became the symbol of modernity that the electric
tramways had been at the turn of the century.
The trains were now cleaner for passengers and the soot that had always hung
about rail lines soon disappeared. Real estate agents and developers started to
open up new estates near the rail line, proudly proclaiming in text and illustration
the easy and quick access to the city centre from their raw blocks of land.
Investors started to build blocks of flats near ferry stops, tram routes and the
closer-in railway stations. This latter trend took off on a spectacular scale from the
early l960s, with the introduction of the Strata Title Act.
Not only did Sydney electrify its railway system, it became, in 1926, the first
Australian city to boast an underground railway, a feat which Melbourne did not
match until the l980s.10 But the grand coup, the opening of the Sydney Harbour
Bridge, created a direct electric rail and tram link between the city and the north
7
shore. It opened amid much fanfare and incident on the 19th of March l932, when
a para-military horseman beat the Labor Premier, Jack Lang, to the ceremonial
ribbon. Although the Great Depression cast a ‘shadow behind the Bridge’ the
great engineering feat helped people think that recovery would come.
Public transport, which had made suburban Sydney possible, was, by the mid
l930s, almost entirely powered by electricity. Electrically powered trams and
trains carried their greatest ever share of Sydney’s public transport trips – nearly
85 per cent in 1935-36 (about 10 per cent of public transport trips were by bus and
the rest by steam ferries). From the 1950s the truck made it possible for industry
to relocate well beyond the reach of the railway system and the car enabled a
degree of travel flexibility that could never be matched by fixed track public
transport, and Sydney gradually moved away from its reliance on electric transit.11
Railway and tramway traction, which had accounted for over a third of Sydney
electricity use in the 1930s, declined to about 3 per cent in the 1970s. Over 80 per
cent of all urban travel is now by car or truck.
The decision to close the tramway system and replace it with buses, taken by a
Labor government in the early l950s on the urging of the National Roads and
Motorists Association (NRMA), proved an enormous blow to electric transit. One
of the world’s largest electric tramway systems, larger even than Melbourne’s,
was abandoned. In the l960s and l970s Sydney became remarkably car dependent,
and only rising traffic congestion and higher density rebuilding around the railway
network saved the electric train system from gradual erosion. The electric train
system has actually extended over the last thirty years, with new lines to the
eastern suburbs and the airport and new links to the north, west and south.
The form of the city
The shape of Sydney shows the imprint of electric transit. Over the past four
decades Sydney has established the most successful suburban centres in Australia,
all based on major railway stations and related bus connections. Starting with
North Sydney and Parramatta, these centres now include St Leonards, Chatswood,
Blacktown, Mt Druitt, Hurstville, Bondi Junction, Hornsby and Strathfield. These
have major shopping centres, office employment, a wide range of services and in
effect are cities in the suburbs in their own right. The Sydney rail system carries
nearly a million passengers every working day, placing the electrical railway
system near the heart of economic and political life in Sydney.
Electricity made its mark on the Sydney landscape in other ways as well.
Enormous power stations dotted the foreshores of the working class harbourside
suburbs of Ultimo, Pyrmont, Rozelle and Balmain, and later the shore of Botany
Bay. Gas plant and gasometers also dominated the skyline, but the march of
electricity was marked by poles and wires, whereas the gas network had largely
faded from view as the gas lamps disappeared.
In the 1890s the City acquired a new jumble of wires from small electricity
companies, in some cases running alongside the telegraph and telephone wires
already there.12 When the Sydney Municipal Council began electricity supply in
1904 it helped clean much of this up by laying its cables underground and buying
8
out the other electricity companies. The economics of supply outside the City
itself made underground mains too costly, and wooden poles carrying overhead
electrical wires appeared in more and more suburban streets from the l920s.
Telephone wires (and in the 1990s, coaxial cables for pay TV) were often added
to the same poles.
Electricity distribution involves several levels of voltage (called ‘pressure’ in
early electrical terminology). Voltage changes need transformers, and
transformers need space. The first ‘substations’ in Sydney were solid brick and
sandstone blockhouses, borrowing architectural details from the buildings around
them, but unmistakable in their purpose. They housed not only transformers and
switchgear but also other bulky equipment required at the time such as AC to DC
converters and storage batteries.
Small substations were also needed throughout the suburbs, and by the l920s
considerable efforts were made to design them to blend in with the immediate
setting, at least in the areas which the Sydney Municipal Council designated as
‘high class’. These substations could be built in Art Deco, Spanish Revival,
California Bungalow or any other style. Sometimes both design and brick colour
were made to match a church, if that is what the substation abutted.
Many of these substations still survive, while others have been replaced by
smaller units – often on the nature strip and enclosed in metal boxes painted green
– or they have been subsumed within buildings, especially in the case of larger
offices, industrial structures or apartment blocks.
As electric power started to flow into Sydney from the outside rather than from
the centre out, large open air substations were built on woodland, farmland or
railway land at the urban fringe, gradually encroached by suburban expansion.
They were usually surrounded by cyclone fencing and they were rather forbidding
places, not least because of the skull and crossbones warning of immediate death
to any young daredevils who scaled the fence.
There are still thousands of substations in the Sydney region, from the grand to
the modest, and their familiar hum reminds us that the flow of electricity is a
continuous process. A century ago its very existence was a wonder. Now it is only
remarked if it fails.
Only two of the great powerhouses still survive. All were built in working class
suburbs, which – as with every suburb near the harbour – have been gentrified
over the past four decades. The Balmain power station has succumbed to upper
middle class apartments. The Star City casino, an electric entertainment if ever
there was one, occupies the Pyrmont site. The Ultimo powerhouse has been
recycled as a museum. The site of Bunnerong, the grandest power station of them
all, is now part of the Port Botany container terminal.13
White Bay power station, located in a wedge between the harbour and major
arterial roads, clings to a rather uncertain future. In 2003 the new owners, the
Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, published a conservation plan which would
retain much of the original buildings. EnergyAustralia was considering installing
9
a 50 MW natural gas-fired generator (occupying a fraction of the space of the
original coal-fired sets) somewhere in the redevelopment to reinforce supply in
the City at times of peak demand. This would represent a return of utility
generation to Sydney after an absence of more than 20 years, and EA’s return to
the business of electricity generation after more than 50 years.
In the Sydney of the 21st century electricity has many direct and indirect impacts
on the form and functioning of the city. Once a novelty, it is now a necessity of
life. New suburbs have to have electric power and running water before
development and construction can proceed. In the older suburbs over one hundred
thousand houses built before World War II have been rewired, without much
external evidence. Virtually anything can now be plugged in anywhere in the city.
Not all applications of electricity have been as revolutionary as the electric lamp,
the traction motor or the radio, but all have changed our cities, often in
unexpected ways. Many pundits predicted that increasing ownership of personal
computers would see a sharp rise in working from home and a consequent drop in
journeys to work. Working from home has grown, but in addition to working at
the office, not as a replacement. Traffic continues to increase as householders
make more and more trips each year, whether for work, school, shopping or
recreation.
Information devices multiply, and machines that could once be switched off at the
power point must now remain on so they can communicate with other machines.
Electricity has certainly made our lives more modern and efficient, as the
advertisements of the l930s were wont to claim, but it has not made them simpler.
Sydney’s electricity system mimics the shape, the ebb and flow of the city, and
reflects – visibly and literally – the complexity of urban life.
In the 1950s a blackout in an all-electric home prevented cooking and heating and
required households to have recourse to the candle or the torch. Today, blackouts
still require that recourse, but they also close down the communications systems,
from internet to cable TV. Our reliance, indeed dependence, on electricity shows
no signs of waning.
10
1
In 1841 a pound of locally made candles, enough to provide a single light for a week, cost 4d
(Coghlan,465) or about 30 times the cost of an equal weight of coal. A gallon of common whale
oil gave better quality light at a cost of about 1s per week (SMC 1843). The cost of an equal
amount of light from the new illuminant, gas, was estimated to be double that of oil though the
quality was considered superior (ibid).
2
Improvements in oil lamp technology in the first half of the century could not be fully exploited
until the introduction of new, cheaper fuels to replace animal and vegetable oils. Kerosene was
introduced to Australia within a year of its first production from oil wells in the United States in
1859. Imports from the USA and from Britain grew rapidly in the early 1860s (Cuffley,46). The
presence of oil-bearing shales in NSW had been known since 1855, but commercial exploitation of
the deposits was not considered until early 1865 (SMH 7.9.1868). The first local production took
place in late 1865 at the privately owned Pioneer Kerosene Works near Wollongong (SMH
11.9.1868). The industry then developed rapidly and showed exceptional promise. Four of the six
manufacturing companies incorporated by private Acts between 1866 and 1874 were kerosene
companies (Linge,795). These had a combined capital of ₤250,000, fully subscribed by the time
the draft Bills were submitted to parliament (ibid,476). Within two years the capital invested
exceeded that in the gas industry.
The success of kerosene as a lighting oil was due largely to its price. Selling at 3s per gallon, it
was one third the price of sperm oil in 1871 (ROC 1871). Whale oil and spermaceti candles also
became scarce as the whaling industry declined. The tallow industry which developed in the 1840s
provided a substitute lighting fuel for local consumption and for export. The consumption of
purchased candles remained remarkably steady through the 1870s, at about 5lbs per capita, despite
rising domestic gas connections in Sydney, suggesting that candles, which were used mainly by
low-income urban households, constituted a separate lighting market from gas and kerosene.
3
The first shipment of natural ice (494 tons from the United States) arrived in Sydney in January
1855 together with an ice-house and 44 ‘refrigerators’ for sale (Sun 10.1.1911). The supply of ice
was intermittent and expensive, and remained a novelty until it could be produced locally. This
depended on a reliable form of mechanical refrigeration, which was largely pioneered in Australia.
The most obvious spurs to the development of refrigeration in Australia were the hot climate and
the importance of meat in the diet. A contemporary report on ice making commenced with the
observation that ‘...in the summertime it is a common thing for meat to be killed, cooked and eaten
the same day...’ (SMH 28.9.1875). This was increasingly difficult as the cities expanded, and
perishable foods had to be transported further and stored longer before consumption. Urbanisation
was therefore another spur to the development of mechanical refrigeration. Yet another reason was
the profit to be made from shipping frozen meat to the European market. By 1870, chilled beef,
kept just below freezing by ice-salt mixtures, was being shipped from the US to Britain (Singer et
al V,28). The longer route from Australia required temperatures of -8°C, for which not just ice but
low-temperature freezing was necessary.
One of the pioneers of refrigeration in Australia was James Harrison of Geelong. He improved on
a 1834 British design for vapour-compression refrigeration and in 1851 installed a prototype
machine for a brewery in Bendigo using ether as the refrigerating medium (ibid,47). After 1859
Harrison machines were manufactured commercially in Sydney by the firm of P.N.Russell (Selfe
1885,xxxv). By 1860 a George Street hotel was supplying subscribers with artificial ice at about a
sixth of the price previously charged for American imports (SMH 28.12.1860, Sun 3.1.1911).
The Sydney businessman T.S.Mort was the first in the world to attempt a systematic integration of
refrigeration into both the domestic and export food distribution systems. From 1861 he sponsored
work on ammonia-based refrigeration by the Sydney engineer E.D.Nicolle (Selfe 1885,xxxvi).
Mort's scheme involved an abattoir in the Lithgow valley with sufficient capacity to fully supply
the Sydney and export markets, a freezing plant in Sydney, and cooled rail cars to take the meat
direct from the abattoir to the plant (SMH 4.9.1875). Mort had also considered household
refrigeration: he exhibited a prototype domestic ice- maker in Sydney in 1874 (SMH 28.9.75). By
11
1881 there were two well established central refrigeration works in Sydney and two in the rest of
NSW (RC 1881).
4
Coal could be obtained from Sydney fuel merchants for about 20s per ton in the 1820s (SG
3.6.1824). Wood was one-third the cost for the same weight, or between two thirds and equal cost
for the equivalent amount of energy. As a commercial commodity, therefore, wood was little
cheaper than coal. Its attraction lay in getting it free where possible, whether for own use or for
resale, and by 1822 the government found it necessary to issue public warnings against cutting
timber on Crown lands near Sydney (SG 28.6.1822).
5
The first electric power station erected to supply private consumers as well as street lighting was
that of the English Electric Light Company at Holborn Viaduct in London, which commenced
operation in April 1882 (Hughes,55). The Company was also associated with Edison and used his
equipment. The viaduct location was chosen so that previous legislation protecting the gas
companies' monopoly on placing apparatus underground for lighting purposes would not be
infringed. The site was considered ‘fill’ not ‘ground’.
6
The streets of Tamworth had been lit since 1883 by the local gas company, but at the end of 1887
the council decided that the price was too high. After unsuccessful negotiations for the purchase of
the gas company, the council contracted with the Sydney firm of Harrison and Whiffen for the
supply of an electric lighting installation. Harrison and Whiffen operated the Tamworth plant for
one year, after which it was purchased by the council. Opinions about the success of the
installation in terms of quality of light and its cost relative to gas differed sharply. The Sydney
Daily Telegraph correspondent "JL" estimated that the annual cost per lamp, taking into account
running costs, depreciation and loan interest, was more than 30% above the contract price per
lamp previously paid to the gas company (DT 7.6.1890). In reply the mayor of Tamworth took
minor issue with some of the costs used, but based his defence of the installation on the fact that
‘...we have extended our wires nearly three miles beyond the gas mains and are giving seven times
the light at an additional cost of about ₤200 per annum...’ (DT 24.6.1890).
7
Jonah notwithstanding, electric advertising signs did not become common until the 1930s.
L.D.Batson (1927) reported to the United States Department of Commerce
In Sydney there are only a half dozen large signs aside from those in front of a few
theaters. In Melbourne there are still fewer. This situation is due in part to municipal
restrictions and in part to the lack of any organized attempt to modify municipal
regulations or even to push the business. In Sydney there are a few signs along the
harbour, but the harbour board has protested against any more installations that would
face the water on the ground that they might interfere with navigation signals.
8
The coach building, harness and other industries associated with horse transport still thrived at
the turn of the century, and feed was a significant part of the rail freight tonnage arriving in
Sydney. An experimental three wheeled car using an imported Daimler engine was built in Sydney
as early as 1894 (Petroleum Information Bureau 1960,27). By 1901 there was sufficient demand
for the Colonial Oil Company to order its first shipment of motor spirit (ibid,30), so introducing a
new fuel to the Sydney energy system. At the end of 1902 there were 42 motor cars in Sydney
(Dixon 1972,39)
The use of private vehicles increased steadily, to the concern of the Railway Commissioners, who
wrote in their Annual Report for 1929/30:
Attention has been drawn by the Commissioners in their Annual reports for some years
past to the effect of motor competition on the earning powers of this State's railway
system. The use of private motor cars for excursions, for long distance travel, and even
for daily suburban travel, has greatly increased during the last five or six years. In
addition to the driver, there is often a full load of friends and relatives, and there is
evidence in more recent times that private motor cars are frequently carrying strangers
free or for a fee, so that today the private car is the railway’s most serious competitor for
passenger traffic, although the bus and motor coach are important factors in the situation.
12
The internal combustion engine had far more immediate consequences for the horse than for the
railway. The first motor cabs were introduced in Sydney in the late 1900s, and outnumbered their
horse-powered counterparts after 1924, as did motor vans (Hovenden,31). A handful of horse
vehicles remained on the register until the eve of the second world war, after which horses
disappeared from the Sydney scene.
9
The Redfern to Hunter-street Tramway Act passed in March 1879 allowed the government to
construct a tramway to carry passengers from Redfern station to the Exhibition Building in the
Domain. The tramway was opened in September 1879, and operated by horses for two weeks until
the arrival of the steam cars ordered for it (Paddison,178). The same legislation was used as a
model for the Tramways Extension Act of 1880 (NSWPD 31.5.1883,2023).
In 1883 the NSW supreme court ruled after a tram accident that the original legislation empowered
the Railway Commissioners to use only horses, and that the use of steam, which by then was
almost universal, was illegal. The government recalled parliament for the express purpose of
passing the Tramways Declaratory Act, ‘to declare legal the employment of Steam Motors on
Tramways constructed, worked or maintained in pursuance of the Tramways Extension Act 1880’,
and so render the government and its employees immune to prosecution in case of any further
accidents (NSWPD 29.5.1883,1947). The bill was passed with general support, and one member
took the opportunity to suggest that the government should experiment with electricity as a motive
power (ibid,30.5.1883,2001).
The first cable service was a one mile long line from Milson’s Point to St. Leonard’s park. It was
opened in May 1886 and extended to Crow's Nest in 1893 (Paddison 1956,180). In 1889 the
government decided to construct another cable line from King Street wharf in the City to Ocean
Street, Edgecliff. The line was not opened until September 1894 (ibid). Part of the delay was due
to the decision taken in the course of construction to increase the power of the engines, in
anticipation of extending the line to Oxford Street and to Rose Bay (PWD 1893/4,5).
The cable system was not extended further. When the government had decided on the construction
of the Ocean Street cable line in 1889, it referred a separate proposal for a cable tramway along
George Street to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works (V&P/LA 1896,487). In
June 1891 the Committee reported that it would be prudent to await the results of the Ocean Street
cable line, and that there was a difference of opinion as to whether cable or electric power would
be more suitable (ibid).
In 1889 the government commissioned a report on the working of tramways by electricity from an
English engineer, Sir John Fowler. Fowler recommended two systems as suitable for Sydney: the
preferred one, provided that overhead wires were acceptable, was the American Thomson-Houston
system (Fowler,8). The other was a system of mobile accumulators (batteries) charged from
generator stations at the end of the line, in use in Britain where overhead wires were not then
permitted.
In November 1890 an experimental tramway using overhead wires, powered from the generators
at the Randwick workshops, commenced running between Bondi Junction and Waverley (RC
1890/1,73). It was reported that ‘the stationary engine gave some trouble at first, but the defects
have been remedied’ (RC 1890/1,73).
When the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works finally reported on the George
Street tramway in May 1896, it had no doubt that the motive power should be electric, and that the
overhead wire system was preferable (V&P/LA 1896,490).
10
Sydney’s underground rail system was an integral part of J.J.C.Bradfield’s grand plan for the
city’s public transport, including a harbour bridge carrying for two rail lines as well as horsedrawn and motor traffic, received progressive parliamentary endorsement from l916 until l922.
The opening of two underground stations – St James and Museum – in l926, brought something of
the glamour of London’s underground and the Paris metro to Sydney.
13
11
Competition from petroleum-powered private transportation had been temporarily stalled during
the war. New motor vehicles had been practically impossible to obtain, and NSW per capita car
ownership remained steady at about 0.07 between 1935 and 1947. Only 13% of daily trips made in
Sydney in 1947 were by private vehicle (Spearritt 1978,166). By 1954 the number of cars had
nearly doubled and the ownership rate had risen to 0.12. Petrol rationing, which had also restricted
vehicle use during the war, especially in the years 1942-44, was gradually relaxed and finally
lifted in 1950. In 1956 one third fewer trips were made by electrified modes than in 1946.
12
Telegraphy introduced the question of the proper location for cables in cities. Undergrounding
was tried in the first SA line from Adelaide to Semaphore, and proved an ‘endless source of
trouble’ (Moyal,20). Thereafter almost all telegraph and then telephone lines were installed
overhead, and by 1881 the congestion of overhead wires was a serious problem for the economic
introduction of electric power cables in Australian cities. The telegraph also led to the rise of a
new group of engineers and tradesmen and created a pool of the technical skills necessary for later
electrical developments. Together with the railway it introduced engineering issues and rivalries
into the sphere of government. Despite the efforts of the Commissioner of Railways to control the
telegraph, NSW had a separate Telegraphic Department by 1858 (Moyal,21). This department
resisted incorporation into the Post Master General's Department longer than in any other
Australian colony, largely due to the efforts of its superintendent, E.C.Cracknell, who after 1881
played an important personal role in the development of the electricity system. The telegraph
demonstrated the ability of electricity to carry information, which distinguished it from all other
energy forms. In this respect the telegraph was the precursor of all the subsequent applications of
electricity to communications and control, a new and valuable category of energy service.
13
The last new power station to be built in Sydney was Pyrmont B, which the SCC commenced
building during World War II on the site of the original Pyrmont power station, which had
commenced operation on 8 July 1908. Pyrmont B was completed by the ECNSW with the
commissioning of its fourth 50 MW unit in 1955. It was decommissioned in 1984 and demolished
in 1991. The site is now occupied by the Star City casino. The SMC’s Bunnerong power station at
Botany Bay, which commenced commercial operation in January 1929, was progressively
decommissioned between 1977 and 1981, although the ECNSW used the site for two emergency
gas turbines between 1982 and 1984. The power station was demolished in June 1987 and much of
the site is still vacant. The Electric Light and Power Supply Corporation’s original Balmain power
station at Iron Cove commenced operation in September 1909. A much larger power station on the
same site was completed in 1956 with the addition of a final 25 MW unit. It was decommissioned
between 1970 and 1977 and demolished in 1994. The site is now occupied by medium density
housing. The Railways and Tramways Department’s power station at Ultimo commenced
operation in 1899 and was decommissioned in 1964. The building was transferred to the Museum
of Arts and Sciences, and was reopened in 1988 as the Powerhouse Museum. The Railways
Department’s White Bay power station commenced operation in 1912, reached its maximum
capacity in 1956 with the addition of a final 50 MW unit, and was decommissioned between 1976
and 1984.
14
2. Production and Distribution
The phenomenal growth of electricity supply has left its mark on all modern cities.
Overhead wires, transformers and substation are almost universal features of the urban
landscape. So, at one time, were power stations. There are no more operating power
stations in Sydney because it is now far cheaper to transmit energy than to transport
coal, and because the ever-increasing scale of electricity generation, which only reached
its limits in the 1970s, eventually made power stations too large for the city.
Trends which may seem inevitable now, of course, are clear only in hindsight. The late
1890s, when the Electric Lighting Committee of the Sydney Municipal Council (SMC)
began planning its power system, was a time of rapid technological change, competition
between different approaches and suppliers, and controversy and disagreement between
experts. In many ways the SMC was fortunate not to make its decisions ten years
earlier, when Tamworth had set up its lighting system. The technology of electricity
supply was still far from mature in the 1890s, but it was at least outgrowing its infancy.
One of the main areas of dispute was the merit of direct current (DC) and alternating
current (AC) supply. As the physical extent of early electricity distribution systems
increased the loss of power through voltage drop in the mains became a growing
problem, more so in the low voltage DC systems introduced by Edison than in the
higher voltage AC systems of his rivals. The operators of DC systems discovered that
the costs of distribution rose prohibitively for distances beyond about 1.6 km. Remedial
measures involved various configurations of power stations, distribution equipment and
combinations of DC and AC, all of which had their advocates.1
During the closing years of the 1880s, technical journals and even the popular press
kept readers informed of ‘the battle of the currents’ or ‘the battle of the systems’. The
arguments rested on which form of supply was better suited to lamps and motors, as
well as on the economics of distribution over distance and coping with variable loads.2
DC was also the only economical way of working the storage batteries installed in some
early systems to provide extra power at peak times.
The first detailed proposal for electricity supply prepared for the Council in 1891 by
E.C.Cracknell, Superintendent of Telegraphs, and R.Threlfall, Professor of Physics at
Sydney University, was based on three small power stations, to be built at Kent Street,
Woolloomooloo and Prince Alfred Park.3 Street lighting was to be by DC supply - 431
arc lamps (half to be extinguished after midnight) and 1,443 incandescent lamps for the
minor streets.4
In 1899 the Council engaged the British electrical engineers Preece and Cardew to draw
up a design and specifications suitable for tender.5 (The association with the firm – and
with British products and engineering practices – was to be long-lasting. As late as
1964, the Sydney County Council’s annual report listed Messrs Preece, Cardew and
Rider as ‘Council’s Inspecting Engineers, London’. In the 1970s the SCC was still
specifying in some of its more specialised tenders that the equipment should meet
British Standards, even though comparable Australian Standards had been published,
and still occasionally calling on advice from Preece, Cardew and Rider).
Production and Distribution (Chapter 2 of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia)
1
Cardew visited Sydney in February and March 1900, confirmed the suitability of the
Kent Street Site, and worked out the technical and financial details. He proposed an
installation with an initial capacity of some 2500 hp (SMC 1900,265). This was two and
a half times the capacity previously proposed, mainly because the balance of forecast
public and private demand was reversed. Whereas the earlier scheme had allowed for up
to 16,000 private lamps consuming about 30 per cent of the energy, Cardew allowed for
up to 60,000 private lamps, accounting for about 75 per cent of the energy after five
years of operation. The new plan called for one power station rather than three. The
energy was to be generated at Kent Street and distributed at high voltage to substations
at the Town Hall and at Woolloomooloo.
Construction of the power station would have commenced in 1900 but for the outbreak
of plague. On public health grounds, the government resumed all of the Darling
Harbour waterfrontage, including the power station site. In 1902 the Council purchased
a new site in Pyrmont near the harbour foreshore, with good access to cooling water and
suitable for coal delivery by both rail and sea.
The power station, built to a modified design by Cardew, had five Babcock and Wilcox
boilers supplying steam to three Ferranti vertical reciprocating steam engines, one of
500 hp and two of 1,000 hp, each driving a Dick-Kerr three-phase generator, for a total
output of approximately 1.5 MW. The boiler plant, electrical machinery and cables were
all supplied by contractors in London, and the power station equipment and layout
closely resembled the British power stations of the time.6
Power was generated at 5,000 to 5,200 volts AC (5 to 5.2 kV) and transmitted by
underground cables to five substations. One was in the building where the small power
station serving the Town Hall had been located. New substations were built at the north
of the city (Lang Park), the south (Athlone Place) and the east (Darlinghurst and
Woolloomooloo). The west of the City was served by a substation at the power station
site.
One key decision was to supply the central area with DC, and motor-generators were
installed at Town Hall and Lang Park for this purpose. These incorporated the rotating
elements of an AC motor and a DC generator into one unit, to ‘rectify’ the AC input to a
DC output. One reason for the decision was that many prospective customers already
had DC lamps and motors connected to their own generators or to the supply of the
private companies, and the expense of conversion to AC - whether borne by the
customer or the Council - would have been a major deterrent to winning their business.
The street lighting of the central part of the City was ceremonially inaugurated by the
Lady Mayoress, Mrs.S.E.Lees, on the evening of 8 July 1904. By November all of the
substations were in operation and the main streets around them were lit by arc lights,
although it would be almost a decade before the last gas lamp was removed from the
city.
The growth in customer numbers and demand was rapid, partly stimulated by prices that
were about 40 per cent lower than the small private companies in the City, and by
innovative schemes such as motor and lamp hire.
2
In 1909 the Council engaged Preece and Cardew to review the technical, financial and
commercial direction of the undertaking. Cardew was largely satisfied, but questioned
the practice of continuing DC distribution in the inner city, suggesting that it would be
preferable to supply large customers with high voltage three-phase AC and to step down
the voltage at their premises.
The operating advantages of DC – easier cable undergrounding, apparently greater
reliability, suitability for motors and the scope for battery storage – had been overtaken
by AC technology almost as soon as the system had been installed.7 In August 1930 the
Council finally adopted the policy of changing from DC to AC in the central area, but
the work was delayed because of the Depression (SCC 1935).8 The program was
resumed in 1935 with the construction of the first AC substation in the DC area, at
Farrer Place, but lapsed in 1942 under the weight of war-time priorities. The program
was revived in 1948, and in 1954 was said to be ‘90% completed’ and expected to be
finished in 1958 (Anderson,156).
Even though no new DC connections were made after 1935, DC supply was maintained
to customers who did not wish to, or could not change. The last substation to maintain
DC supply was Clarence Street, using mercury arc rectifiers rather than motorgenerators.9 The last time the SCC reported the maximum DC demand was in 1974,
when it was 0.7 MW, compared with a maximum AC demand of 209 MW in the City
(and 1,983 MW for the network as a whole). The last DC supply was ceremonially
switched off on 28 August 1985 at a function to mark the 50th anniversary of the first
meeting of the Sydney County Council, by Mrs.L.Ashby, grand-daughter of Mrs.Lees,
who as Lady Mayoress had switched on the City’s first electric lights 81 years earlier.
Generation
The steam engine, another legacy of 19th century technology, disappeared rather more
quickly than DC supply. Two more 1,000 hp steam engines and their generators were
installed at Pyrmont in late 1905, bringing the maximum output to 2.7 MW, but all new
plant installed by the Council from then on were turbines. The first two, Willans and
Robinson reaction turbines of 2.0 MW each, were installed in late 1907. By 1914 there
were six turbine sets in service at Pyrmont, with a combined output of 15 MW. The
original steam engines were taken out of regular service in 1911 because of their high
operating costs, but two were kept as reserve plant until 1916.
Turbines changed the economics of power generation. They were much more compact,
so they extended the service lives of older power stations. When Cardew had initially
planned Pyrmont power station in the 1890s he had suggested that the economic limit of
the site was less than 8 MW, but turbines had so changed this equation that in 1909 he
revised the limit to nearly 50 MW, if the boiler house could be extended (SMC
1909,617). The original building was extended after World War I and again in the
1920s, when it reached its maximum capacity of over 75 MW.
Turbines required constant loading to function efficiently. They were, in effect, ‘supply
in search of demand’ (Hughes,364). Their installation prompted the undertaking to
actively promote load growth, which in turn allowed newer, larger and more efficient
units and dropped production costs still further, albeit adding to capital charges. The
increase in scale was rapid: the largest turbo-alternator set used in the Council’s power
3
stations increased from 2 MW in 1907 to 50 MW in 1939, and the maximum size of
plant more than doubled at each increment.
Early in 1916, when it became apparent that it would be difficult to obtain additional
plant from Europe because of the war, the City Electrical Engineer, H.R.Forbes
Mackay, urged the Council to negotiate a formal interchange agreement with the
Railway Commission (RC), which had its own generation plant to supply the tramways
and the railways. In March 1916 the RC agreed to supply up to 4 MW into the City DC
system, but the Council needed to obtain rotary converters to rectify the Tramways’ 25
Hz 6.6 kV AC supply to 50 Hz 480/240 V DC supply. Orders were placed with the
General Electric Co. in the USA, but when the USA was drawn into the war this plant
too was delayed, and did not arrive until April 1919, when the converters were installed
at the new Castlereagh Street substation.10
Forbes Mackay also argued for interconnection as a way to defer the large capital
expenditures required to extend the Pyrmont power station. This recommendation was
rejected by the Council in 1918, in favour of extension (Pearce,17). Nevertheless, the
Council came to accept partial reliance on the railways electricity system as a way of
smoothing the need for capacity increments throughout the 1920s.11 In March 1923 the
Council made a formal agreement with the Railway Commissioners for the interchange
of power for an indefinite period from March 1925, subject to termination at five years’
notice by either party (Anderson,88).
Consulting engineer S.L.Pearce recommended to the Council in 1924 that the two
systems should be fully integrated, and that the next power station should be built by the
Railways Commission (Pearce 1924,22), a sensible suggestion given the magnitude of
the RC’s electricity network.12 In 1926 for example, the Council’s installed capacity at
Pyrmont was 65.5 MW and its main competitor, the Electric Light and Power Supply
Corporation, had 14.6 MW at the Balmain power station. By contrast the RC plant
totalled 168.3 MW – 34 MW at Ultimo, 105.8 MW at White Bay and 28.5 MW at Zarra
St in Newcastle.13 The largest single generator at Pyrmont was 5 MW, while the RC
already operated 22 MW sets.14
Most of the electricity generated by the RC powered trams and the city and suburban
railways, which were progressively electrified from 1926. The RC also supplied its own
general purpose electricity for railway stations, offices and workshops. Its plant
capacity had to be adequate to meet the traction peak load which occurred during the
day or evening, and to provide station lighting at night. During much of the day and
night there was excess capacity which could supply energy at marginal cost.
The Chief Railway Electrical Engineer of the 1920s, W.H.Myers, strongly advocated
the policy of supplying electricity to the suburban municipalities along the southern rail
lines, at prices which returned a small profit (Paddison,118). A similar policy was
followed in Newcastle, with the building of the Zarra Street power station in 1915. The
Newcastle Borough Council’s Electricity Supply Department (which had commenced
operation in December 1890 and formed the nucleus of the Shortland County Council
and eventually Orion Energy, which merged with Sydney Electricity in 1995)
commenced purchasing energy from the RC in 1917, and by the 1920s Zarra Street was
supplying nearly all of the its needs.15
4
However, the Railway Commission had no legal powers to enter into formal supply
arrangements with outside bodies until the Government Railways (Supply of
Electricity) Act 1922. Armed with the Act, the Commission formalised the
arrangements under it which had been supplying Parramatta council since 1921, and
commenced supply to the St George County Council in 1923 and the Sutherland Shire
in 1925. By 1928 the RC provided bulk supply to the entire south-western region of the
metropolitan area, while the Sydney Municipal Council provided bulk supply to the
northern municipalities and shires that had not yet been integrated into its retail area.
Some City aldermen, and perhaps some Council engineers, saw Railway Commission
supply as a potential spearhead for State Government control of electricity
development.16 The notion was not entirely fanciful, as Pearce’s 1924 report had made
clear. In 1925 the Minister for Works and Railways in the Fuller coalition government
appointed a commission to examine the issue of the state’s electric power resources.
(SMH 7.1.1925) The Lord Mayor of Sydney (and Labor MLA for Goulburn)
P.V.Stokes, addressed a special meeting of the Council a few weeks later:
Newspaper reports and unchallenged accounts of official statements by
accredited Ministers of the Government indicate that a preconceived scheme to
filch from the Council the undertaking established by the citizens, with their
own money, is shortly to become operative...the contract [with the Railway
Commission] is against the best interests of the people of the Metropolis and the
Citizens of the City, and the object of the contract is only too apparent, namely,
to form a nucleus of an Electricity Commission for the State of New South
Wales. (SMC 1925,831)
On Stokes’ recommendation the Council gave five years’ notice of termination to the
Railway Commissioners in March 1925, very shortly after the arrangement took effect.
At elections one month later the Fuller government was succeeded by the Lang Labor
government, and the commission appointed by Fuller lapsed. By that time, however, the
Council was committed to having a new power station operational by March 1930.
In 1924 Pearce had been asked to recommend possible sites for a new power station. He
settled on four: on the coalfields south of Sydney, on the Parramatta River which runs
into Sydney Harbour, on the George’s River which empties into Botany Bay and on the
northern foreshore of the Bay itself, across from Captain James Cook’s 1770 landing
place.17 Pearce thought the Botany Bay site the most suitable, with access to rail and
cooling water, and close to the centre of the Council’s load. The 117 acre site included
30 acres below the high water mark, which were later reclaimed by earthworks during
construction.18
Whereas the equipment for Pyrmont power station had been shipped almost as a
package from London, the Council’s engineering staff took direct control of the design
and construction of Bunnerong, although only British firms appear to have been invited
to tender. Once the specifications were completed in late 1925, Forbes Mackay travelled
to London and stayed there for 10 months to discuss technical details with tenderers and
then to plan production schedules with the successful ones.
The power station was designed for an ultimate capacity of 300 MW, of which the first
stage was 150 MW (6 x 25 MW). Babcock and Wilcox won the contract for the 18
5
boilers and Metropolitan Vickers supplied the two cylinder impulse-type turboalternators. The equipment layout was designed by the Council’s engineers, and the
architect was Henry E.White, who appears to have captured the streamlined aesthetic of
the age rather better in his presentation drawing than in the actual design.19
The Council also decided to undertake building work directly, using day labour. Indeed,
the opportunity for wholesale employment patronage on the part of the City aldermen
may well have played a part in their decision to build Bunnerong rather than continue
the interchange arrangements with the Railway Commission. The construction
workforce at Bunnerong numbered about 500 in 1926, 900 in 1927, and more than
1,000 in 1928 and 1929. (Anderson, 93)20
The tendering process for Bunnerong also brought to a head allegations of corrupt
behaviour on the part of some City aldermen and some officers of the Electricity
Department. Two Royal Commissions were appointed by the State Government in
1928, one into the awarding of the boiler contracts for Bunnerong in 1927 and the other
into the coal supply contracts for Pyrmont, going back to 1917. Forbes Mackay’s
deputy, S.Y.Maling, was convicted for bribery associated with both contracts. Several
aldermen were implicated and one was prosecuted for collusion with Maling, but not
convicted.21
Bunnerong, with its commanding position on Botany Bay, stood as a major technical
achievement for its time. The first two turbo-alternators were commissioned in January
1929, and the sixth in January 1930. At 150 MW, it was the equal largest power station
in Australia (with White Bay) and the most modern. There were however some
problems with the transmission links to the rest of the system, the longest of which was
40 km. Power was generated at 11 kV and stepped up to 33 kV, a voltage level which
the SMC had been using since 1914. There were four 33 kV feeders to Zetland
substation, and one each to Marrickville, Five Dock, Randwick and Waverley
substations, from where they connected with the rest of the system. There were
recurring faults on parts of these links, one of which led to a major fire at Zetland. It
was decided that the least costly way to correct these was not to re-lay the cables but to
operate them at 22 kV.22
In June 1929, even before the first phase of six generators was complete, the City
Commissioners accepted Forbes Mackay’s recommendation to order a seventh 25 MW
generator, to operate from the existing steam plant during winter peak periods, and to
initiate the tendering process for the B section, to be ready for the winter of 1933. In
September 1929 Forbes Mackay left for a study tour of Britain, France, Germany and
the USA to investigate developments in pulverised coal, 66 kV cables and outdoor high
voltage switchgear. In the following month the New York stock market crashed, and by
his return in March 1930 there were already early signs of economic depression in
Sydney. The installation of the seventh 25 MW unit, which had already been ordered,
was deferred, and planning for the B section was abandoned for the time being.
The impact of the depression on sales proved less severe than might have been feared,
although any reduction in growth caused the undertaking much anxiety, given that it
was accustomed to an average 16 per cent annual increase in energy sales throughout
the 1920s, and with the building of Bunnerong the debenture borrowings had increased
from ₤5.3 M at the end of 1925 to ₤13.9 M at the end of 1930. Energy sales fell by
6
about 4 per cent in 1930 and 4 per cent again in 1931, but in 1932 they increased by
nearly 7 per cent, and grew at an average rate of 10 per cent per annum for the rest of
the 1930s.
The planning for expansion of generating capacity resumed early in 1936, with the
decision to install the deferred 25 MW unit at Bunnerong, commissioned in September
1937.23 Another 200 MW were ordered before the war. In early 1938 the Sydney
County Council decided to build the ‘B’ section of Bunnerong – a completely new
boiler house and an extension to the turbine house – to accommodate two 50 MW units.
Babcock and Wilcox won the contract for the boilers (the company having suffered no
obvious damage from its involvement in the earlier scandal) and C.A.Parsons the
contract for the turbo-alternators.
With the 100 MW just ordered, Bunnerong and Pyrmont were expected to have enough
capacity to cover the peak load for the winter of 1942. However, 53.5 MW of plant at
Pyrmont was nearing the end of its service life, and in May 1938 the Council accepted
the General Manager’s proposals for its replacement. These involved the order of two
additional 50 MW units to be in place by the winter of 1943, so that the original
Pyrmont power station could be demolished after winter 1942. A new power station on
the Pyrmont site would need to be operational by the winter of 1945.
The first of the 50 MW units at Bunnerong B first saw service on 5 September 1939,
just days after Britain had declared war on Germany. This was to be a golden moment
in the SCC’s role as a generator of electricity. It was the last unit to be installed by the
Council more or less as planned, before the turbulence of war and the ensuing crises that
resulted, ultimately, in the loss of responsibility for generation. Fittingly, Forbes
Mackay retired on 6 October 1939, after 31 years as head of the undertaking.24
The war increased the delivery time of plant already ordered, from the normal 3.5 years
to 10 years in the worst case, and prevented new orders being placed in Britain, the
traditional source of the SCC’s equipment.25 The war was clearly the main cause,
compounded by the reliance on Britain26 but indecisiveness by both the Council and the
State Government delayed the ordering of plant for Bunnerong and for the
redevelopment of Pyrmont.27 In the meantime Bunnerong had to carry the load (with
assistance from Pyrmont and support from the Railway and ELPSC systems). It is
appropriate to leave the last word on Bunnerong to Jack Lang, who would have been
entitled to think that the power station had helped his government lose office in 1927:
It is human nature that evil things should be remembered when good things are
forgotten. An amount of ₤10,000 did change hands, and ruined many reputations
in the process. But it was only a very minor consideration when the magnitude
of achievement in construction is realised. If Labor had not built Bunnerong in
the twenties, it could not have been built during the Depression. There would
have been no money. That would have meant that we would have probably been
unable to supply our wartime industries with power. There could have been a
disastrous collapse in defence supplies when they were needed most (Lang,
370).
7
Enmeshed in the Grid
The Second World War brought all public utilities under greater Government control,
and the need to manage resources efficiently accelerated the integration of the Sydney
and State electricity systems, a subject of frequent discussion, but very little action,
since the 1930s. The advantages of integrating the Sydney regional grid were first
demonstrated after World War I, when a 12 MW link between the Sydney Municipal
Council and Railway Commission systems enabled the former to keep expanding
without installing new plant. Progress towards more formal co-ordination of the systems
was frustrated in 1925 by the political circumstances leading to the construction of
Bunnerong power station. In 1930 arrangements were again made for the regular
interchange of energy, but there was no co-ordination between the two systems in
planning for expansion.
In 1938 the Minister for Works and Local Government asked the Electricity Advisory
Committee (EAC) to advise on the best means of co-ordinating the development of the
metropolitan electricity system on both economic and security grounds.(SMH
30.12.1938) This had the support of Forbes Mackay, who noted that each year that a 50
MW generator costing £1 million could be deferred represented a saving to the SCC of
£80,000 in capital charges. (This represented about 2.5 per cent of the SCC’s 1939 gross
revenue). The Chief Railway Electrical Engineer, W.H.Myers, was also a keen advocate
of co-ordination, not only on a regional but on a state level. In 1941, as the systems
were being linked for emergency support, he calculated the potential cost saving from
full system integration to be £2.5 million over the following 13 years, or nearly 24% of
the total cost of separate expansion.(SMH 28.3.1941)
Defence concerns rather than economic considerations finally brought the systems
together, and only after more false starts.28 By the end of 1940 there were new 15 MW
links between the Council and RC systems at St Leonards and Marrickville, and the first
ever link between the Council and the ELPSC, at Five Dock.(SCC 1940,22) The interurban links with the RC system in Newcastle and the Public Works Department system
at Port Kembla took another year, much to the impatience of the Council (SCC
1940,19).29 As the SCC was the only system with connections to all the others, the
SCC’s control room at Pyrmont effectively became the first control room for an
emerging State grid.(SCC 1951,12)
Since no part of the system was ever subject to enemy bombardment, the defence value
of the links was never tested. Their economic value, on the other hand, was immense.
In normal circumstances interconnection would have allowed the SCC to defer plant
installations by two years. With the war putting an end to planned expansion, the links
proved even more valuable as emergency supports for the Sydney system during its
worst years of stress from 1945 to 1951.30
By the end of the war, most of the state's consumers were connected, for better or
worse, to an integrated electricity grid.31 Just as the grid pooled resources it also
distributed problems. The SMH observed ‘When electric clocks run slow in the
Murrumbidgee irrigation area it is probable that Bunnerong power station, 400 miles
away, is having another of its bad spells’.(SMH 10.1.1948)
8
Immediately after the war the SCC began to plan for its next generating station. In
September 1947 it decided in principle that a new power station should be constructed
in the metropolitan area, although the grid meant that new capacity no longer had to be
located within Sydney itself and the RC, for example, was planning to build its next
power station at Lake Macquarie. In 1948 the Council selected a site at Lugarno on the
George’s River, and in the following year the Electricity Authority (successor to the
Electricity Advisory Committee) gave tentative approval for construction. The Council
was on the point of opening tenders and resuming the site when, in May 1950, the
newly formed Electricity Commission of NSW requested that all documentation be
handed over to it. The ECNSW was committed to building large power stations at the
coalfields, not in the metropolitan area, and the project eventually lapsed. No major
generating plant was planned for the metropolitan area after 1950, and none installed
after 1956.32
There was one more job for the SCC to finish before it handed its power stations over to
the ECNSW – the commissioning of Pyrmont B. It had been the SCC’s intention since
1938 to redevelop the Pyrmont site, and formal investigations began in September 1940.
After consideration of several alternative sites within and outside the metropolitan area,
the SCC and the Electricity Advisory Committee agreed in May 1941 that Pyrmont was
indeed the best site, largely because it was already connected to the 33 kV network. In
1942 the SCC accepted the tender of Australian General Electric (AGE) for the supply
of a 50 MW turbo-alternator, to be manufactured by the Metropolitan Vickers company
in Britain. Generation was to be at the transmission voltage of 33 kV, because the site
did not have the space for step-up transformers. International Combustion (A/Asia) Pty
Ltd was the successful tenderer for the steam raising plant. Wartime restrictions delayed
the placing of an order until 1944, and in March 1945 the original order was doubled, in
the hope that dispensing with another round of tendering would save time. However, all
manufacturing in Britain was by then devoted to post-war reconstruction, and exports of
electrical plant were subject to extensive delays. In mid 1947, the order was doubled
again to four units in all, and a Council engineer was sent to Britain to co-ordinate
contractors and do whatever he could to speed up the delivery process.
Even if the plant had arrived on time, the power station was not ready for it.
Construction was so delayed by post-war shortages of labour and materials, by labour
disputes, by the difficulties of working in a congested 6 acre site, and by the need to
keep the original Pyrmont A plant in operation, that the first generator did not enter
service until mid 1952, by which time the ECNSW had taken over all the SCC’s power
stations (and incidentally, was in a position to take credit for the new plant as they
eventually came in).33 With the installation of the fourth generator in 1955, Pyrmont B
power station reached its maximum design capacity of 200 MW.
By then however more electricity was being consumed in Sydney than was being
generated there. Sydney was last self-sufficient in electricity in 1954. In 1958 it was still
generating 75 per cent of its requirements, but by 1962 only 32 per cent, and by 1965
only 10 per cent. The combined output of the seven Sydney power stations in that year
was barely one fifth that of Vales Point A on Lake Munmorah, the newest and largest
power station and the first actually planned by ECNSW engineers.34 It had taken the
SMC 32 years to scale up its largest turbo-alternator from 2 MW (Pyrmont, 1907) to 50
MW (Bunnerong, 1939). Within 20 years the ECNSW scaled up from 60 MW sets
(Wangi, 1957) to 660 MW (Vales Point, 1977).
9
The loss of the generation function was of course a major wrench for the Sydney
County Council, even though most engineers accepted that the ECNSW model was the
only way forward, given the enormous projected growth in demand for electricity, the
high voltage interconnection of the disparate systems and the ever-increasing scale of
power stations. There was no longer room for large coal-fired power stations in Sydney,
even if the necessary volumes of coal and ash could have been transported
economically. However, the passing of the baton to the ECNSW was clouded by the
circumstances of the time, and some SCC engineers involved in the process felt that the
Council did not get enough credit for nursing the system through the war or for its lastminute efforts to get Pyrmont B operational.
Over a third of the workforce went with the power stations to the Commission, and the
SCC ensured that their number included some that the management considered
troublesome. On 1 January 1952, the day appointed under the Electricity Commission
Act, the whole of the assets on the sites of the Bunnerong and Pyrmont Power Stations
were transferred to the Commission, along with stores and plant directly related to their
operation. Of the 6,137 staff employed by the SCC on the appointed day, 2,203 were
transferred to the Commission.35
The SCC’s annual report for 1951 gives a farewell history of its involvement in
generation (along with extended apologia for the post-war power shortages) above the
signature of the General Manager, C.J.Craggs. It concludes:
The passing of the function of Generation to the Electricity Commission, a
function which the Council and its predecessors have discharged for the past
forty-seven years, marks the close of yet another phase in the history of the
Undertaking. As an illustration of the development of the supply system and the
growth of the business over the years, it is of interest to note that the 86
customers with which the Undertaking started in 1904 has increased to over
300,000, returning in 1951 a gross revenue of £11,000,000. In a like manner, the
capital expenditure has grown from £151,000 to £41,000,000.(SCC, 1951)
To the Suburbs and Beyond
On 1 January 1952 the County Council’s activities reverted to retailing electricity in the
Sydney County District, closer to the core purpose for which the undertaking had been
set up. Generation had in a sense been an ancillary function, and one which the City
Council had briefly considered outsourcing in the 1890s, before embarking on Pyrmont
and all that followed. Those who stayed with the Council in 1952, and those who joined
it later, would be amused to consider that in the following 50 years the enterprise
increased its customer numbers and annual capital expenditure more than five-fold, and
its annual revenues a hundred-fold.36 (Incidentally, the involvement of the Electricity
Commission in electricity generation, as a unified entity, turned out to be a year shorter
than the Council’s had been).37
The Sydney Municipal Council’s first extension of supply beyond the City was to the
new wing of the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington in 1906. Despite approaches
from Glebe, Randwick, Waverley, Woollahra and Newtown Councils, and by private
customers outside the City, no further extensions were made until 1910, when a
10
substation was built in Annandale to supply street lighting in the Municipality of
Camperdown.38
The pace increased sharply in the years immediately preceding the war, in response to
actual competition from the Electric Light and Power Supply Corporation, which
commenced supply in September 1909, and the Redfern undertaking, which the Council
finally purchased in 1913, and the threat of competition from other quarters. By 1915
the Council supplied a total of 23 municipalities, including some on the strategically
important North Shore, where as late as 1911 the municipalities had tried to get an Act
of Parliament to enable them to set up their own equivalent of the ELPSC.
Expansion continued after the war despite a shortage of generating capacity. By the
early 1920s the area in which the Sydney Municipal Council retailed electricity direct to
consumers, with the agreement of the local councils, was close to its maximum – from
Randwick in the east to Auburn in the west, from Ku-ring-gai in the north to Canterbury
in the south. Almost all of the sales agreements made by the Council after 1921 were for
supply in bulk to municipalities which then retailed the electricity themselves. By 1932
it was supplying in bulk to 11 municipalities.
With the creation of the Sydney County Council in 1935, the municipalities that had
granted the City Council a franchise to supply in their areas finally got a formal say –
limited though it was – in the management of the undertaking. The areas supplied in
bulk continued to be supplied in bulk, and their relationship with the SCC was
contractual only. These arrangements changed very little between 1932 and 1952, when
the Electricity Commission became the bulk supplier to all electricity retailers, both
County Councils and individual municipalities.
Of the municipalities that had been supplied in bulk by the Sydney County Council,
Manly and Warringah formed themselves into the MacKellar County Council in 1951,
Hornsby, Bankstown and Sutherland joined Sydney during the 1950s and those south
and west of Parramatta constituted the new Prospect County Council in 1956,
effectively splitting the metropolitan area.39 Gosford and Wyong shires on the Central
Coast, not historically part of Sydney but soon to become dormitory suburbs, had
formed the Brisbane Water County Council in 1942. On 1 July 1958 the SCC was given
the distribution business of the ELPSC, which had been acquired by the State
Government in 1950 (the ELPSC’s Balmain power station was transferred to the
Electricity Commission).40
As NSW electricity demand soared during the 1960s and 1970s, the Electricity
Commission built ever larger power stations and the average cost of generation
declined, although the costs of transmitting the energy to the less populated parts of the
State remained high as the grid expanded. The Commission cross-subsidised country
consumers from the cities (primarily Sydney) by charging a uniform bulk supply tariff
(BST) to all retailers, and by meeting the costs of sub-transmission in less densely
populated areas. However the distribution of benefits between consumer classes – and
between consumers and employees – was a matter for each distributor. The Sydney
County Council had historically favoured residential consumers, and this caused some
difficulties to its neighbouring suppliers.
Differences in tariffs remained a chief cause of public dissatisfaction, especially among
11
consumers living near the boundary of a district with a lower tariff than their own. The
Electricity Authority of NSW (EANSW), which was responsible for maintaining the
viability of distribution organisations, constantly found new ways, in addition to the
uniform BST, of transferring funds and expertise from the coastal nucleus of the NSW
electricity system to its periphery, but it could not overcome the fundamental geography
of electricity demand and load density.
On the other hand the administrative boundaries of electricity distribution authorities
could be changed at will, and amalgamating supply areas became the Authority’s
preferred means for managing electricity distribution.41 The aim was to merge a
financially strong unit with a weaker one, to achieve a balance of high and low cost
load, and a uniform tariff throughout the combined area.42 The load patterns of urban
areas generally lent themselves to amalgamation with rural areas, and industrial with
residential. However, areas with suitably complementary loads were not always
conveniently adjacent, and amalgamated areas still had boundaries across which
consumers could make unsatisfactory comparisons.
The Authority recognised that there was no rationale for supply boundaries within the
Sydney region. In 1954, before any major boundary adjustments had occurred (other
than the formation of the Mackellar County Council) the Authority reported:
The County of Cumberland is a well-defined geographical area bounded mainly
by the Nepean and Hawkesbury Rivers. Natural boundaries, extensive reserves
and sparsely populated territory separates the county from most of the
surrounding populated areas. The district thus has a geographical and economic
unity which requires that it be considered as a whole and separately from
surrounding areas...
If a number of undertakings are to control supply in the County of Cumberland,
therefore, their boundaries, to a large extent, must be artificial from an electricity
supply point of view...
It is considered, therefore, that, if any consolidation of areas is to be made, it
should be done by an extension of the Sydney County district rather than by the
formation of a number of separate county districts.(EANSW 1954,4)
The opportunity to unify the Sydney region was missed, however, with the formation of
the Prospect County Council.43 The EANSW commented ‘...it is hoped that the separate
operations of the Sydney and Prospect undertakings will lead to healthy rivalry,
enabling some comparison to be made of the efficacy of each’. (EANSW 1957,29).
There was indeed rivalry between the six county councils which served the Sydney
region from 1957 to 1979, expressing itself mainly in domestic electricity tariffs.44
Whenever the SCC announced a tariff reduction the other councils were under pressure
to match it, and they did not have the SCC’s advantage of a large industrial and
commercial load from which to subsidise domestic consumers. Recommending further
amalgamations in 1977, the EANSW stated:
Maintaining domestic tariffs at this level with their relative load situation can
only be done at the expense of the industrial and commercial consumers in
12
Mackellar and St.George whose tariffs generally are above Sydney. The poor
load balance in these two undertakings compared with Sydney has been a main
contributing factor to the difficulties they are facing and this is also apparent in
their general financial position. (EANSW 1977,22).
The affected councils could not refute this, but sought to delay their proposed
amalgamation by calling for yet another inquiry.45 The Sydney County Council, which
stood to gain considerably in consumer numbers and area from the amalgamations,
naturally favoured them (SMH 26.3.1977), and resigned from the Local Government
Electricity Association when that organisation geared itself up for a campaign of
opposition (LGEA 1977,10).46
On 1 January 1980 the municipalities formerly constituting the St George, Brisbane
Water and MacKellar County Councils were amalgamated into the Sydney County
district. This was a major change for the staff of all the undertakings, and of course for
the residents and customers in the newly merged undertakings.47
The start of the national electricity market in the mid 1990s prompted another major
review of distribution area boundaries, this time in a completely new national market
context. The functions of Sydney Electricity (the successor corporation to the Sydney
County Council) and other electricity distributors were to be split into two parts. One
was to be a distribution business inheriting the major physical assets for supplying
electricity, which would have no competition in its network area and so was to be
relatively low risk, but whose charges were regulated. The other was to be a retail
energy business which could operate anywhere to win (or lose) customers and whose
business success would depend on how skilfully it managed the risks of buying and
selling energy.
In 1995 the Government set up a Distribution Review Group to examine how the
internal structures and the external boundaries of the then 25 electricity distributors in
NSW needed to change to adapt to the new market.(DRG 1995) The review’s
recommendations included the amalgamation of the distributors into six new businesses.
The six new distributors, to be called eventually Advance Energy, Australian Inland
Energy, EnergyAustralia, Great Southern Energy, Integral and NorthPower, were
formed as statutory authorities on 1 October 1995.
For Sydney Electricity this meant the first significant changes in boundaries since 1980.
The network business area was amalgamated with that of Orion Energy, the successor
corporation to the Shortland County Council, centred on Newcastle. The boundaries of
the retail business were far wider. Once the necessary legislation was in place in the
States participating in the national market, the new entity, EnergyAustralia, could sell
energy in any State where it had a licence to do so. At the same time the EA distribution
business had to deliver electricity to any customer in its area, including customers of
retailers other than EA.
Nor was the business restricted to electricity any more. There were similar reforms in
the gas market, and EA acquired licences to retail gas in both NSW and Victoria. To get
the gas delivered it had to make arrangements with the gas network counterparts of its
own electricity network business. In NSW that gas network operator was AGL. By 1999
the two companies were competing for electricity and gas sales in NSW, Victoria and
13
elsewhere. Their historical rivalry, which had begun with the lighting of the City of
Sydney in the 1900s and gone on to battles for the Sydney cooking load in the 1930s
and the water heating load in the 1980s, went national. In 2004 they were the two
largest energy businesses in Australia by turnover.
Poles, Wires and Substations
Anyone involved in the operation of an electricity supply system, from the generator on,
must understand the dimension of time: since electricity cannot be stored it must be
produced at a rate that matches demand. An electricity distributor must also manage the
dimension of space. The Council had to supply ever increasing amounts of energy over
greater distances to more customers, and in the City, had to meet the equally
challenging problem of delivering more energy into a limited space. As the Sydney
economy became more dependent on electricity it was also necessary to ensure greater
redundancy, so that supply could be rerouted in the event of disruption, and greater
capability to restore supply quickly.
In 1904 the Council generated and distributed energy at about 5,000 volts (5 kV), which
was reduced by transformers located in its substation buildings to three phase 415V
supply. Customers could take supply at either three-phase 415 V or at single-phase
240V. The Council’s first underwater cables were installed in 1909 (from Pyrmont
power station across Darling Harbour to the City) and in 1910 the 5 kV supply was
stepped up to 10 kV for the first time, at Pearl St substation, for transmission to the
municipalities in the east. In 1914 the Council adopted 33 kV, which by then was
becoming a standard voltage through the electricity industry, for its longest distance and
highest energy feeders. The Councils’ first 33 kV line, first energised in June 1916,
included the first section of underground 33 kV cable installed in Britain or Australia to
that time.48
One consequence of the adoption of 33 kV was the shift from 10 kV to a nominal 11 kV
for the high voltage distribution system (being one third the transmission voltage). The
ELPSC used 22 kV as its highest voltage, because it had such a compact distribution
area, and when its 22 kV/6.6 kV network was transferred to the Council in 1958 it
continued to operate almost as a separate system for many years. Fortunately the St
George, MacKellar and Brisbane Water county councils used 33/11 kV operation, so
standardisation could be achieved more readily when those areas were integrated after
1980.
In November 1955 the Council commissioned its first 66/11 kV substation at Ryde,
taking supply from the Electricity Commission’s supply point at Carlingford. In 1969,
when the Council purchased power mainly at 66 and 33 kV, it adopted the policy that
future purchases would be at 132 kV in the more densely loaded areas and stepped
down directly to 11 kV, so avoiding the need for new 33 kV transmission lines.49 In
1990 the Electricity Commission transferred its 132 kV Sydney region transmission
network to EnergyAustralia.
New modes of working had to be developed as the city grew outward and upward. In
1962 the Council introduced the green metal distribution kiosks, installed in their
thousands in the suburbs, for ratings up to 500 kVA. The needs of tall buildings
presented special difficulties. In 1965 dry-type air-cooled (as distinct from the
14
traditional oil filled) transformers were first used, to reduce fire risk in City buildings.
As buildings grew taller the voltage drop from basement substations became too great
and additional substations were needed at higher levels. Australia Square Tower,
Australia’s tallest building when completed in 1968, had substations on the 14th and 30th
floors as well as the basement.
The City also extended downwards, as basements became deeper and underground
pedestrian ways and shopping malls proliferated. In 1986, the Council’s cable-layers
encountered remnants of the first Government House when laying cable to a new high
rise hotel at the corner of Pitt and Bridge Street (SCC 1986,15). Occasionally the
remnants were the Council’s own. The redevelopment in 1984 of the Council’s former
headquarters, the Queen Victoria Building, included the construction of underground
pedestrian links and car parks, which required the rerouting of 1.3 km of 11 kV cable.
The redevelopment of Darling Harbour (1985-88), a 50 Ha site located between the City
and the old Pyrmont power station, by then decommissioned but still the focus of
several major cable routes, required the relocation of twelve 33 kV and four 5 kV
cables.50
The aesthetics and the storm-vulnerability of overhead wires, and the tree lopping to
keep wires clear, became a perennial issue in residential areas. In 1989 the SCC
introduced Aerial Bundled Cable (ABC) to reduce the impact of conductors in the more
leafy suburbs. In 1993 Sydney Electricity adopted a policy that all new HV powerlines
in urban streets, and all cables in new subdivisions, would be underground. It also
embarked on a program of replacing 11 kV overhead lines in storm prone areas.
EnergyAustralia’s most famous, and most expensive undergrounding project was the
removal of overhead lines from the site of the 2000 Olympics at Homebush.
The technology for managing this vast network also changed. In 1928 the Council
investigated British, European and American developments in remote monitoring and
switching of substations from a central point by means of control cables, and the
operation of 24-hour control rooms. Up to that time the operation of switches could be
initiated by any of a number of Council officers, without centralised control. The
complexity of the system further increased with the commissioning of Bunnerong in
1929, and a System Operation Branch was created in May 1930. The main functions of
the Branch were load despatching and distribution under normal conditions,
maintenance of supply in emergencies and the coordination of shutdowns of parts of the
system when needed for maintenance and for new connections.
A System Control Room was established at headquarters, which were at the time at
Kent Street. Telephones provided communications between the system operator and the
substation staff, who still operated switches manually, and a private exchange was
installed for this purpose. Operating protocols and lines of authorisation were quickly
developed and on 15 November 1930 the Operating Engineer took control of the system
for the first time. In 1931 a signalling system was installed so that fault conditions at the
larger unattended power stations could be monitored from the control room, and remote
control of switchgear directly from the control room started in 1935.
The new headquarters building erected at the corner of George and Bathurst Streets,
opened in 1968 and still the headquarters of EnergyAustralia, had as its centre the
control room, the termination point for control cables extending to all the main
15
substations. In 1989 the Council began the installation if its SCADA (Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition) system to continuously monitor the condition of over
1,000 items of equipment and 3,000 transformer and feeder loads.51 After the merger
with Orion this system was integrated with the Newcastle and Hunter area SCADA, and
by 2004 the network could, in theory, be monitored and controlled from a laptop
computer anywhere in the world.
In 1932 the section of the staff which dealt with calls from the public regarding supply
interruptions was transferred to the System Operating Branch.52 By 1936 the number of
calls during emergencies overwhelmed the switchboard and hampered calls from SCC
officers. An independent means of communication had to be set up. The Council
established its own amplitude modulated (AM) radio system, which entered service in
1938 under the call-sign VKK. This allowed two-way communications between the
radio despatcher at head office (by now the QVB) and vehicles in the field, via a main
transmitter and six receiving relay towers located throughout the metropolitan area – a
first for Australia. (Anderson, 157). In 1953 this was replaced by a frequency modulated
(FM) system, with the call-sign VL2BC.53
The visible signs of the electricity undertakings activities – from radio towers to office
buildings to badged vehicles – became as much a part of the Sydney scene as poles,
wires and substations that made up the hardware of electricity distribution. Despite its
absorption into the NSW grid, the Sydney energy system retained a distinct identity,
reflecting the economic and spatial structure of the city.
16
Chapter 2 Notes
1
The most favoured were: (i) The number of low voltage DC generating stations could be increased, or
(ii) storage batteries at the edge of the distribution radius could be charged from a single DC station, to
then relay power for a further distance. (iii) DC generated and distributed at high voltage could be broken
down to low voltage in local substations with the aid of the rotary transformer (invented in 1874). (iv) AC
could be generated and distributed at high voltage, with reduced losses and the voltage could be reduced
locally by AC transformers (available from about 1882). Alternatively, (v) high voltage AC could be
converted to low voltage DC in local mechanical converter stations – the arrangement chosen for Sydney.
Each system had influential supporters: AC had Ferranti, Westinghouse and Tesla, and DC had no less an
authority than Edison, whose entire system was based on it. Ferranti designed the 1889 Deptford Power
Station in London to operate at 10,000 volts, four times the highest voltage previously attempted (Singer
et al V,200). Westinghouse was the largest manufacturer of AC transformers in the USA and Tesla was
the inventor of the AC motor.
Edison's tactics bordered on the unscrupulous. In 1889 his associate H.P.Brown strongly backed the
adoption by the New York State legislature of AC for electrocution, successfully recommending that
Westinghouse alternators be used for the purpose. The deadly properties of AC were then widely
publicised by Edison, and led to attempts to set legal limits on AC voltages. Westinghouse considered
instituting proceedings for conspiracy (ibid,201, Hughes,108).
2
Certain types of arc-light could work only on AC (Singer et al V,210). Incandescent lamps could take
either current, but were susceptible to flickering and shortened lamp life if multiple AC generators were
imperfectly synchronised. Motors were also important factors. The DC electric motor became
commercially available in 1873 (ibid,231), and even after the AC induction motor was invented by Tesla
in 1888, DC remained the only system capable of operating the heavy-duty traction motors which by
1900 were becoming increasingly common in electrified railways and tramways (ibid,233).
3
The proposed Kent St site was next to the AGL gasworks, the Woolloomooloo site was bounded by
Forbes, Bourke and Wilson Streets and the Prince Albert Park site was at the corner of Castlereagh and
Devonshire Streets (now occupied by the suburban railway platforms at Central Station) – roughly
describing an equilateral triangle centred on Hyde Park.
4
There was no proposal to follow AGL’s custom of leaving the street lamps unlit on the nights of the full
moon and on the two nights either side (Anderson,11). One limitation on arc lamp use was the fact that
the carbon electrodes burned away in operation, and had to be replaced, if not nightly then every second
night. The arc lamp was first demonstrated by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1808 using chemical batteries,
several decades before mechanical generation of electricity was introduced. A great deal of ingenuity was
spent from the 1870s onward on methods to automatically regulate the gap between the shortening
carbons, extend the life of carbons and extend the times between carbon replacements, sometimes by
using multiple carbons. The carbon arc light was rendered obsolete by the introduction of gas discharge
lamps in the 1930s (Dunsheath,137).
5
Cracknell had died in January 1893, but his commitment to low voltage underground DC technology
may already have outlived its time. In his many appearances before Parliamentary committees in the
1880s he often indicated his concerns that the overhead telegraph wires, which were after all his main
responsibility, should be protected from the clutter, risk and electro-magnetic interference of high voltage
AC.
6
The electrical machinery and boiler contract (₤49,072) was supplied by Dick, Kerr and Co, London. The
cable contract (₤39,949) was supplied by the W.T.Henley Ltd, London. The power station buildings,
conduits, structural steelwork, chimney stacks, street lamps and substation buildings were all supplied by
Sydney contractors, at a total cost of ₤52,131. (Anderson,27).
7
Cardew had questioned the cost-effectiveness of a large battery installation at Town Hall, which had
been justified on the basis of providing peak load support for the inner area (ie it could be charged at offpeak times) and security in case of plant failure. He also questioned the way in which the SMC had
integrated the supply areas of the private supply companies it had purchased. The SMC, at its own
expense, had changed customers’ wiring, lamps and fittings from 100V to 240V, whereas Cardew said it
would have been more economical to install transformers at each of the old generation points and
17
maintain the 100V supply – presumably until the customer could no longer obtain 100V equipment and
would be forced to rewire to 240V at its own expense. However, that would have left many small ‘legacy’
problems (ie when to terminate each 100V supply?) analogous to the large DC legacy problem.
8
At the time the DC phase out decision was taken Town Hall, Clarence St, Phillip St and Castlereagh St
substations were still supplying DC. The total conversion plant capacity was 40.3 MW and the batteries
were capable of a combined output of 12MW for one hour.
9
Some of the senior engineers working at EA in 2004 had to learn to operate the DC equipment and still
remember it fondly.
10
The SMC was unable to install new plant between 1914 and 1921, by which time sales had more than
doubled. The system load factor increased from 31% in 1913 to 40% in 1919 and remained at that level
throughout the interwar years. This would not have been possible without interconnection with the RC
system (Wilkenfeld,316).
11
The SMC’s maximum demand on the RC system in the early 1920s was equivalent to 20% of its own
capacity. The price paid to the RC was above the SMC’s own average costs but below the marginal costs
of generation from new peak load plant (Wilkenfeld,316).
12
The SMC overtook the RC in terms of electricity generated in 1930, once Bunnerong power station
commenced operation.
13
Generation at Ultimo was originally at 600V 25Hz DC, but in 1902 the system was changed to 6.6 kV
AC. The 25 Hz frequency was retained because it was convenient to rectify locally to DC for tramway
and railway working. However this meant that, until the commencement of 50Hz working at White Bay
in 1925, the rate of energy transfer between the Railways and the SMC was limited by the installed
capacity of the frequency changers.
14
The scale of the SMC’s generators was limited by the need to ensure that the load could tolerate the
outage of the largest supply source available to it (whether a generator or a backup connection with
another system). If there were no interconnection, the increase in scale of the SMC’s generation was more
or less limited to the growth in its load.
15
The two turbo-alternators installed at the Newcastle Borough Council’s power station at Sydney Street,
Newcastle had a combined capacity of 2.6 MW, less than a tenth of the capacity at Zarra Street.
16
Other arms of the State Government were also becoming involved in electricity supply. The Public
Works Department (PWD) built a power station for the harbour works at Port Kembla in 1915, and in
1921 commenced bulk supply to Wollongong (Rendel, Palmer and Tritton,76). The first government
projects intended exclusively for general supply were the Burrinjuck and Nymboida hydro-electric
schemes authorised by the Holman Nationalist government's Hydro-Electric Development (Construction)
Act of 1919. The government considered hydro-electric generation in association with regional
development particularly attractive, and saw the schemes as fore-runners of projects extending in due
course to the Snowy, Shoalhaven and Tumut rivers (NSWPD 5.11.19,2413). The Fuller coalition
government foreshadowed further hydro-electric development in 1924 (NSWPD 15.12.24), but none
eventuated before the second world war.
The RC constructed its first power station exclusively for general supply, as distinct from traction, at
Lithgow in 1928, and by 1936 it was supplying power to seven local government areas. In 1936, once
load growth had resumed after the hiatus of the depression, the Government, through the Railways and
Public Works Departments, was the largest generating organisation in NSW, producing over 40% of the
energy generated in both Sydney and in the rest of NSW. Most of this was for traction , but the
Government still supplied more than a quarter of the state's general electricity demand, and its electricity
infrastructure constituted a ready-made framework for a state-wide electricity system.
17
In his excellent history of the Sydney County Council to 1954, 50 Years of Electricity Supply, Gordon
F.Anderson (who worked in the Council’s Administration branch) describes the start of construction in
romantic, if dated, terms:
18
The sounds of the boring plant seeking rock, the voices of the gangs clearing scrub, and the thud
of the mallets on surveyors’ pegs echoed across the one-time hunting grounds of the Aborigines
who had stood and stared wide-eyed and incredulous as Captain James Cook’s ship Endeavour
sailed through the heads of Botany Bay 155 years before.
Where once the fire-stick had been the only means of creating light and kindling campfires to
cook tribal meals, a mighty power station was to be built – a monument to man’s progress from
the primitive, a source of energy that would give him light, heat and power at the touch of a
switch. (Anderson, 91)
18
The site also happened to be located over coal deposits (as is much of Sydney) but no seam of useable
quality was found and in 1929 drilling was abandoned after 4,000 feet.
19
A civil engineer, F.McCormick, was employed by the SMC to supervise the construction.
J.D.Harrington, who had been associated with the construction of the White Bay power station by the
Railway Commission, also joined the SMC as Resident Engineer for the new power station.
20
In 1905, after a period in which some Sydney City aldermen had awarded Council jobs in return for
political support or had simply sold them outright, the City Council resolved to give control of labour hire
to the Town Clerk, T.H.Nesbitt. Nesbitt retired in 1924, and in 1925 the Mayor P.V.Stokes succeeded in
having the hiring controls suspended (Fitzgerald). Whether or not there was corruption in labour hiring,
the electricity undertaking’s employee numbers soared in the mid 1920s. The SMC began publishing
separate employment data for the Electricity Undertaking in 1923, when the number was 1624. It peaked
at 3576 in 1927. The fact that Stokes was succeeded as Mayor by alderman J.Mostyn, assistant secretary
of the Electrical Trades Union, would probably not have curbed the tendency to increase employment.
21
As the State elections approached in late 1927, the Nationalist Party used the alleged corruption of the
Labour City Council as the centrepiece of its campaign against the Lang Labour Government. The
Nationalists won the election and the Bavins Government passed legislation in late 1927 to suspend the
Council elections due at the end of the year, and to appoint three City Commissioners. These were in
charge of the administration on the City of Sydney from 3 January 1928 until the end of 1930, when the
conservative Civic Reform party was returned at the Council elections. Jobson (1999) reports on the
Maling case in some detail and advances the case that Forbes Mackay, who emerged from the episode not
merely unblemished but greatly strengthened, used the opportunity to promote the independence of the
undertaking from the Sydney City Council.
22
As a consequence the SMC carried out a pioneering program at Bunnerong to test the operation of 33
kV circuit breakers under full load (Anderson, 124). The program yielded new data which led the British
suppliers to substantially modify their designs. It also contributed to the SCC’s establishment of a HV test
facility.
23
The SMC had regained some operational flexibility with a 1930 agreement to exchange energy with the
Railways system on an opportunity basis, so that flows each way more or less balanced each quarter. In
1935, the first year of the Sydney County Council’s operation, the SCC’s maximum draw on the
Railways system was 21.8 MW, the maximum draw by the Railways was 17 MW, and the energy flow
both ways was 32.6 GWh (SCC 1935). On the other hand, there was a new constraint on planning – the
Gas and Electricity Act 1935, which established the SCC, also made the approval of the government a
necessary condition for extensions of electricity franchise areas, the construction of power stations and
main transmission lines. All proposals were to be referred to the Electricity Advisory Committee, which
was required by the Act to advise the Minister.
24
In 1939 Forbes Mackay had been awarded the Peter Nicol Russel Memorial Medal, the highest honour
of the Institution of Engineers, Australia. After his retirement he practised briefly as a consulting
engineer, and was engaged in that capacity by the SCC itself, among predictable controversy (SMH
17.10.1939). In December 1939 he was appointed to the war post of Chief Censor for Communications in
NSW. He died on 19 October 1940, at the age of 69. In 50 Years of Electricity Supply, Anderson writes:
‘Although it is nearly fifteen years since Forbes Mackay retired and, and fourteen years since he
died, he lives on in the memories of a large number of the Undertaking’s staff. Even those who
did not have direct dealings with him recall with pleasurable warmth his tall figure, his erect
19
carriage, his grey hair receding from the high forehead, his close-clipped moustache, the bushy
eyebrows from under which his keen eyes appraised a man and looked only for the good in him.
Those who were close to him speak of his humaneness and his sense of justice, his readiness to
admit an error, his adamant attitude when he knew he was right. Simple in phrase, deliberate in
purpose, he was an administrator and leader who inspired confidence and respect and won the
loyalty of his staff.’
At his funeral, it was revealed that for the previous seven years he had anonymously paid for the lunches
of unemployed men on work relief at Bunnerong power station (SMH 21.10.1940). The Clock and Dome,
the journal of the Sydney City Council and County Council branch of the (then) left wing Federated
Municipal and Shire Employees Union, noted the death, saying ‘Never a foe, he placed great reliance on
the principles of conciliation as a means of securing agreements in industrial matters’ (Jobson,130).
25
In 1943, when it was evident that orders placed in Britain would be greatly delayed, there was some
investigation of the possibility of obtaining plant from the USA. It was reported that because US
standards of steam conditions, supply frequency and voltage differed from the Council’s British-based
standards that off-the-shelf US equipment (as opposed to special orders) would be useless, and that orders
for plant in the USA had increased by half over pre-war levels (Anderson, 177). In 1947 Prime Minister
Menzies became personally involved in the issue of overseas plant purchases for NSW. The Premier
J.J.Cahill asked Menzies to approve an additional allocation of US$ borrowings (above the Loan Council
limit) for the ECNSW to purchase two 60MW plant for Wangi Wangi power station (post-war currency
controls were still in place). Menzies was not inclined to do so if the plant could be obtained in the UK
(SMH 18.7.1952). The matter appears to have been complicated by Government’s plans for financing the
purchase of the ELPSC (SMH 10.9.1952).
26
The first 50 MW generator at Bunnerong was installed only 3.5 years after Forbes Mackay's formal
recommendation to the Council. The next one was installed in January 1941, only a few months later than
its original target. The next generator was put in service in February 1947, some 7 years after
management recommendation, and the following two took 12 and 10 years respectively. The installation
of new generating plant in Sydney's major power stations stopped between 1941 and 1947, when a 50
MW plant ordered by the SCC in 1941 from C.A.Parsons was finally installed at Bunnerong. No new 50
Hz plant was installed at White Bay between 1939 and 1948, although there were sone small additions to
the 25Hz supply. The ELPSC installed a ‘superposed’ 32.5 MW turbine set in 1947 (Sykes 1947), but
retirement of old low pressure plant meant a net increase in capacity only from 43.75 MW to 49 MW.
27
In March 1936 and September 1939 some councillors were reluctant to approve the installation of more
plant at Bunnerong, a site they considered vulnerable to enemy attack (Anderson,161,SMH 20.9.1939).
Forbes Mackay's assurances were sufficient on those occasions, but as the world crisis deepened, so did
the councillors' apprehensions. When the succeeding General Manager, R.Vine-Hall sought approval in
July 1940 to order plant for the new Pyrmont power station, the Council referred the matter back to him
and then to the EAC. By the time the original recommendation was finally adopted, nearly a year later,
the production in Britain of all equipment not directly necessary to the war effort was subject to indefinite
delay. Despite representations from the Australian High Commissioner, the British government did not
give approval until late 1947 for this order, and an identical one placed later, to be scheduled for
production (Anderson,195-3).
28
In early 1939 the SCC and RC began discussions on larger scale interchange and the ELPSC also
expressed interest (SCC 1939,45). Before the negotiations were completed the minister directed the EAC
to investigate and report on the war time precautions necessary to ensure supply in the munitions
manufacturing centres of Sydney, Newcastle, Lithgow and Pt Kembla. Within two months the EAC had
worked out a scheme of interconnection which it considered justifiable on economic as well as security
grounds, and began discussing the costs with the utilities (SMH 17.3.1939). The SCC immediately voted
£240,000 for work on the metropolitan links (SCC 1939,15).
29
The Commonwealth government, which had been consulted on the project in March 1939, would not
allow capital to be spent on it because it could not be regarded as a war item (SMH 11.2.1939,
28.10.1940). In January 1941, after personal representations from the NSW premier, the Commonwealth
conceded that the project was of national importance, and authorised the expenditure of £225,000 on 66
kV links from Sydney to Newcastle and Pt Kembla (SMH 4.1.1941).
20
30
In 1945 the SCC drew up to 20% of its maximum demand from the RC. From 1949 the peak hour
energy flows were from the SCC to the RC systems, not because of improvement in the SCC system but
increased support from the ELPSC, which did not have direct links with the RC.
31
In their 1937 report on electricity development in NSW, Rendel, Palmer and Tritton identified 8 major
regional systems. These were centred on Sydney, Newcastle, Pt Kembla, Burrinjuck, Lithgow, Clarence
River, Tamworth and Yanco (RPT 1937,4). by the end of the war the unified grid extended from Taree in
the north to Canberra in the south, and as far west as Griffith. This formed the backbone of the NSW
grid. By 1952 Tamworth was the only regional system still isolated, and it was connected in 1958.
32
The last order for generating plant placed by the SCC was in June 1948. The contractor for the 50MW
turbo-alternator unit, intended for Bunnerong, was C.A.Parsons and Co. and the boiler contract was
placed with Simon-Carves Ltd. The plant was eventually placed installed at Bunnerong by the Electricity
Commission in August 1953.
33
The building was in fact a vertical power station with equipment stacked over several floors, so
requiring extensive and hard to obtain steel framing, whereas Bunnerong had been a horizontal design on
a far more spacious site.
34
Most of the state's additional thermal power requirements up to 1962 were obtained from Wangi,
Tallawarra and Wallerawang power stations on the northern, southern and western coalfields respectively.
These were all were planned by the Railways Department in the 1940s and completed by the ECNSW in
the 1950s (Sykes,138). At the ECNSW’s request, SCC engineers assisted with the design of Wallerawang
(SCC 1951,8). More hydro-electric power also became available. In 1959 the Tumut 1 power station of
the Snowy Mountains Scheme was connected to both the NSW and Victorian grids, and in 1960 the two
state Electricity Commissions formally agreed to exchange power across the interconnection to their
mutual economic advantage (ibid,140).
35
In 1951 three joint committees had been established to determine the divisions of staff, plant, assets and
liabilities, as required by the Electricity Commission Act. The committees completed their work on 10
December 1951.
36
At 2 $ to the £, and making no allowance for inflation. EnergyAustralia reported $2,432 million
revenues and $307 million capital expenditure in 2003.
37
In 1989 the Greiner Coalition government changed the structure of the Electricity Commission of NSW
to a corporation, which adopted the trading name of Pacific Power. In 1995 the HV transmission function
was transferred to a new State-owned entity, Transgrid. In 1996 the Carr Labor government split Pacific
Power into three state-owned generating entities: Macquarie Generation (owning the Liddell and
Bayswater power stations), Delta Electricity (Mt Piper, Munmorah, Wallerawang and Vales Point) and
Eraring Energy (Eraring power station, hydro plant and some small gas turbines).
38
Each request was considered ad hoc, but negotiations broke down over different issues. The Glebe
Municipality wanted the right to purchase the mains after 10 years, but the Council insisted on 25.
Woollahra wanted only underground mains. In the case of Randwick the potential private load was
considered economically attractive, but not the street lighting load, unless the neighbouring municipalities
also took supply.
39
The 1956 SCC annual report remarks on the poor state of the Bankstown system (transferred 1 January
1956) and notes that ‘the supply voltage at peak in several residential areas was as low as 160V and
arrears in work were such that a target of 200V only was set for the winter of 1956’.
40
The Electricity Commission (Balmain Electric Light Company Purchase) Act was passed in 1950 to
embody an agreement between the company and the government on the valuation of the undertaking for
its acquisition by the ECNSW. The ECNSW took operational control of the company and its subsidiary,
the Parramatta and Granville Electric Supply Co. Ltd., in November 1950, pending the valuation
(ECNSW 1952,10), but the parties could not reach agreement. The ELPSC originally claimed £10
million, calculated on the basis of the replacement value of its assets, less proper depreciation (ie on the
principle of the cost avoided by the ECNSW). The ECNSW claimed that the proper amount was £1.7
21
million, on the basis of the capitalised value of the company's profits (ie the value to the seller rather than
the buyer). These figures were revised to £8 m and £1.9 m respectively after evidence. The Land and
Valuation Court accepted the ECNSW principle, adjusted to £2.4 m. The sharemarket had expected
higher - ELPSC shares jumped from 54/6 to 62/- the day before the judgement, then slumped to 47/(SMH 17.12.1955). The shareholders were given debentures, not redeemable for cash until 1965. In order
to avert a series of appeals which could further delay the company's acquisition by the ECNSW, and the
final settlement to its shareholders, the government amended the Act in 1956 to make the 1955 valuation
final.
41
Labor governments took full advantage of this technique in their management of the electricity
distribution system after the 1940s. The conservative governments of 1965-76 were more sensitive to
anti-amalgamation pressure from the predominantly conservative local government lobby, and were
content to defer action by relying on the established system of cross subsidies as long as possible.
42
The most persistent argument against amalgamation was that it resulted in the loss of local control and
identity. In 1957 the EANSW paid particular attention to refuting the ‘objections commonly raised
against county councils’ into which it advocated the absorption of numerous small local undertakings
(EANSW 1957,3). Recommending another round of amalgamations in 1977, it still found it necessary to
repeat:
‘Fears are sometimes expressed that the loss of the local council control in the areas added to the
main load area will lead to more centralised control and less care and attention to the system and
service in those areas than previously. The authority in its years of experience with county
councils has no evidence to show that development and electricity service in parts of a county
district have suffered neglect or restraint in this way’. (EANSW 1977,3).
The EANSW nevertheless conceded that there was a threshold number of organisations below which
local character could not be preserved, and the logic of a single state wide distribution authority would
become irresistible. In 1963, when there were still 52 undertakings, the EANSW considered the minimum
number to be 7 (EANSW 1965). These were Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong (to the Victorian border),
Northern Rivers (to the Queensland border), Northwest, Central and Murray regions. In 1974, when a
system of 34 county councils had been in operation for a decade, the Brown committee reported to the
Askin LCP government that it considered this number to be close to the irreducible minimum. It rejected
a proposal for 9 groupings because ‘It loses much of the local flavour of the present system, but in doing
so does not give the administrative and rationalisation advantages that a single distribution authority
would give. (EANSW 1974,38)
All proposals for amalgamation had ultimately to grapple with the problem of the metropolitan region.
Administrative logic suggested a unified undertaking, at least for the whole of Sydney if not for the entire
coastal region. Yet this would so dominate the rest of the state, which would be dependent on it for
subsidies, that little justification would remain for not proceeding to full unification (EANSW 1965,2).
One solution discussed (and dismissed) was the absurdly contrived one of including a portion of Sydney
within every area:
‘To delineate say 9 areas of New South Wales which would have reasonable load balance, one
would need to have areas fanning out over the State from the general Sydney area... It is difficult
to see any community of interest or true local involvement in such fan type areas and with huge
areas geographically at the periphery of the fan’.(EANSW 1974,38)
43
In 1952 the Parramatta Council began to agitate for a new county council to take over the assets of the
Parramatta Co. once the ELPSC valuation case was settled, rather than have them go to the SCC (SMH
7&18.9.1952). It was successful, and the Prospect County Council was constituted in late 1956. The
PCC’s industrial load was second only to the SCC’s, and the two authorities were therefore the natural
nuclei for further amalgamations in the Sydney region. These eventually occurred though not always
without resistance. In December 1958 the Windsor, Penrith and Liverpool councils commenced action in
the Supreme Court to prevent their incorporation in the PCC. The transfer was finally validated at the
beginning of 1960 (SMH 2.1.1960). The councils’ opposition arose both from their wish to remain
autonomous and the fact that they were the beneficiaries of historically low bulk supply prices from the
Railways, which the ECNSW had undertaken to honour until their expiration in the early 1960s
(EANSW 1957,29).
44
In general they succeeded reasonably well in keeping domestic tariffs close to the SCC's. Typical
SGCC and MCC domestic consumers paid about 20% more than in the SCC in the early 1960s (SMH
22
24.5.1961). By 1974 the difference had been reduced to 4%, but achieved at the cost of about 10% higher
business tariffs than in the SCC (EANSW 1974,36).
There were other aspects of rivalry as well; in 1967 both the SCC and SGCC claimed the right to supply
the extensions to Sydney airport, causing delay to the project (SMH 27.4.1967). The SCC won the right,
but as part of the site was in the Rockdale municipality Rockdale was added to the Sydney County
District, even though the SGCC remained the electricity supplier in all parts of Rockdale other than the
airport.
45
According to P.D.Hills, Minister for Energy at the time:
‘...the St George County Council has been leading the campaign for an open inquiry. It is a past
master at the art of using this technique to stall or stymie positive action. It was the St George
County Council that sponsored the original motion within the Local Government Electricity
Association, leading to an earlier inquiry. On this occasion that council's demand for an open
inquiry is allied to the St George parochial pride. It has made no attempt to co-operate in the
tariff rationalization problem, but has chosen to mislead its consumers, in the most outrageous
fashion, into believing that the Government has selected St George County Council for special
attention. Opposition members and many of the St George consumers have been hoodwinked by
the plea for an open inquiry. Fortunately the industry could see through the ruse. After more than
a decade of continual inquiries into tariff rationalization, it is sick of inquiries. It is time to take
some action’ (NSWPD 26.11.79,3664).
46
This was not the first time differences had emerged between the SCC and other distribution authorities.
In 1969 and 1972 SCC councillors put to the LGEA a radical proposal for the abolition of the then 39
county councils and their replacement by seven or eight area boards (DT 25.6.1969,SMH 4.5.1972). The
proposal was overwhelmingly defeated. SCC councillors D.B.Carruthers and G.I.Ferris commented:
‘It is clear to me that most of the opposition revolves around the fact that you don’t want to vote
yourselves out of office...
The consumer should come first, then the local government institution, and only then the elected
representatives and staff - unfortunately, this works in reverse sometimes’ (SMH 4.5.1972).
47
References to the amalgamations still appeared occasionally in the Sydney suburban press years later,
eg ‘Pat on the Back for SCC’ (Lakes Advocate, 29.4.1987), in which a former BWCC member and now
local delegate to the SCC listed major projects undertaken in Wyong since amalgamation, saying ‘it
would have been impossible for the former county council to have carried out so many big projects in the
seven years’. In the Gosford Central Coast Express (12.8.1987) a local Liberal candidate for state
parliament claimed that the promises of stable prices given to locals at the time of the BWCC's abolition
had not been honoured.
48
In June 1914 Council decided to erect a 33kV transmission system to supply the western suburbs
(Auburn and Lidcombe) and as an alternative route to the north of the Harbour (the cable tunnel from
Balmain to Hunter’s Hill, built in 1909, was always troublesome and prone to flooding, and was
subsequently abandoned). Because of the limitations of the underground cables then available, the initial
plan was to transmit underground at 5 kV to a substation at the Great North Road, Dry Dock, and there
step up the voltage to a 33 kV overhead circuit. In response to the Council’s inquiries, the Callender’s
Cable Construction Company was able to supply an underground cable capable of 33kV operation. The
voltage was stepped up at the power station and the Great North Road substation (later known as Five
Dock substation) was used as a switching station for the 33kV line. The original underground cable was
still in service in 1954 (Anderson,61).
49
See also Wilson and Burke (1960).
50
The opportunity was taken to replace some of them with 132kV underground cables (SCC 1985,22). In
1985 also construction began on the Grosvenor Place development. This was the first Sydney office
building designed expressly to be able to operate completely independently of the electricity system since
the 1890s, when several commercial premises had their own generators (and there was no electricity
grid). The standby power plant were integrated with solar panels on the roof, heat recovery from the car
park and many other energy-efficiency features.
23
51
In 1993 the installation commenced of a similar monitoring and control system for the City. It covered
more than 360 distribution substations and involved the laying of about 120 km of optic fibre.
52
Forbes Mackay was proud of these achievements and thought they deserved wide publicity. In 1932 he
wrote to the Town Clerk: ‘The technical details in the shape of telephones, visual and audible signals,
maps, diagrams, etc provided in connection with those two arrangements are somewhat elaborate. I
believe it would be to the advantage of the Electricity Department to have some description of those
arrangements appear in the press.’(Anderson, 129)
53
The contractor for both systems was Amalgamated Wireless (A/Asia) Ltd. (AWA). In 1968 radios were
also installed in appliance repair service vehicles.
24
3. Electrifying Workplace and Home
Electric light took the world by storm. Cities and towns all over the globe were lit by
electricity between the 1880s and the l920s. Suddenly light could be created by the flick
of a switch, without the smell, flickering or fire risk associated with gas or kerosene. In
the workplace and the home, electric light lengthened the day for activities that required
strong and steady illumination, from reading and sewing to carpentry and watchmaking.
The incandescent mantle had maintained the popularity of gas for home lighting
through the 1900s and 1910s, and the Sydney Municipal Council’s difficulties in getting
new plant during World War I kept gaslight alive for a few more years, but it gradually
gave way to electric lighting from the early 1920s. All over Sydney, houses had their
gaslight pipes converted to electric wiring conduits. By the late l920s electricity had
replaced gaslight in over two thirds of Sydney’s homes and new homes built in this
speculative decade were all wired for electric lighting. In a society where most girls
learned to knit and sew and most boys took up some male hobby, electric light helped in
countless ways. Even cooking became easier in kitchens lit by electricity.
Although electricity had a natural advantage for light and power, gas had a natural
advantage for heat. The technology was simple - all you had to do was burn it. The
Australian Gas Light Company, having lost the battle for home lighting, fought to build
and hold the market for heat.
In Sydney’s mild climate, the cooker was the hearth of the home. Gas cookers had been
locally manufactured since the 1880s, were cheap to purchase and run, and often
installed free of charge by the gas companies. Gas cookery demonstrations began at the
new Haymarket showroom in 1893, and continued in one form or other until 2003.1
Mrs Harriet Wicken, lecturer in domestic economy at the Sydney Technical College,
declared in her Kingswood Cookery Book in 1891 that ‘Cooking by gas is far superior,
cheaper, and cleaner than cooking by any other means. The gas is always ready for use
day and night at a moment's notice. Its use for cooking purposes renders the Mistress of
the house almost independent of servants’.(Wicken)2
By the mid 1920s AGL had showrooms in the City, Parramatta, Burwood, Waverley
and Rose Bay, gas cooking demonstrations and tri-weekly radio broadcasts. It
persevered with an advertising campaign entitled ‘The All-Gas Home’, which showed
just how many appliances could be run by gas, from cookers and coppers to room
heaters and bath heaters. By the late twenties Sydney’s 250,000 households had a huge
investment in all manner of gas cooking appliances, from grand stoves and ‘Early
Kookas’ to the simple gas ring. Gas was quick and relatively cheap and generations of
cooks – housewives and domestic servants – were not only used to it, they relied on it.
Apart from cooking, hot water was needed for laundry and bathing, and the living room,
at least, needed heating in winter. Central water heaters were still rare, but many middle
class households installed small gas water heaters in the bathroom and above the
kitchen sink Laundry day (usually Monday) was hard work for women, and any means
to make it easier found eager takers. Most better-off households soon gave up cutting
Electrifying Workplace and Home (Chapter 3 of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia) 1
wood and lighting a fire under the laundry ‘copper’, opting for a gas copper instead. In
poorer households laundry water and bath water continued to be heated in the kitchen –
although increasingly on a gas rather than wood stove - and ferried out in saucepans or
pots to the ‘laundry’, often a cement tub in a lean-to at the back of the house. On
bathing days the hip bath also stood in the kitchen. Running hot water remained a
luxury that many Sydneysiders had to do without, even after World War II.
Electricity versus Gas
AGL’s ‘all-gas home’ campaign promised a wide range of household appliances – even
absorption type refrigerators – but there were some new products that gas simply
couldn’t power. The radio was the first, and in many ways, still the most dramatic of
these. Suddenly up to date news and an extraordinary variety of entertainment – from
popular and classical music to serials and, of course, advertising – were available in the
home. First introduced in l923, radios were to be found in over one fifth of Australian
homes by l930, and nearly two thirds by 1938, a dispersion rate far quicker than the
telephone.3
While Sydneysiders revelled in the new possibilities for electric-powered home
entertainment, with the radio and later the record player or ‘gramophone’, they were
slow to buy other electric appliances and even slower to replace their familiar gas
appliances with electric ones. Apart from lamps, the only electric appliance to be found
in most households in the 1920s was the iron, which was not a large energy user.4 Just
as the mass connection of lower-income consumers had driven down average household
gas consumption in the 1870s, it drove down average electricity consumption in the
1910s and 1920s. The resulting under-utilisation of vast capital resources became a
pressing concern. In 1922 City Electrical Engineer, H.R.Forbes Mackay, addressing the
Electrical Employers’ Association of NSW, complained of ‘thousands upon thousands’
of lighting consumers, whose annual consumption amounted to only 70-140 kWh (AET
27.6.1922,322). He noted that the Council was legally compelled to supply these
consumers, yet the revenue received was barely enough to cover generating costs, let
alone capital charges. In his opinion, the best way of meeting the situation was to
organise a campaign to introduce more electrical devices into the home.
The Council embarked on the direct promotion, sale, hire and repair of electrical
appliances in the late 1920s, and continued this strategy without interruption for the
next 60 years.5 Another part of the strategy to increase sales was the tariff structure
adopted in mid 1925, under which the need for separate light and power meters for
households was abandoned, typical domestic accounts were halved and the marginal
cost of electricity reduced by up to 75 per cent.
A Sales Branch was created in 1926 ‘to increase the sale of electricity by means of
selling appliances’. Demonstration trucks toured the suburbs to not only sell appliances
but to install them, repair them and fit new wiring if necessary. Salesmen were told to
attempt to get their housewife ‘targets’ to invite them into the kitchen. Even if an all
electric kitchen didn’t eventuate, at least some power points might be installed.(Jobson
48-49)
By l930, when it was clear that the Wall Street crash had sparked a world wide
depression that would last for some years, the electrical retailers complained about the
competition from the Council’s retail operations, and the Council withdrew from direct
selling of appliances. In 1936 the Sydney Council County resumed appliance sales, but
agreed to sell only larger items such as cookers and water heaters, and leave radios,
irons, vacuum cleaners, toasters, sewing machines and other smaller appliances to
electrical retailers.
The best way to increase residential electricity demand was to capture the thermal uses
which householders still associated with gas, and the most obvious place to start was
cooking. As well as the promotional methods of AGL, the Council also had the example
of the pioneer of electric cooking promotion in Sydney, the St George County Council,
which had started public demonstrations of electric cooking in 1927 in its Kogarah
showroom and at the stores of electric appliance retailers in the district.6
In 1934 the Sydney Municipal Council launched its campaign by offering to contribute
£6 for the connection of the first 5,000 cookers purchased, and started twice weekly
cooking demonstrations at its showrooms in Druitt Street. In June 1935 it began holding
regular cooking demonstrations in public halls and cinemas. Audiences of up to 2,000
(invited by leafleting the district) were treated to musical items interspersed with talks
about the uses of electricity, and practical demonstrations on electric ranges installed on
the stage.
The glamorous Art Deco appliance showroom in the renovated QVB, opened in
December 1935, included a ‘model kitchen’, along with model living-room, bedroom
and laundry. The display windows promoted the latest electric cookers, and the model
kitchen inside was a permanent base for the cookery demonstrations which were to
became a Sydney County Council trademark. The zeal of the promotion at first caused
concern even to the councillors. In April 1936 they disapproved of the display of a new
electric cooker alongside a 1911 gas stove as ‘unethical’ (SMH 22.4.36).
In the 1930s the market for large electrical appliances was still relatively modest, and
the Council continued to play a vital promotional and retailing role. It sold nearly nine
in ten of all the new cookers connected to its supply in 1938, and in 1939, noted that
‘Electric ranges are now common and accepted household equipment and no special
inducements are necessary to ensure their extensive use’.(SCC 1939,16) Nevertheless,
the promotional cooking tariff introduced in 1933 remained as late as 1968.
At the end of 1939 the Council began a ‘co-operative merchandising plan’ with
refrigerator manufacturers, offering a five year hire purchase scheme.7 The war put an
end to most special deals, but this hardly slowed the growth in sales. The efforts of the
Electricity Sales Branch were credited with fully 45 per cent of the total increase in the
Council’s electricity sales between 1935 and 1946 – 14 per cent through equipment
sales, 4 per cent through hiring and 27 per cent through advisory services.8
By 1951 there were regional showrooms at Bondi, Burwood, Crows Nest and Campsie,
replicating in miniature the facilities at the QVB. At these showrooms customers could
pay their accounts, get advice, shop for appliances and attend regular cookery
demonstrations in a small auditorium, where they could also view films such as Yours to
Command and Your Career in Electricity (1969). In 1951 about 15,000 customers,
mostly women, attended cooking demonstrations. In the 1960s annual attendances
stabilised at around 21,000, but rose again in the early 1970s to about 27,000.9 Electric
cooking was no longer unfamiliar (indeed by the mid sixties more Sydney households
cooked with electricity than gas), but customers liked the recipes and the sociability,
and there were still new things to learn. In 1973 the Council produced a colour film The
Kitchen Goes Metric, and the advent of the microwave oven in 1980s caused another
surge of interest.
The friendly voices and faces of its home economists carried the Council’s message into
virtually every communications medium: radio (from 1936), television (1956), and
video (1978).10 Cookery News, first mailed out with electricity bills in 1953, was
replaced in 1976 by Watt’s News, which carried not only recipes but information on
promotions, electrical safety, new appliances and new ways to use (and eventually, to
save) electricity.
Showroom cooking demonstrations ended in 2002 with the closing of the Chatswood
showroom, but EnergyAustralia still employed a home economist in 2004 to deal with
requests for advice by mail, telephone or email.11 She gave advice on adapting recipes
from conventional to fan-forced electric and microwave ovens, just as Mrs Whiffen had
advised on adapting recipes from wood fires to gas cookers over a century earlier. The
fact that EnergyAustralia now sold gas made it possible to give advice on the best use of
gas cookers as well.
Although the Council needed electric cooking to underpin the economics of supply, the
real appeal of the all-electric home for the consumer of the 1930s revolved around the
enormous range of appliances that either depended on electricity for their very existence
– including the radio – or that replaced manual power and dexterity, most notably the
washing machine, with its electrically-powered mangle, and the sewing machine. Floor
polishers and vacuum cleaners replaced hands and knees, at least in the advertising
images of upright housewives whisking about their daily tasks. Such appliances were
almost unknown in all but the better off households until the l950s, but they were
regularly advertised in women’s magazines from the l920s. (A.Spearritt)
By the end of the l930s most households had at least a toaster, an iron and a radio, made
in one of the new factories in Sydney or Melbourne. The spread of larger electric
appliances awaited the consumer revolution following World War II, but in the
meantime electricity continued to eat into the gas market. Electric room heating became
sufficiently common so that in the post war period radiator use placed particular stress
on the supply system during the frequent periods of coal shortage, and so was generally
prohibited.12 There was also steady growth in permanent off peak demand with the
increasing penetration of night rate storage water heaters, the Council’s largest selling
appliance line in the late 1940s (SCC 1947,11).
The Council’s promotional zeal continued through the war years, despite frequent
appeals to the public to put the war first. It planned for the ‘complete electrification’ of
post-war homes. Aggressive promotion continued through the supply problems of the
late l940s when coal strikes regularly interrupted supply. In August l950 the Chairman
of the Electricity Commission of NSW, H.G.Conde, criticised the advertising
campaigns of the SCC and other electricity suppliers, telling them that they had a ‘moral
obligation’ to put ‘the soft pedal on sales promotion’ because of the shortage of
generating plant to supply ordinary needs.(SMH 3.8.1950) But the SCC continued to
distort its pricing and promotion in favour of residential consumers, providing a pro-
consumer underpinning of the long boom that started in the early l950s and saw almost
every household in Sydney with a refrigerator by the end of that decade.
Factories and workplaces
Utopian writers, from novelists to devotees of modern engineering, contemplated a
world where electrified factories would produce vast quantities of goods with very little
human toil. In the 1890s Edison predicted an enormous increase in ore-processing
productivity overseen by fewer workers. Scientific journals and hobbyist magazines
were full of grand claims for the new technology. Productivity certainly did increase,
but electrification was just one of many contributing factors, along with mass
production in ever larger factories.(Nye,185-186) Electricity plants themselves, like car
assembly plants and steelworks, saw enormous gains in productivity per worker.
Demand for industrial electricity reflected the overall state of the economy and the
range of manufacturing, which in Australia, behind its high tariffs walls, became varied
indeed.
While electricity transformed some aspects of housework before World War II, it had a
much more rapid and profound impact in factories, where steam and gas still powered
the engines and motors of the industrial revolution. In 1901 steam drove 95 per cent of
motor horsepower in NSW factories, but thirty-five years later it only accounted for 20
per cent. Gas power peaked in 1911 at 12 per cent and fell away promptly after that.
Nearly all new equipment installed after World War I was electrically powered.
As historian David Nye explains:
Electricity has certain advantages in industrial production that gas cannot match.
Both are sources of light and heat, but unlike gas, electricity can drive a
multiplicity of small motors; it can produce high temperatures without
consuming oxygen; it can link a series of machines through automatic feeding
devices, scanners, and moving belts, and it can regulate the system of production
with temperature gauges, meters, warning bells, automatic shut-off devices, heat
sensors, and other electrical control devices. In short, modern production
methods are unimaginable without it. (Nye,13)
The proportion of machine horsepower in NSW factories driven by electricity increased
at a phenomenal rate, from less than one per cent in 1901 to 50 per cent by l921 and 77
per cent by l936. The rate of electrification of industry was just as rapid as in the USA.13
In 1906 the average electric motor power per NSW factory worker was 0.12
horsepower, but by 1950 it was 2.7 hp (2 kW). The Sydney Municipal Council played
an active part in bringing this change about. From 1906 it offered electric motors on a
hire-purchase basis, and in 1917, the peak year, there were over 3,400 motors on hire,
ranging from 0.5 to 100 horsepower.14
Electric power not only lowered the cost of running a factory, it transformed many
industrial processes. Motors were able to convert electrical energy to mechanical energy
‘precisely where conversion was needed, the drive shaft of the machine’.
Manufacturers were therefore able to turn their attention away from producing power
and devising ways of distributing throughout the factory building by means of shafts,
belts and gears – as they had to do with steam – to improving the efficiency of their
industrial processes.(Devine 1983,371) Engineering firms in NSW were just as quick as
those in the UK, the USA and Germany to grasp the opportunities of new industrial
equipment with a power source both reliable and continuous. Electricity also made
factory work cleaner, better lit and quieter.
While electricity was rapidly adopted for industrial power it had to compete with coal,
gas and, increasingly, oil products in the market for industrial heat. In Sydney, it was
used in special applications such as steel melting as early as 1916, but it was slow to
penetrate the general thermal energy market.(Anderson,118)
A showroom displaying and eventually selling commercial and industrial heating,
cooking and motor equipment was opened at the QVB in November 1936 (SCC
1936,18). As with domestic appliances, the emphasis was on applications that competed
with gas. Advisory services, equipment sales and hire were complemented by
promotional tariffs, such as a special flat rate for all electricity used in heating,
ventilating and air conditioning (SCC 1936,18). Special rates were also available for
industrial heating, cooking, bread making, metal melting and steam boiler installations.
(SCC 1939,15)
The commercial and institutional demand for electricity grew steadily up to the
beginning of World War II. Lighting intensities for retail and office space were
constantly increasing. Display lighting extended beyond individual shop windows to socalled ‘white way’ lighting - the illumination of entire shopping precincts. With the
active support of the Council, electricity competed successfully against gas for
commercial cooking and water heating. Commercial food preparation also provided a
natural market for electric refrigeration.
Although commercial lighting had been of central importance to the development of the
Sydney electricity system in the 1900s, this sector received the least favourable
treatment from the electricity suppliers, possibly because they could be confident that its
dependence on electricity was irreversible. Commercial consumers paid more for their
electricity than others and they suffered more, as a group, during times of supply
restrictions.15
As Sydney’s economy moved from manufacturing to services, electricity demand
soared in the buildings that housed and fed service sector workers and their customers,
for lighting, ventilation, air conditioning, lifts, water heating and many types of
specialised commercial cookers, from pizza ovens to espresso machines. As it had
before the War, electricity also powered new entertainments – in 1954, for example, the
Sydney County Council designed the lighting for Australia’s first night golf driving
range. Another new entertainment, which relied as much on the petrol engine as on
electricity, was the drive-in cinema, of which there were eight in Sydney by 1957.
(Spearritt 2000,222).
But it was not until the last decades of the 20th century that electricity revolutionised the
daily work of those who had, by then, come to be known as information workers. Over
the previous fifty years many key devices such as calculators, cash registers and
typewriters had moved from manual to electric operation, with great benefit in speed
and consistency, and easing of the physical effort required of their operators, but
without change in their basic function.
The ‘mainframe’ computers introduced in the 1960s, which required enormous amounts
of electricity for their processors and peripherals, for maintaining their sensitive dustfree environments and for sucking away their heat, automated certain tedious
accounting functions in large enterprises, but did not change the way most people
worked. The electric typewriter had made typing more efficient in the 1970s, but in the
early 1980s the word processor, the first widely disseminated form of personal
computer, revolutionised not just typing but the whole organisation of office work.
Finally the fusion of the mainframe (much reduced in size and power needs, and often
put to work as an internet server), the personal computer, and the telecommunications
system ushered in an unprecedented, fully electric economy.
If the emblematic electrical device of the 1900s was the filament lamp, and the device
of the 1930s was the electric motor, in the 1980s it was the integrated circuit. For the
lamp and the motor, electricity was the latest in an unbroken line of energy technologies
going back to the fire and to muscular effort. The integrated circuit (and its precursor,
the radio diode) had no pre-electric antecedents. For the first time, it made the means of
using electricity in daily work as unfathomable, mysterious and remote as the means of
producing it.
The consumer revolution
Because each house had only one stove, it took decades to loosen the grip of gas on the
cooking market. The number of other large electric appliances that a home could have
was limited only by space, income, desire and supply, and these stars moved into
perfect alignment after the war. The market was wide open - in 1946 only 16 per cent of
Australian households possessed a refrigerator and 2 per cent had a washing
machine.(AWW 1963,28) In the l940s some parts of Sydney still had twice daily
deliveries of milk, vital for those households who had not been able to afford an ice
chest, let alone a refrigerator.
The refrigerator became the first large electric appliance to find its way into nearly
every home, but not before shaking off competition from other fuels. The first design to
gain popularity was the absorption type, operated by the application of heat from a fuel
source such as kerosene or gas, rather than the now familiar vapour compression type,
which incorporates a small electric motor. In 1937 AGL became the sole agent for the
Electrolux gas refrigerator, and its success, along with other brands such as Hallstrom
and Silent Knight, temporarily blunted electricity’s claim as spearhead of the modern
kitchen. As late as 1949, more absorption refrigerators were manufactured in Australia
than vapour compression types, including models where the heat source was an electric
element.16
The spectacular growth of refrigerator ownership after 1950 was made possible by the
local manufacture of vapour-compression refrigerators. Sydney’s factories, protected by
high tariff walls, started in the late l920s and l930s to produce a wide range of smaller
electrical appliances, from radios and irons to electric toasters and radiators. Companies
including Standard Telephones and Cables (STC), Amalgamated Wireless Australasia
Limited (AWA) and Australian General Electric (with its Hotpoint brand) spawned new
factories and became household names overnight. After the war white goods firms in all
the capital cities, but especially Melbourne and Adelaide, boomed on the basis of new
stove, refrigerator and clothes washer sales, and made another crop of brands household
names – Kelvinator, Bellings, Metters, Chef, Dishlex, Westinghouse, Admiral and
Simpson.
Nonetheless, there were impediments to the spread of electrical appliances in the home.
When most households were converted from gas to electric light, no one bothered to
insist on extra plugs, which required more expensive wiring. In older houses without
wall cavities it could be exceedingly difficult to insert extra wiring other than along the
existing gas lines. So it was not uncommon, even as late as the l970s, to find in
unrenovated terrace houses electrical appliances operating from light sockets rather than
conventional power points.
Increasingly, everything in the kitchen operated off electricity, except the gas cooker,
and its days appeared to be numbered. The gas pipes did not keep pace with the growth
of Sydney’s new suburbs, and most new houses were built all-electric by necessity as
much as choice. This contributed to the complete reversal between 1947 and 1984 in the
proportion of Sydney households using electricity and gas for cooking.
Electricity came to dominate water heating even more than cooking. Less than half of
Australian households had central hot water systems in 1960, as distinct from sink or
bath heaters serving a single outlet (AWW 1963,60). Most of the growth in the water
heater market took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when gas was not well placed to
compete for it, and the Council’s off peak water heating tariff was particularly
attractive. By the 1970s electricity was also the most widespread form of space heating
energy in Sydney. (The introduction of natural gas in 1976 brought a rapid turnaround
in the Sydney energy market, first in industry and then in the household sector).
Manufacturing firms fell over each other in their enthusiasm for new appliances.
Instead of heating water for a baby’s bottle or a cup of tea on the stove, you could use
an electric jug. These ceramic jugs were proof of the modernity of a kitchen in the l930s
and even in the l950s. The electric frypan made its appearance, a popular wedding
present, along with the Sunbeam Mixmaster. Wealthier households invested in all
manner of gadgets, from coffee and tea makers, replete with alarm clock, to domestic
milk shake makers.
Small cooking appliances did not contribute much to household electricity consumption
because they consumed little energy, were used infrequently or both. Indeed, many
appliances had the potential to actually reduce cooking energy by replacing the use of
ovens and hotplates. This was particularly so with the microwave oven, which had been
used in commercial food processing since the 1940s and was introduced to the
Australian household market in the 1980s.
But the biggest event in domestic electricity in the l950s was the introduction of
television, first in Melbourne, in time for the 1956 Olympics, and then in Sydney.
Australia was some years behind Britain and the US in the introduction of television.
Many Britons watched the l952 coronation of Queen Elizabeth the II on television. One
of the explanations as to why two thirds of all Australians turned out to see the Queen
and the Duke in person during the royal visit of 1954, the first visit of reigning
monarch, was that we did not yet have television.
Television, as the manufacturers and TV stations told viewers, provided a whole new
world of home entertainment, bringing the world to you in your own living room.
Although essentially a private medium, television did have an impact on the landscape.
The giant TV transmission towers at Gore Hill were a symbol to Sydneysiders of this
powerful new means of communication. But much of the population could not get the
TV signals without themselves erecting huge TV aerials, up to 15 metres high. These
aerials could be seen in the wealthiest and in the poorest suburbs, from harbourside
residences to tin shanties, including those left over from the depression on the banks of
the Hunter River, near Hexham. Although, in the late l950s, a television cost 30 times
the average male weekly wage, thousands of working class households acquired them,
usually on usurious hire purchase schemes, often paying an effective interest rate of
over 30 per cent.(Groves).
A modern household had to have a television. In the late l950s and l960s schoolyard
and tearoom conversations revolved around TV, and if you hadn’t seen the latest
episode of Bonanza, Cheyenne or Zorro you were at a social disadvantage. Penetration
grew phenomenally in the Sydney metropolitan area: 56 per cent of households by
1959, 83 per cent by 1962 (AWW 1963,32) and well over 90 per cent by 1971 (ABS,
Census 1971).
Television was also a visible indicator of the quality of the electricity supply. Nobody
noticed if the bread took longer to toast because they were at the end of a long feeder
and the voltage was down to 160V rather than the promised 240V, but low voltage
shrunk the size of the TV picture. The Sydney County Council and its neighbouring
electricity suppliers were investing heavily in infrastructure anyway, to keep up with
suburban growth, but customer complaints prompted by TV made the job even more
urgent.
Broadcasting in colour commenced in March 1975 and the penetration of colour sets
was almost as rapid as for black and white. Home video-cassette recorders (VCRs) were
introduced in the late 1970s, and their penetration increased rapidly from 11 per cent of
Australian households in 1982 to 50 per cent by 1986 and 90 per cent by 2002 (SMH
29.3.86,ABS).
Electrification changed the way families used their homes. The reticulation of gas and
later electric lighting throughout the house had allowed families to disperse their nighttime activities more widely than before, when light sources were relatively few,
inconvenient and costly. This pattern was repeated with each innovation in electronics.
In the 1930s, the radio ‘might vie with the fireplace as focal point of family relaxation’
(Johnson 1987, 370). The spread of cheap and increasingly portable second and third
radios and record players, coupled with more power points, helped disperse activities
again, until the television set briefly brought families back together in their living rooms
in the 1960s. Colour television and the VCR had similar, if less pronounced effects: by
the 1980s a wide range of alternative entertainment was readily available to family
members both within and beyond the home. Radios, recorded music players, computer
games, the old black and white TV or even a second colour set could be used in any
room, and so undermined the attraction of the central TV/VCR combination in the
lounge room.
Household electricity demand growth slowed in the early 1980s, due to several
coincident factors. The ownership of large whitegoods had saturated – people had as
many refrigerators, freezers, clothes washers and dryers as they needed, and as many as
they could fit into their homes (a growing number of which were apartments), although
the stock continued to grow because old appliances were kept for occasional use when
new ones were bought. New appliances became much more energy-efficient, due
largely to the introduction of energy labelling in 1986, enabling consumers to compare
the running costs of appliances. Finally, the introduction of natural gas in 1976 brought
a resurgence in gas demand, and for the first time gas began to win back market share in
cooking, space heating and water heating. The cause of natural gas was given an early
boost by well-publicised turbine problems at the Liddell power station in 1981,
followed by the first real increase in electricity prices since 1950.
One they had bought their large appliances, households diverted more discretionary
expenditure to devices that recorded and played images and sounds, on
communications, and on home versions of office equipment such as computers and
printers. Although each device used very little energy to do its job compared with a
water heater or a refrigerator, there were so many that their collective energy demand
for recharging and standby power became the fastest growing segment of household
energy use. Electronic controls also began to appear in traditional appliances such as
space heaters and washing machines, generally increasing their flexibility and energyefficiency when operating, but also contributing to standby power.
By the end of the century the new ‘must have’ appliance was the air conditioner. In the
1980s the Council had begun the promotion of ‘reverse cycle’ air conditioners, which
heat as well as cool, partly as a means of countering the return to gas space heating.
Electric radiators, together with electric cookers, had contributed to the winter peak load
on the Council’s system since the war, and the introduction of a technology which could
produce up to three times the heat for the same amount of electricity, and cost no more
to run than gas heating, was attractive to both suppliers and consumers. However,
people naturally turned their air conditioners on to cool on the hottest days of the
Sydney summer, at the same time as offices and shops were running their cooling plant
flat out. 2003 was the first year in which the annual peak load on EnergyAustralia’s
system occurred in summer, and the pattern was repeated in 2004.
Households are unlikely to want to pay the real cost of electricity in the summer peaks.
But as more and more Sydney homes – especially apartments and neo-Tuscan houses
without eaves – are uninhabitable in summer without air conditioning, they may have to
pay extra for this new and increasingly profligate user of electricity.
Chapter 3 Notes
1
By 1884 gas cookers could be obtained from several importers and local manufacturers, and by 1899
AGL had rented or sold them to about a fifth of its customers. Gas space and water heaters were also
available, but installed only in more expensive dwellings. Most households in Sydney, as in the rest of
NSW, still used firewood or coal fuel, albeit in cast iron cookers instead of open hearths.
2
In 1891, when the Kingswood Cookery Book was published, domestic service accounted for nearly 43%
of female employment in NSW. In 1901 approximately five per cent of households had two or more livein domestic servants, and another five per cent had one. Up to another ten per cent of households had the
equivalent of full-time domestic help, but did not provide accommodation. In wealthier homes with
numerous servants, labour saving devices were not usually highly prized, and tasks such as cleaning and
laundry still remained unmechanised.
With the decline in domestic service more and more cleaning and cooking tasks fell to immediate
household members, usually the wife and/or mother, and often older female children as well. Women's
time came to be valued more highly, both in terms of the wages paid to domestics and the increasing
opportunities for women to work in manufacturing and commerce, and this contributed to the impetus
towards the rationalisation and electrification of household tasks after the depression.
3
Battery-powered radios were also readily available, so radio ownership was partly independent of
electricity connection. The geographic distribution of ownership was influenced more by the quality of
reception from the available stations and by the desire of households for radio-disseminated information.
By 1960, 95% of Australian households owned at least one radio, and in Sydney the average ownership
rate was two per household (AWW 1963,42-3).
4
Electric radiators, kettles, irons, ovens, toasters and hotplates, sewing machines and washing machines
could all be purchased in Sydney by 1908 (Building 15.6.1908,70). By the 1920s electric water heaters,
refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, some of them Australian made, were also available (AET,
27.4.22,190). Statistics compiled around 1920 by a distributor of American appliances indicated that 75%
of connected households in Australia had electric irons, 20% had toasters, 7% fans and 2% vacuum
cleaners. All other appliances were present in 1% or fewer homes (Batson 1927,22). A survey in Victoria
in late 1925 found that 100% of new domestic customers were purchasing irons, 11% kettles and 6%
grillers. All other appliances had a lower penetration (AET 27.1.26).
5
Appliance sales ended in December 1982, and the repair service for small appliances brought to
showrooms ended in December 1983. The in-home repair service for large appliances ceased in 1989.
6
The St George district was predominantly residential and, unlike Sydney, had very little daytime
industrial or commercial load, so development of the cooking load was an economic necessity.
Eventually the connection of the St George name with electric cooking became so strong that a local
manufacturer adopted it as the brand for its cookers (eventually making gas as well as electric products
under that brand).
7
This resulted in over 2,000 orders within a 3 month period (SCC 1939,17), a significant intervention in a
market where national sales amounted to only 20,000 units in 1938, many of them absorption models
powered by gas (A.Spearritt 1983,39). To counter the campaign AGL offered hire purchase arrangements
on gas refrigerators and a discount on gas used for refrigeration (SMH 9.8.39). The SCC also hired out
water heaters and wash boilers from 1938.
8
The estimates of increased energy sales attributed to the Sales Branch are almost certainly optimistic,
possibly because of the need to defend the branch against criticism from councillors, who called into
question its cost-effectiveness from time to time (eg SMH 5.4.39).
9
There were about 300 sessions per year in the 1950s, rising to about 700 a year in the 1970s, but on
average only half as many attended each session. Night time sessions were introduced in 1959. There
were also special cooking sessions for children, old people, blind people and many community groups.
10
At first the commercial TV channels were happy to carry up to five SCC cookery demonstrations a
week, but by 1964 were no longer prepared to offer suitable free time slots, and the SCC had to buy time,
which it did until 1977.
11
The home economist, Ms Cathy Iffland, had trained at AGL (which closed its cookery school and home
economics advisory service in December 2003).
12
It is estimated that only 15-20% of Sydney households had a radiator by the end of the war, but the
electric heating load was troublesome even when fuel supply was adequate because the system was
chronically demand constrained from 1948 to 1952. Apart from regular winter prohibitions on radiator
use between 7 am and 7.30 pm there were unprecedented summer blackouts in 1948-9, brought on by
sudden cold snaps while the SCC was overhauling plant in preparation for the coming winter.
13
The percentage of effective factory power that was supplied by electricity may have been significantly
higher than indicated, since a large proportion of the steam and oil engines drove on-site electricity
generators rather than process equipment.
14
The motor hire service continued until 1954, by which time less than 1,500 motors were on hire. The
DC proportion of motors hired out fell from about half in the 1920s to less than a quarter in the 1950s,
reflecting the gradual closure of the DC system in the City. By 1931 the estimated horsepower of motors
connected to the Council’s system exceeded the total reported (by other sources) for electric motors in all
NSW manufacturing. This is not inconceivable, since the Council system supplied many non-factory
motors such as lifts, and some very large motors for water pumping. The share of the Council’s motor
load represented by the its own hired out motors is not reported.
15
SCC commercial sales declined in five of the ten years between 1942 and 1951, compared with three
years for industrial sales, and uninterrupted growth in residential sales. During post-war restrictions the
use of grid electricity for commercial display lighting was usually prohibited outright or severely
curtailed (SMH 23.6.45,21.1.49). The state government permitted display lighting from private
generators, but the Commonwealth government prohibited the purchase of oil to run generators for that
purpose (SMH 27.5.49). Interior lighting was restricted to 0.75 watts per sq ft in shops and showrooms
and 0.2 watts per sq ft in warehouses (ibid). Some restaurants made a virtue out of necessity and used
candles as the sole means of lighting (SMH 3.7.48). Commercial consumers were also receptive to ways
of increasing their efficiency of use, and fluorescent lamp manufacturers took the opportunity to point out
that their products could supply three times as much light per watt as incandescents (SMH 27.5.49).
16
In 1945-46 gas and kerosene models accounted for 65% of Australian refrigerator production, but
within three years it was down to 41% (Department of Post War Reconstruction – Division of
Redevelopment, Brief Review of the Australian Domestic Refrigerator Industry, Melbourne 1949). Over
the same period the production of electric element absorption units fell to 25% of total electric
refrigerator output. Absorption units typically cost about 15-30% less than compressor units of the same
storage capacity, but consumed more energy (ibid,11). In 1949 the SCC still offered electric absorption
models on easy terms, and an ‘allowance’ of between 2s8d and 3s1d per week (depending on the model)
to offset the higher operating cost of absorption units (Contactor, May 1950). During the 1950s electric
absorption type rapidly disappeared from the market, and fuel absorption sales were restricted largely to
country areas not yet connected to the electricity grid.
In 1949 the Department of Post War Reconstruction was still equivocal about the future of the refrigerator
The extent to which the domestic refrigerator succeeds in establishing itself as a necessity will
have an important bearing on the future of the industry. While the refrigerator is regarded as a
luxury item by a large section of the community the industry will remain very vulnerable to
economic fluctuations. The refrigerator is at present in a transitional stage and is coming to be
regarded as a near-necessity, although the developing use of ice-chests is a moderating influence
here. Continuance of the present trend towards the adoption of a five day week by food vendors
could be an influential factor in fixing the machine in the minds of the public as a necessity,
particularly in the warmer temperate zones (ibid,7).
4. Owning and Managing
Electricity supply in Sydney, as in the rest of NSW, is a predominantly public
enterprise. EnergyAustralia represents a century of publicly owned capital, managed by
those elected or employed to serve the public. This has complicated rather than
simplified the development and management of the enterprise, making it subject to
political forces at the state and the municipal levels, and testing the political acumen as
well as the engineering and business skills of successive councillors, boards and
managers.
By the time the NSW Parliament came to consider the electric lighting of Sydney in the
1890s, politicians were moving strongly in favour of public ownership of public
utilities. It had not always been so. When the Australian Gas Light Company set up in
1837, the tiny British colonial administration happily encouraged whatever private
investment it could to reduce the cost of supplying public services.1 This precedent
established gas street lighting as a proper, and profitable, business for private capital for
the next 50 years.
The gas companies relied on municipal street lighting contracts to provide a reliable
income as they expanded their gas sales to private consumers. There were regular
disagreements between councils and their local gas companies, including the City of
Sydney and AGL, over the price of lighting, the inconvenience and cost of opening
roads and pavements for pipelaying, and the refusal of the companies to service
outlying areas because of their unprofitably low load densities.
The Municipal Gas Act 1884 allowed councils, acting jointly or severally, to construct,
purchase and operate gasworks to supply gas for public lighting and for private
purposes.2 Several of the Act's supporters pointed out that it would be opportune to
extend its provisions to electricity or any future illuminating agent. Had this been done,
much subsequent parliamentary debate and legislation could have been avoided.3
The first Australian municipalities to generate electricity for their own street lighting
were the NSW towns of Tamworth (November 1888) and Young (April 1889), with the
latter the first to supply private consumers as well as street lighting. Municipal electric
lighting was not at first a financial success. Revenue barely covered running expenses,
and if depreciation and interest charges were included, the installations ran at a deficit.
Between 1891 and 1902 only five municipal electric lighting installations were built,
considerably fewer than the number of municipal gasworks.4 The electric lighting
installations at Lambton (1890) Penrith (1892) and Canterbury (1898) were of only
local importance. The one at Newcastle (1891) was highly significant in that it
represented the first major challenge to a well-established urban gas company, while the
one at Redfern (1892) brought municipal electricity supply near the heart of Sydney.
Tamworth’s undertaking could be seen as an exercise of the municipal prerogative over
street lighting already conceded by State Parliament, but at Newcastle the municipality
sought to enter the general energy market in direct competition with a private gas
company. In 1890 Parliament was presented, for the first time, with a clear choice
between municipal and private electricity systems. The select committee reports and
Owning and Managing (Chapter 4 of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia)
1
debates on the Newcastle bills rehearsed the arguments for and against public ownership
which were to be repeated on many occasions thereafter.
The Newcastle Gas Company’s supporters argued that by supplying electricity for
private lighting the municipality would be using ratepayers’ money on a risky venture
that was properly the province of private enterprise. The council’s supporters countered
that the council had every right to supply private consumers if it lowered the cost of
street lighting, and that ‘...the spirit of the age favours the supply of gas and water commodities in daily use - being placed in the hands of the people themselves’.
(NSWPD 2.10.1890,3379).5
The lower house of the NSW Parliament, the Legislative Assembly, favoured municipal
ownership. The Newcastle Gas Company's bill was defeated in September 1890 while
the council’s bill was eventually passed in 1892, by which time the installation had
already commenced operating. The Parliament insisted that lighting be separated from
the municipal account. This removed the incentive for the Council to manage the
undertaking in a way which paid a return to the ratepayers, since profits could only be
re-invested in the electricity business.6
The Competition for Sydney
The battle for Sydney proved even more vexed. Between 1887 and 1896 Parliament
dealt with no fewer than six separate bills for the electric lighting of the City of Sydney,
some of them introduced more than once. The fate of each proposal depended less on its
intrinsic merits than on the influence or odium of its sponsors, and on shifts and
balances in the broader political and legislative framework.
The Sydney and Suburban Electric Lighting Bill would have given exclusive rights to
supply electricity in the City and the Suburbs to a private company formed for the
purpose by Messrs E.H.Taylor (accountant) and G.K.Kirkland (electrical engineer).
The NSW Electric Light and Power Company’s Bill sought supply rights in Sydney,
Bathurst and Newcastle for J.C.Bogue, an electrical engineer and agent of the American
Electric Company. These two bills were introduced, and lapsed, between December
1887 and October 1989.
The other bills were all brought in during the life of the Dibbs government (October
1891 to August 1894), the first period in which the newly formed Labor Party held the
balance of power in the Legislative Assembly.7 The Australasian Rights Purchase Bill
would have given a Victorian-based company the rights to develop hydro-electric plant
on the Colo river, transmit the energy to Sydney and supply it in bulk to local
distributors, including the Sydney Municipal Council if it wished. The Sydney Electric
Lighting Company Bill would have given rights to supply electricity, in the City only,
to a private company formed for the purpose by Messrs W.Wynne (manager of the
Daily Telegraph, which was already in the electricity business in a small way) and
A.H.Whiffen (electrical engineer).
The Australian Gas Light Company’s Electric Lighting Bill would have enabled AGL
to supply electricity in the City and suburbs. Although AGL did not seek exclusive
rights, as did some of the other bidders, its opponents knew that AGL, better than any
2
other company, understood how to build and protect a natural monopoly, in which the
first mover could manipulate prices to keep competitors out.
These three bills were all laid aside during the Dibbs ministry. A Labor member of the
time noted with approval the Party's role in their defeat:
Each of the electric-lighting bills had proposed to hand over to private
companies the sole right to provide Sydney with electric light and power. The
Labor Party believed in the supply of light by municipal authorities only, and, in
addition, was opposed to the creation of monopolies. (Black,37)
Last Left Standing – the Sydney Municipal Council
The Sydney Municipal Council had expressed an interest in electric lighting as early as
1882, partly as a way of putting pressure on AGL during renegotiations of the street
lighting contract. In 1889 the Council arranged for the electric lighting of the Town
Hall, which had been completed the previous year, but made no active moves towards
lighting the entire city until December 1890, when a new committee to consider both
public and private lighting was established.(SMC/FC 18.12.1890) Chaired by Alderman
Manning, Mayor of Sydney and a member of the Legislative Assembly, its deliberations
were given some urgency by the introduction of the competing Sydney Electric
Lighting Company and AGL bills in July and August 1891.
In October 1891 the Electric Lighting Committee presented its report and tabled a draft
bill for Council’s consideration and adoption. (SMC/FC 1.10.1891,20.10.1891) The
report was firm on the economic need for sales to private consumers, but ambivalent on
Council ownership ‘...whether carried out by the Council itself or under concession
from the Council, it is desirable to combine the public lighting and the supply for
private lighting.’ (SMC/ELC,1891)
The Municipal Council of Sydney Electric Lighting Bill was first introduced into the
Legislative Assembly in November 1891, and on five other occasions thereafter, before
finally receiving assent in October 1896.8 By the time the bill passed the Council’s
sense of urgency had dissipated. Its enthusiasm for gas was rekindled in 1896, when
AGL fitted new high efficiency mantles to the street lamps free of charge and reduced
the rates.9
Interest revived with the re-establishment of the Electric Lighting Committee in
December 1898, this time with a brief to consider the commercial as well as the
technical basis of the venture.(Anderson,17) In 1899 the Council engaged the British
electrical engineers Preece and Cardew to draw up a design and specifications suitable
for tender. Whereas the previous consultants, Cracknell and Threllfall, had proposed a
modest scheme of street lighting supported by private sales, Cardew’s approach was
aggressively commercial:
It is...essential to the early success of the undertaking that it should be pushed
and extended as rapidly as possible. The conditions in Sydney are not such that
the business of electric supply will take care of itself. You will do no good with
a small supply at a high price. You have to meet powerful competition from the
Gas Company, Hydraulic Power Company, existing electric supply companies
3
and private installations. Success will be secured by encouraging demand by
every legitimate means, taking care that your arrangements for supply are kept
ahead of the growth of the demand. (SMC 1900,264)
The committee and the Council shared this view. Some members expressed concern at
the possibility of competition from the small private firms, but were assured that only
the Council had the power to take supply across public streets.(ibid,270) Indeed, many
small private electricity systems had started up before the Council commenced supply
in 1904.10 In the 1890s several hotels, theatres, shopping emporia and newspaper offices
used their own generators to supply neighbouring businesses.11 Some of these formed
the core of the Empire, Strand, Oxford Street, Imperial Arcade and Palace electric
lighting companies, which the Council acquired, along with the Redfern Council
undertaking, between 1907 and 1913.12 By then the only sizeable private electricity
business to survive in Sydney was the Electric Light and Power Supply Corporation,
which supplied the inner western suburbs until the 1950s.13
The Electricity Department
The electricity business began in July 1904 as a department of the Sydney Municipal
Council, with the City Electrical Engineer (T.Rooke) reporting to the Town Clerk
(T.H.Nesbitt) and with the City Treasurer managing the accounts. The main objectives
of the first years were to bed down the operation of Pyrmont Power Station, establish
mains and substations and increase the number of private customers in the face of
competition from the private companies.
Electricity supply was the only one of the Council’s functions to extend beyond the
boundaries of the City itself and, in due course, over most of the metropolitan area. The
Electricity Department (ED) grew so rapidly that by 1929 it employed two thirds of the
Council’s staff.(SMC/CC 1929,67) The degree of direct Council involvement in
electricity supply matters varied with the composition of its Electric Lighting
Committee, which changed from year to year.14 By contrast, management of the ED was
extremely stable. It remained under the direction of the same Chief Electrical Engineer,
H.R.Forbes Mackay, from 1908 until the creation of the Sydney County Council in
1935. Forbes Mackay then served as the first General Manager of the SCC until 1939.
At first the Electric Lighting Committee involved itself in almost every aspect of the
management of the ED.15 On technical matters it acted on the recommendation of the
City Electrical Engineer, and on financial and pricing matters called for supplementary
reports from the Town Clerk, who was responsible for all ED accounts, stores and
staffing. This cumbersome structure invited friction. After the resignation of the first
City Electrical Engineer in 1908 over the interference of aldermen in staffing matters,
the Councillors recognised the ED’s need for greater independence. (SMC/TC
1908,170)16 An investigating accountant advised the Council in 1913 ‘...to
commercialise this undertaking in the fullest possible manner’.(SMC 1913,580)
The Electricity Department, often described as a ‘business’ or ‘commercial operation’
by management, aldermen and the press, became increasingly autonomous. However
the Council did not set financial objectives until 1922, when it formally adopted the
following resolution, endorsing the policy which Forbes Mackay had privately adopted
a decade earlier while waiting on a policy direction from Council:
4
That the policy of the Council’s Electricity Supply Undertaking be laid down as
follows: (a) To produce electric light and power at the lowest possible rate; (b)
To produce sufficient to cover working expenses, interest, sinking fund,
depreciation, and allocation of a maximum of one percent (1%) towards the
relief of rates.(Smith & Johnson,96)17
Opinion varied on the issue of contribution to revenue. In the 1920s the Labor Party and
the conservative Civic Reform movement contested the control of an increasingly
politicised Council (Curnow 1957). The owners of most City businesses and properties
had by then migrated to the suburbs, yet their rates maintained Council services to the
remaining residents, most of whom were tenants and Labor Party voters. The Civic
Reform Association represented the interests of non-resident ratepayers, and its
aldermen occasionally succeeded in appropriating small amounts from ED surpluses for
the relief of rates.18 But as one Labor MP and alderman put it:
We do not believe in distributing the profits made by a business undertaking of
that sort to relieve ratepayers of their burden. We say that when a profit is shown
in a business of that kind it is an indication of bad management, and that if any
surplus is being shown the price of current to consumers should be reduced.
(NSWPD 16.11.27,329)
In fact, neither political faction exercised any effective financial control over the ED: it
was not until 1928 that it first presented forward estimates of income and expenditure to
the Council, and that was at the request of the City Commissioners installed by a nonLabor Government, which sacked the Council in 1927.(SMC/CC 1928,79)
Creation of The County Council
Both Labor and Civic Reform agreed that the Council’s electricity system should
remain under the control of the Municipal Council. The emergence of the County
Council model in the 1919 Local Government Act offered an all too visible alternative,
which found its first application on the Sydney Municipal Council’s very doorstep.
The Act enabled councils to form county districts to more efficiently undertake tasks
which they were individually empowered to do.(Larcombe III, 250-66) The idea sprang
from the successful combination of a group of councils in northern NSW for the
purpose of controlling the water hyacinth weed, and was soon taken up for electricity
supply. Since much less capital was necessary to establish a retail system than a power
station, the financial obstacles and risks confronting prospective electricity county
councils were reduced if a bulk supplier of electricity were available.
The first fortuitous combination of willing municipalities and a bulk supplier occurred
in the south west of Sydney in the early 1920s. The St George County Council,
constituted in October 1920 as the first electricity county council in NSW, commenced
supply in March 1923. It took its bulk supply not from the Sydney Municipal Council,
as some other suburban councils had done, but from the Railways Department.19
Although it covered only four suburban municipalities, and in 1932 supplied less than
four per cent of the electricity sold in Sydney, it was the prototype of the form of
organisation which characterised electricity supply in NSW up to the 1990s.20
5
The StGCC, unequivocally a public utility, had no obligation to earn profits and in fact
had no power to return any to its constituent municipalities.21 Its creation identified
electricity distribution with local government interests in a way not possible for those
councils absorbed within the SMC reticulation area. Like the SMC, the StGCC
tenaciously defended its territory against all perceived threats.22
St George also pioneered the organisational separation of electricity generation and
distribution. The SMC embodied both functions, and could therefore balance them in
the interests of orderly load development: for example, by refraining from promotional
activities in years of stretched capacity. County councils on the other hand had no
control over or direct interest in generation beyond the price they paid to the bulk
supplier. St George was fortunate to purchase from an organisation generating mainly
for traction, and whose price structure for bulk sales did not fully reflect all capital
costs. In its first decade it paid about 14 per cent less per unit than those municipalities
taking bulk supply from the SMC.23
The apparent autonomy in matters of policy and tariffs of the St George municipalities
contrasted with the dependence of those within the SMC's reticulation area. The
consequent pressure for suburban participation in the SMC's electricity supply policies
was one of the factors leading to the establishment of the Sydney County Council.
There were other pressures as well. After allegations of corruption over the building of
Bunnerong Power Station in the late 1920s and the Civic Commission of 1928-30, the
relationship between the SMC and its electricity undertaking became a matter of
perennial public debate. Most protagonists in the debate, other than Labor Party
members, agreed that there was too much scope for aldermen to interfere in the affairs
of the undertaking. Several alternatives for making political control less direct were
canvassed by the conservative government of Premier Bavin (1927-1930).24 Bavin lost
office in September 1930 to Labor’s Jack Lang, who had much more interest in the
popular issue of limiting gas prices than in reorganising the SMC.
The succeeding Stevens-Bruxner government tried to find a suitable model for the
organisation of electricity throughout the state. Some of the suburban municipalities
considered that they could obtain electricity cheaper from other suppliers and wanted
the opportunity to do so as soon as their contracts with the SMC expired. The
government needed a model with general applicability, and one consistent with its
commitment to local government, and it floated the idea of a Sydney-wide county
council on which the suburban municipalities would all be represented.(SMH 25.5.33)
In the face of opposition from the Parliamentary Labor Party and from SMC aldermen,
both Labor and Civic Reform, the Stevens-Bruxner government brought in the Gas and
Electricity Act 1935, the main provisions of which were the removal of the electricity
undertaking from the Sydney Municipal Council and the constitution of the Sydney
County Council.25
H.R.Forbes Mackay was part of the Government’s Electricity Advisory Committee,
which recommended the creation of the SCC, and his role did not go unremarked,
especially given that the enabling legislation appointed him as the first General Manager
and allowed him to remain past the statutory retirement age of 65.26 The Sydney
Municipal Council noted in its annual report ‘...although the Bill is put forward as
6
providing a County Council Scheme it is very largely a scheme for autocratic control by
a General Manager’.(SMC 1935,99)27
The State Governor formally proclaimed the Sydney County Council on 17 August
1935. On 1 January 1936, 2,394 staff and ₤21.9 M of assets were transferred from the
SMC. (SCC 1935,5) The transition proved less smooth in other respects, and the
controversy surrounding the SCC’s formation was prolonged by tensions between
elected councillors and ambiguities in the division of powers between council and
management, under an Act which, in the opinion of a King’s Counsel ‘...was so
ambiguous in many respects that it was difficult to understand what object in view the
framers of the Act had...’(SMH 3.9.37)28
The County Council itself consisted of five members, elected at three year intervals by
the aldermen of the municipalities within the undertaking’s retail district. Each
councillor represented both geographical and party interests.29 The Council had the
right, subject to consultation with the government, to appoint three ‘statutory’ officers:
the General Manager (once Forbes Mackey retired), the Chief Engineer and the
Secretary. All other staff matters were the prerogative of the general manager.
The councillors soon discovered that their administrative powers were severely
circumscribed by the Act, and their first attempts to assert themselves on major issues of
technical policy were unsuccessful.30 Defeated by management in every trial of
strength, the councillors were understandably frustrated. At one stage a councillor
suggested that they should resign en masse in protest against the ‘dictatorial powers
given to the general manager’.(SMH 14.7.37) Tensions became less visible after 1939,
when the councillors took steps to keep controversial matters out of the public eye, and
Forbes Mackay retired after 31 years as general manager of the undertaking.31
Forbes Mackay was succeeded as general manager by R.Vine-Hall (1939-44),
D.J.Nolan (1944-46), G.S.Boyd (1946-50), J.C.Craggs (1950-52), C.E.Ranger (195265), G.Washington (1965-70), R.W. Mitchell (1970-78), F.J. Rainbird (1979-87) and
D.Gray (1987-91), each one appointed from within the organisation. Perhaps the only
one whose tenure approached the level of friction associated with Forbes Mackay was
C.E.Ranger, the first general manager appointed after the County Council’s electricity
generation functions and assets were transferred to the Electricity Commission of NSW
on 1 January 1952.32
The supply area expanded in the 1950s to take in the Hornsby and Sutherland shires and
the Bankstown municipality, and again in 1979, when the SCC was amalgamated with
the St George, Brisbane Water and MacKellar County Councils. Enlarged from five to
nine members at the beginning of 1949, the County Council remained at that number
until 1979, when it was enlarged to sixteen.33 With each increase in number the Council
became more unwieldy, and not all councillors were equally interested or competent in
the business of the Council, not least because of the increasing tendency for councillors
to be elected on the endorsement of the major political parties, as a reward, a stepping
stone to party advancement or as a consolation for missing out on other, perhaps more
desirable appointments.
The SCC could not escape the pressures of wider energy and economic policy. As the
ECNSW’s largest customer by far, it felt the backwash of the massive power station
7
investment program which the Commission undertook in the early 1980s at the urging
of the State and Federal governments, for a minerals processing boom that never came
and for aluminium smelters that were never built.34 The SCC was unable to borrow for
capital investment because the Commission had used the full borrowing capacity
allowed to NSW for major infrastructure, so the SCC had to generate its own
investment capital. This left it with a large capacity to borrow once restrictions were
removed in the 1990s, to the great temptation of later State Governments. Well before
that there were constant pressures to increase the Bulk Supply Tariff which the SCC and
other councils paid to the Commission, and a multiplication of special funds to transfer
wealth from the SCC to the regional county councils, to favoured large users and to
State Government revenue.35
During the 1960s and 1970s the ability of other groups to subsidise residential
consumers had seemed inexhaustible. However, the evaporation of the hoped-for
minerals boom and a decline in economic growth in the early 1980s brought industrial
electricity prices to the attention of state governments, all of which were attempting to
lure new industries and retain existing ones. At the beginning of 1986 the NSW Labor
government introduced an ‘Industrial Development Tariff’ resulting in an average price
reduction of 14 per cent for the state’s largest 500 industrial consumers (EnANSW
1986,28). In 1987 the Victorian government launched a campaign to attract electricityintensive manufacturing on the basis that Victoria had the ‘cheapest rates of electricity
for industrial users in the Western world’, and that manufacturers in Sydney paid 22 to
38 per cent more than their counterparts in Melbourne (Australian, 25.3.87).
The year 1987 marked the beginning of a decade of turbulent change for the SCC. The
Unsworth government enacted legislation to bring the structure and responsibilities of
the SCC into line with all other electricity county councils in NSW, making the SCC
subject for the first time to direction by the Minister for Energy, including the approval
of prices, payments into special funds and approval of the Council’s nominee for
General Manager.36 At almost the same moment as the State Government finally
succeeded in taking full control of the Sydney County Council, a long held ambition,
the pressure for micro-economic reform changed the face of the electricity industry.
Ninety years of tradition and certainty were suddenly called into question.
Corporatisation and Competition
The election of the Greiner government in March 1988 changed State politics, and not
just in NSW. Reform of NSW government-owned trading enterprises had begun under
the Wran government, whose Public Finance and Audit Act 1983 enabled the State to
require dividend payments from public authorities. It took on a new urgency under the
Greiner government, whose aggressive corporatisation of state instrumentalities owed
something to the precedent of the British conservative leader Margaret Thatcher.
However, the Greiner reforms stopped short of the sale of public assets, which became
the hallmark of the Kennett government, elected in Victoria in 1992.
One of the first acts of the Greiner Government was to review the operation of all public
sector trading organisations in NSW, the level of competition they faced and their
financial self sufficiency. The purpose was to determine how free they should be from
government supervision and (although this was not emphasised at first) their suitability
for eventual sale to the private sector. At one end of the scale were policy departments
8
that should remain under direct Ministerial control, and at the other were organisations
that should be governed by principles of business rather than politics. The SCC was
classified as a ‘commercial business’ with its shareholder the public of NSW, embodied
in the Minister for Energy.37 In July 1989 the SCC entered its first ‘performance
agreement’ with the Minister, covering a range of objectives.
In July 1989 the government initiated the Curran Inquiry into the financial, technical,
operational, property and management aspects of the SCC, to ‘determine [the] scope
for, and means of, achieving performance improvements without necessarily reducing
the level of service to customers. In particular, areas of cost saving for the benefit of
consumers are to be identified’.38 The report acknowledged the technical competence
of the SCC and the reliability of its supply, but criticised it for narrowness of planning,
rigidity, bureaucracy, excessive staffing and poor cost and asset management. It also
declared its ties to local government outdated: ‘there appear to be no benefits accruing
either to the SCC from its links to local councils, nor to these local councils from their
involvement with the SCC.’
The Curran Inquiry also concluded that the Government and/or electricity customers
could safely extract a billion dollars of accumulated wealth from the SCC almost
immediately – partly through selling it some $450 million of 132 kV distribution assets
owned by the ECNSW – and could then look forward to a dividend stream of $60
million per year.
The Government and the SCC accepted the recommendations and the Minister for
Energy appointed two delegates to the SCC in November 1989 to facilitate the changes,
taking the number of Councillors to 18. In the following year the SCC implemented
extensive reorganisations and changes in management practices, and increased
borrowings by over $560 million in order to purchase the 132 kV assets and meet the
minister’s direction to pay $330 million to the Electricity Development Fund. In 1990
Parliament passed the Sydney Electricity Act, dissolving the Sydney County Council
and reconstituting the organisation as a statutory body. Some local government links
still remained. The Act provided for half of the ten directors to be elected from local
government in each of five newly designated Electricity Supply Districts. The minister
was to appoint up to five directors, including the chairman, the deputy chair and one
director elected by Staff.
Sydney Electricity came into being on 2 January 1991, with a high degree of continuity
in the composition of the board: 8 of the 9 members had been Sydney County
Councillors immediately before. The chairman, A.G.Moyes, had been a ministerial
appointee to the SCC, and deputy chairman M.K.F.Bray had been the SCC’s last
Chairman. The SCC’s last general manager, D.K.Gray, served as acting Chief
Executive until the appointment of A.Gillespie in August 1991. The staff-elected
director, J.Thoms, was appointed in 1993, after which the membership of the board
remained unchanged until July 1995, when it was dissolved pending the merger of
Sydney Electricity and Orion Energy.
The first wave of change after 1987 realigned the enterprise to meet State Government
expectations, especially in regard to payments to consolidated revenue. In the eight
years between the start of these payments (July 1987) and the end of Sydney
9
Electricity’s last full financial year of operation (June 1995), the enterprise transferred
over $860 million to the State, representing about 5.8 per cent of revenues.39
The next wave of change after 1995 was made necessary by the most dramatic shift in
the landscape of the NSW electricity market since the creation of the Electricity
Commission. The seeds of that change were in the electricity industry reforms
instigated by the Thatcher Conservative government in the UK in the 1980s, replicated
in large measure by the Kennett government in Victoria, with some support from the
Hawke and Keating government in Canberra and (with varying degrees of enthusiasm)
the other states.
In 1991 the Commonwealth Industry Commission reported to the Treasurer on an
inquiry into the generation, transmissions and distribution of electricity and gas. The
inquiry stated: ‘There is substantial scope for improving the efficiency of energy
generation and distribution in Australia. The potential gains are large – in the order of
$2,400 million a year’.40 The keys to realising this potential included the separation of
the monolithic State-owned energy utilities into separate and competing elements,
encouraging the entry of private capital (eg by selling State-owned assets to the private
sector) and strengthening the transmission interconnections between States to encourage
price competition and allow the sharing of plant reserves.
During the early 1990s the subject of national electricity market reform became a
fixture at the conferences of the Council of Australian Governments (CoAG,
comprising the Prime Minister, the Premiers and the Chief Ministers), but progress was
initially slow, and in the event the national electricity market did not commence
operation until December 1998. In the meantime each State made changes to its own
electricity system at its own pace, but under the shadow of the Competition Principles
Agreement made by CoAG in 1995, which threatened penalties for States that failed to
meet certain benchmarks for market liberalisation in electricity and other sectors.
Initially, the States focussed on creating competitive markets in those aspects of
electricity supply where competition was possible: in generation and in retailing. In the
context of the market ‘retailing’ covered all aspects of the relationship with the
customer, which could be as simple as reading the meter, sending the bill and collecting
the money, or could extend to complex pricing and financial arrangements, the
provision of gas as well as electricity, assistance with increasing the efficiency of the
customer’s energy use or providing ‘Green Power’ from renewable energy.
The elements of electricity supply less suited to competition were the high voltage
transmission and low voltage distribution – the ‘poles and wires’. It was not
economically efficient to have more than one transmission grid connecting power
stations and load centres, or more than one set of distribution wires running along each
street, although this sometimes happened in the 1890s before government regulation
caught up with the electricity industry, and happened again in the 1990s when both
Telstra and Optus laid parallel telecommunications cables along the same streets.41
For competition to work, generating companies needed to bid for market share, so
minimising the wholesale price of electricity, and retailers needed to attract customers
through both price and other aspects of service, such as bundling – eg offering
electricity, gas and possibly telecommunications and financial services as well.
10
Customers could exercise their market power by negotiating with retailers, changing
retailers or even participating directly in the wholesale market if they were large
enough. Of course some customers – typically lower income households or those in
remote areas – had very little market power, so Government regulation ensured their
continued access to electricity supply, on specified conditions and prices.
NSW had separated generation and transmission (ie the ECNSW) from distribution and
retailing (the SCC and other county councils) in the 1950s. In contrast, the State
Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) carried out all of these functions throughout
Victoria, apart from distribution and retailing in eleven Melbourne municipalities. The
SECV had major problems of plant availability, low productivity and some
disadvantageous supply contracts (which NSW also had, to a lesser degree). From its
election in 1992 the Kennett government made it a priority to restructure the Victorian
supply industry, and by the end of 1994 there were five separate generation entities, the
transmission network and five distributor/retailers, all still in public ownership.42
A guiding principle of the new electricity market was that state-owned corporations
should have no advantage over their privately-owned competitors solely because of
their ability to call on the taxpayer in the event of poor business decisions. The NSW
Treasury devised a regime that subjected state-owned entities to the same financial
demands and disciplines as any other corporation, including the need to maintain good
standing in the capital markets, to pay dividends at commercial rates (but not
unsustainably high rates) and to make payments in lieu of Commonwealth company tax,
from which state-owned enterprises were exempt. The demands of ‘competitive
neutrality’ accorded well with the revenue inclinations of the State government: in the
eight years from March 1995, EnergyAustralia transferred over $2,120 million to the
State, representing about 12.5 per cent of revenues.
EnergyAustralia’s ability to remain so profitable in the face of competition showed that
it had mastered the skills for success in the new electricity market better than most
publicly-owned electricity enterprises and at least as well as the private ones, including
AGL. Whereas the natural advantages of Sydney’s high load density had underwritten
the enterprise for its first 90 years, this no longer applied when so many of the
customers it contested and won were located outside its distribution system. The key to
satisfying these market-savvy customers was the ability of EA’s trading room to
manage price risk on their behalf, just as all customers in EA’s network area continued
to depend on its 100 years of experience in guaranteeing the physical supply of
electricity.
The Energy Policy which the Labor Party released before the 1995 election included the
statement that a ‘Carr Labor Government will…maintain the electricity generating
industry in Government ownership...’43 But there was no corresponding statement
regarding Sydney Electricity or the other distributors. The $8.3 billion realised from the
sale of the Victorian distributors in 1995 attracted the interest of the NSW Treasury, the
treasurer M.Egan, and other members of the NSW Government. The impending
introduction of the national electricity market also threatened to make owning electricity
businesses far more risky than previously, and the NSW Government argued that the
risks should be borne by the private sector.
11
In late 1996 the Carr Government contemplated the part-privatisation of Pacific Power,
and by mid 1997 openly advocated privatisation, not just for the generators but for the
distributors as well, with the total value of the NSW industry estimated at $22 billion.44
In October 1997 the NSW State Conference of the ALP rejected privatisation, through
an alliance of left wing unions committed to the retention of public assets in State
ownership and right-wing unions, including the ETU, whose members would have been
adversely affected. Privatisation disappeared from the NSW policy agenda, at least for
the time being, after the Liberal-National Party opposition, which had committed to
pursue it, was resoundingly defeated by Carr in March 1999.45
These events had a direct impact on the new EnergyAustralia. Following the dissolution
of the Board of Sydney Electricity in July 1995, A.G.Moyes acted as ‘reform facilitator’
for EnergyAustralia until the appointment of P.Hughes as interim chairman on 1
October. The full board, with P.Hughes as chairman, was appointed in February 1996.
None of the six board members had served on the Sydney or Orion boards.46 The former
Chief Executive of Sydney Electricity, A.Gillespie, acted as Managing Director of
EnergyAustralia until his resignation in November 1995, after which A.Smith acted in
that position until the appointment of E.A.Woodley on 25 June 1996. This was almost a
full year after the announcement of EnergyAustralia’s creation – a marked contrast with
the generally seamless transitions from chief engineer to general manager over the
previous 90 years.
E.A.Woodley’s tenure was brief but eventful. There was much to be done. The two
parts that had been Sydney Electricity and Orion Energy were still largely operating as
separate entities and needed to be integrated. The organisation had to put in place the
structures required for participation in the national market, such as the operational and
financial separation (‘ring-fencing’) of distribution from retailing and other functions.
The skills and systems for winning contestable customers and for managing the risks of
trading energy in the national market had to be developed. There were also issues of
manning and work practices: despite significant improvements over the previous
decade, on some indicators productivity was still well below the benchmarks for
comparable organisations. All this against looming deadlines for contestability, in
which more and more electricity customers would become free to switch retailers.47
EnergyAustralia’s workforce did not respond well to the uncertainty surrounding the
government’s privatisation intentions, nor by the fact that Woodley had previously
worked for the Kennett Government’s Electricity Supply Industry Reform Unit, and had
been the project leader for the sale of the distributors PowerCorp and CitiPower.
Staffing levels had already fallen during the early 1990s, although with the merger with
Orion the numbers briefly increased again. Further reductions were in the offing, but
their extent and rate were matters of fierce contest between the management and the
workers, especially the large part of the workforce covered by the ETU, which was
fighting its own anti-privatisation battles with the government at the time.48 There were
also tensions within the board itself. In early May 1997 the EA board dismissed
Woodley as Managing Director.
The General Manager Network, M.Davies, acted as EA’s managing director for six
months. In November 1997 the government appointed a new board, chaired by
J.C.Conde who, among other previous appointments, had been chairman of Pacific
Power between 1988 and 1995, and whose uncle H.G.Conde had been the first
12
chairman of the Electricity Commission of NSW in the 1950s. The new managing
director, P.A.Broad, had formerly been managing director of the Sydney Water
Corporation. After the turbulence of the mid 1990s stability returned to the governance
of EnergyAustralia, and most of the 1997 board were still in place to lead the
organisation into its centenary year.
The EnergyAustralia of 2004 had developed in diverse and sometimes unexpected ways
from its roots in the Sydney Municipal Council. Its electricity distribution network
covered half the population of NSW, extending from Waterfall in the south to Port
Stephens in the north, west to the municipality of Auburn and northwest to the Upper
Hunter Valley. The largest energy service organisation by cashflow in Australia, it
retailed electricity not just in Sydney but throughout NSW, and had electricity
customers in Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and the ACT. It also sold natural
gas in NSW and in Victoria. It had gone through nearly every model of governance
available to a public authority in NSW, and survived them all. The two constant
polarities of power had been the senior management and the state government, and it
was the role, allegiances and influence of the intermediaries – aldermen, county
councillors and directors – that changed the most over the period. Nevertheless, there
was one great constant. The enterprise concluded the century as it had started – firmly
in public hands.
13
Chapter 4 Notes
1
In 1827 the government commenced regular illumination of Sydney's major streets through the agency
of private contractors (McGuanne,4). It bore the expense grudgingly, and resisted the frequent public
demands for extension of the service beyond the central area (SMH 18.2.1831). Street lighting became
one of the issues on which the eventual incorporation of the City of Sydney in 1842 revolved (Larcombe
I,21). The government’s desire to rid itself of the cost of street lighting also played a part in Governor
Bourke’s support for the establishment of AGL:
’I am the more readily disposed to solicit such an encouragement for this Company, as its
formation may tend to promote habits of co-operation in measures of public improvements
which are at present much wanting here, the Colonists having been hitherto accustomed to lean
upon the Government for everything’ (HRA I/XVIII,557).
2
In addition to the street lighting rate of up to 2.5% of assessed value which councils were empowered to
levy under 1873 legislation, the 1884 Act gave them the power to raise revenue from private gas sales,
and to raise special loans for gas undertakings beyond the general limits on borrowing imposed by the
Municipalities Act. The Municipal Gas Act Amendment Act of 1886 extended the power to borrow for
gasworks even further, by allowing a council’s power to levy general and special rates to be used as loan
security, in addition to the gaswork assets themselves (Larcombe II,201).
In the three decades following the passage of the Act there were more than twice as many municipal
gasworks built in NSW as private ones, although none of them in Sydney, where gas supply remained
firmly in the hands of AGL, the North Shore Gas Company and the Manly Gas Company. After the
enactment of the Municipal Gas Act, gas manufacture in smaller towns became a largely municipal
enterprise by default. Private companies showed little interest in establishing new gasworks outside the
major population centres, where gas reticulation was most profitable and where there were already
thriving companies. These were too large and powerful for the local municipalities to compete with or
acquire, especially since the piecemeal development of local government legislation had left a legacy of
small, sometimes barely viable councils. No Sydney suburban municipalities ever established gasworks,
though they held discussions on joint action from time to time.
3
The Colonial Secretary, who introduced the bill, said ‘There is no very pressing necessity for any
provision with regard to the use of electricity as a means of lighting. This matter forms a special subject
in the Local Government Bill, which I hope to have the pleasure of introducing at an early date, if not
during the present session’ (NSWPD 24.7.1884,4527). The said Local Government Bill and another
attempt in 1894 to amend the Municipal Gas Act to include electric lighting were among eight
unsuccessful attempts between 1876 and 1894 to introduce new local government measures (Maiden
1966,88). As it happened, the provisions of the Municipal Gas Act were not extended to electric lighting
until the Municipalities Electric Lighting Act of 1904. In the meantime any municipality wanting to levy
a rate for electric lighting or establish its own electric lighting system had to obtain special legislation, or
proceed without clear legislative authority, which added an additional element of risk for contractors,
ratepayers and customers.
4
Some councils showed an interest in electricity only to strengthen their hand in negotiating with gas
companies, while others were unable to raise the finance. Public lighting installations at Moss Vale
(which commenced March 1890) and Enfield, a newly-incorporated outer suburb of Sydney (April 1890),
were operated by contractors. The municipalities had options to purchase during and after the 12 year
contracts. (Wilkenfeld,100)
5
The Gas Company’s supporters claimed that the costs of the venture would be lower, and hence its
success more likely, if it were professionally managed by a private company, even if that company had to
make a profit which the municipality did not. The Councils’ supporters answered that the electricity could
be supplied ‘at cost’ without overheads for profit or management expenses, and that much of the
administrative work could be done by the Council’s existing staff.
6
The assertions that municipal ownership in Newcastle would lead to lower costs were essentially
unsubstantiated, incomplete, and, as it turned out, incorrect, as were the assumptions about the balance
between public and private electricity consumption. A later manager of the Newcastle undertaking,
G.Allbut, noted: ‘As was the case with some of these early concerns, misfortune and financial losses
14
provide most of the early history. Until 1911 the concern was not financial...’ (Allbut,28). Private
electricity sales by municipalities had been justified on the grounds that they would defray the costs of
public lighting. There is no evidence that Parliament or the council considered the possibility that private
consumption could exceed street lighting demand, as rapidly occurred, or whether a municipal monopoly
would then be appropriate.
7
The 11th of the 16 points in the platform adopted by the Labor Electoral Leagues in 1891 was ‘Local
Government and decentralisation; an extension of the principle of the Government acting as employer,
through the medium of local self-governing bodies...’ (Black,40). At a conference of the Leagues in
January 1895 six new planks were added, including
‘1. Ownership by the State or Local Government bodies of such works as railways, tramways,
water-supply, public lighting, or other works for the good of the community’ (Coghlan,2187).
Labor also reinforced the feeling of the Assembly against monopolies. A ‘pledge of solidarity’ drawn up
by the Labor Electoral Leagues in November 1893 included the clause
‘That a parliamentary Labour Party to be of any weight must give a solid vote in the House upon
all questions affecting the Labour platform, the fate of the ministry, or calculated to establish a
monopoly or confer further privileges on the already privileged classes...’ (ibid,1870).
8
The major opponents of the bill were, ironically, the same Labor members who had disposed of its
competitors. They objected to the clauses which gave the Council the right to contract with private
tenderers, fearing that the Council would give away the same monopoly rights which the Labor party had
fought to deny AGL, the Sydney Electric Lighting Company and the Australasian Rights Purchase
Association.
9
The Council's reaction was so favourable that the town clerk stated, immediately following his report of
the passage of the electric lighting bill:
‘Meanwhile the street lamps are being supplied with an incandescent gas burner, which so much
improves the brilliancy of illumination, that the urgency of the question of the use of electric
light has been considerably minimised’ (SMC/TC 1896,4).
10
One of the first, inaugurated on 3 November 1882 was in the composing-room of the Sydney Morning
Herald. The light compared favourably in brilliance and steadiness with gas, which however was retained
in the rest of the building (SMH 10.6.1980).
11
In a paper read before the Electrical Club of NSW in September 1893, H.H.Kingsbury, an early
electrical entrepreneur, noted that ‘Since 1883 some 87 private installations have been erected in the
colony, aggregating 27,508 incandescent and 545 arc lamps’. His own firm had been responsible for
perhaps a third of these, but was by no means the only important electrical contractor in Sydney. Some
merchants advertised as ‘general electricians’ selling everything from ‘medical’ apparatus to electric bells
and lighting equipment. Other contractors came to specialise in large installations, using exclusively the
equipment of whichever overseas manufacturer they represented (Wilkenfeld,95).
12
Purchased businesses accounted for about 40% of the growth in total SMC electricity sales between
1907 and 1910.
13
The Borough of Balmain Electric Lighting Act 1906 empowered the Balmain council to contract with a
private supplier and to sell power in the areas of neighbouring councils, subject to their approval. The
Balmain council contracted for supply with the ELPSC, established in 1908 with capital of ₤50,000. The
company's power station at Balmain commenced operation in September 1909, and within two years
franchise agreements had been made with the adjoining municipalities of Leichhardt, Ashfield, Newtown
and Petersham. By 1915 the ELPSC’s main supply area was surrounded by the SMC’s, although it
expanded its operations to Parramatta through a subsidiary, the Parramatta and Granville Electric Supply
Co. The ELPSC continued to operate successfully until the early 1950s, when it was acquired by the
Electricity Commission of NSW after a lengthy valuation case. The Commission retained the Balmain
Power Station and in 1956 transferred the inner western supply area to the Sydney County Council and
the Parramatta supply area to the Parramatta Municipal Council, which transferred its undertaking to the
Prospect County Council in 1956.
The competence of the ELPSC was widely recognised: so much so that in 1950, a Labor government
appointed its general manager Harold G.Conde and chief engineer F.Sykes as the first chairman and first
15
chief engineer respectively of the ECNSW. Nevertheless the ELPSC was destined to occupy a unique and
limited niche in the Sydney electricity system. Attempts to establish another private company on the
North Shore were blocked by the McGowen Labor government, which came to power in late 1910.
14
The Electric Lighting Committee comprised 12 of the 24 SMC aldermen. Between 1919 and 1924 the
average length of service on the committee was 3 years. The greatest turnover was in 1922 when 5 new
members were appointed.
15
Its decisions were subject to the ratification of the full Council. As late as 1913, matters as trivial as the
acceptance of a tender for the purchase of empty cases from the Electric Light Store had to be referred to
the committee (SMC/ELC 12.5.13).
16
In 1913 a report commissioned by the Lord Mayor on the workings of the various departments of the
Council stated:
‘The electric Light Undertaking is the one Department of the Municipal Council which is
capable of demonstrating that its work is being economically and efficiently carried out, and
freed from Municipal routine and patronage, would be able, by comparison with other Electric
Light Undertakings, to show the profits which were commensurate with the volume of business
transacted’. (SMC 1913,580)
17
Transfers of electricity supply earnings to other council purposes was possible under the provisions of
the Municipal Council of Sydney Electric Lighting Act 1896, but not under the more general
Municipalities Electric Lighting Act 1904 or under subsequent legislation for County Councils.
18
The only years in which there was a contribution to the rates were 1918 (₤22,000), 1922 (₤33,000) and
1923 (₤30,592). This represented an average return of capital of 0.6% of total capital investment in those
years. The average annual return on capital for the undertaking as a whole was 2.8% during the 1910s,
declining to 0.8% during the 1920s (Wilkenfeld,315).
19
The Railways Department (RD) had commenced the electrification of the city’s tramways from Ultimo
power house in 1899. Construction of White Bay power station started in 1912 in anticipation of the
electrification of the suburban railways. The RD generated more electricity than the SMC in each year to
1930.
The RD system had originally been designed for low voltage DC supply for traction, but as it expanded
its technology incorporated high voltage AC, for economic transmission throughout an expanding area of
operations. This enabled the RD to supply electricity for general purposes at any point along the extensive
tramway and railway systems.
The Chief Railway Electrical Engineer of the 1920s, W.H.Myers, strongly advocated the policy of
supplying in bulk the suburban municipalities along the southern rail lines, at prices which returned a
small profit (Paddison 1956,118). Some energy was exchanged with the SMC under informal
arrangements after 1918, but the RD had no legal powers to enter into formal supply arrangements with
outside bodies until the Government Railways (Supply of Electricity) Act 1922. Armed with the Act, the
Commissioners formalised the arrangements under which they had been supplying Parramatta council
since 1921, and commenced supply to the St. George County Council in 1923 and the Sutherland Shire
in 1925. By 1928 they were supplying the entire south-western region of the metropolitan area (Tait’s
Electrical Directory 1929,160).
20
In 1920 the four adjoining municipalities of Bexley, Hurstville, Kogarah and Rockdale constituted
themselves into a county district and negotiated a bulk supply agreement with the Railway
Commissioners. The Minister for Local Government acknowledged the historical significance of the
county council's formation when he opened its first formal meeting in December 1920:
‘I cannot too strongly impress upon this Council the importance of the responsibilities they are
charged with, for you are the body that is charged with setting a lead to the rest of the State in
matters under the Local Government Act ...’ (St George County Council,21).
The StGCC commenced supply in March 1923 (ibid,29). Its primarily residential load was dominated by
lighting until domestic power use increased, following active promotion by the council. Even so, the
system load factor barely reached 30% by the early 1930s, compared with over 40% for the SMC. The
StGCC’s attempts to promote commercial and industrial sales stalled during the Depression.
16
21
In the first ten years of trading the StGCC realised a small net surplus for reinvestment, amounting to
about 3% return on the total capital (St George County Council,64,70).
22
Summarising the achievements of the county council in its first decade, the county clerk added:
‘It is well for the people of this district to keep the above facts in mind when proposals are
submitted for the absorption of this Undertaking in Greater Sydney, Electricity Commissions and
other such schemes which are continually being resurrected by successive Governments. For
many years Greater Sydney proposals have been in the air, and in the year 1931, the Government
brought down a Bill under which it was proposed to abolish the St. George County Council and
to rob the people of their Undertaking, without compensation of any kind. The council was
forced into the position of fighting for its very existence and was gratified to find that it was
supported by the people’ (St George County Council,39).
23
The SGCC's primary objectives were to lower prices and expand sales. Increasing sales meant greater
efficiencies of scale and so lowered the council’s average distribution cost per unit sold. If they were
daytime sales, they compensated for the night-time peaks and led to better load factors and lower average
bulk purchase costs. There was every incentive for the council to promote electric cooking, space and
water heating, and to press the bulk supplier to reduce the purchase price to achieve still greater volumes.
The SGCC was successful in this respect: in 1932 it claimed to supply ‘the cheapest current in Australia’
(St George County Council,3).
24
In 1929, with the Civic Commission due to be replaced by a new council, the Citizens' Reform
Association urged premier Bavin to place the undertaking under the control of a commission. Bavin was
sympathetic:
‘Anything we can do to ensure that the electricity undertaking will be free from political control
will be done’ (SMH 30.11.29).
Early in 1930 the government was reported to be considering a three person board, constituted like the
Railway Commission and subject to dismissal only by parliament, to take control of both the SMC and
RD electricity systems (SMH 21.2.30).
25
Labor’s defence of the inviolability of the existing structure was based on rather shaky ground,
however, since many Labor members supported proposals to transfer the undertaking to a Greater Sydney
Council (NSWPD 12.2.35, 6207,6225).
26
The State Government formed a 10 member Electricity Advisory Committee (EAC) in 1934 and gave it
statutory status under the Gas and Electricity Act 1935. The Government invoked the support of the EAC,
which had ‘carried a unanimous resolution, after full consideration, that the undertaking should be
transferred to a county council’ (NSWPD 6.3.35,6906). The Labor Party suspected that the government
was paving the way for the eventual sale of the undertaking to the private interests with which the
members of the EAC were said to be associated (NSWPD 12.2.35,6223).
The Minister for Local Government, E.S.Spooner, defended Forbes Mackay's integrity, pointing out that
he had made it plain to his employers that he was going on the EAC not as their employee but as an
independent expert (NSWPD 12.3.35,6211). Nevertheless several aldermen criticised Forbes Mackay for
his failure to keep them informed (Anderson,139).
The minutes of the EAC reveal that Forbes Mackay was particularly careful to make clear that he had no
obligation to consult or report to his employers (EAC 23.8.34). They also reveal that the question of the
reorganisation of metropolitan electricity supply was raised first by the EAC itself, and not referred to it
by the government (EAC 19.10.34). The minister then asked the EAC to advise him ‘whether a board or a
commission would be a suitable body to control the [SMC's] undertaking’; it was the EAC itself which
suggested a county council.
27
Both the State government and the management of the undertaking gained considerably from the
legislation. The government had stabilised the structure of the Sydney electricity system and reinforced
the county council as the model for State-wide electricity development. The management of the
undertaking, already effectively independent of the SMC in long term policy, was now freed from day to
day interference in staffing and administration. In fact, with the establishment of the EAC, all major
decisions regarding the Sydney electricity system could now potentially be taken at the level either of
management or of state government. This was to prove the case during normal operations, but the
17
arrangement proved inadequate to handle the post war supply crisis.
28
For some years the Minister for Works and Local Government still found it necessary to defend the
government's action, and SCC councillors continued to publicly advocate other forms of organisation
(SMH 19&20.10.36).
29
Two councillors were elected by the Sydney Municipal Council, two by the 25 municipalities south of
the harbour, and one by the 7 north of the harbour. Councillors were elected for three year terms. The
only qualification for election was eligibility for election as an alderman or councillor in any of the
constituent municipalities. The composition of the SCC from its inception to the beginning of 1949, when
it was reconstituted and enlarged, was remarkably stable: there were only 12 councillors in all, 3 of whom
had served on the SMC's Electric Lighting Committee. The northern municipalities had the same
representative for the entire period 1935-49. Labor councillors were in a majority only from 1935 to
1937, although they continued to be elected to the chairmanship until 1944. The SCC became strongly
polarised in its party alignments after the war, when it was in continual conflict with the state Labor
government.
30
In early 1937 the County Councillors rejected Forbes Mackay’s recommendation for the selection of
two high speed 50 MW turbines for the proposed Bunnerong B power station. Instead it selected a tender
for a lower speed turbine, despite the fact that both capital and running costs were substantially higher, on
the strength of the views of three British experts that the slower-running machines were safer and more
reliable (SMH 2.2.37). Forbes Mackay termed the decision ‘an unjustifiable waste of money’, and the
Australian Institute of Engineers called it
‘...one which challenges the authority of professional experts in decisions on matters which
experts alone are competent to judge, and in so doing, threatens the sound administration of one
of the most important public utility services in Australia’ (ibid).
The council rescinded its decision.
31
With the election of J.H.Gardiner (Labor) as chairman in 1938 the SCC changed its meetings from
weekly to fortnightly (SCC 1939,5), so reducing the opportunities for conflict to arise. Furthermore,
Gardiner adopted the policy of discussing contentious issues in private, ‘to prevent unseemly wrangles in
public, which damaged the prestige of the council’ (SMH 18.5.38). Despite his previous criticism that the
powers of the general manager were too comprehensive (SMH 25.1.38), Gardiner seemed to arrive at a
realistic understanding of his own role in relation to both Forbes Mackay and the government. He later
said, with unconscious irony, that the chairman of the county council was ‘a sort of liaison officer’
between the general manager and the Minister (SMH 1.11.39).
32
C.E.Ranger was appointed General Manager in July 1952, by bloc vote of the Labor councillors. His
appointment was called ‘political’ by J.O.Cramer, one of the minority Independents, who called for an
inquiry by the Minister for Local Government (SMH 26.7.52, 6.8.52). Cramer contended that there were
three staff members senior to Ranger, and that
‘...because the SCC no longer controls the production of electricity but is now only a power
distributor a commercial man should be general manager’ (SMH 26.7.52).
Cramer also alleged collusion between Ranger and F.Maguire, head of the new Planning and
Development Branch, who both belonged to a union affiliated with the one of which R.A.Triggs, a Labor
SCC councillor, was secretary (SMH 19.8.52).
In the late 1950s Ranger tried to moderate the Labor policy of keeping domestic tariffs low by
recommending that domestic consumers should bear their fair share of rises when necessary, and
industrial consumers should benefit from reductions when possible (eg SMH 9.4.58). In 1960 he
appointed as his deputy Maguire, who was by then a public critic of the SCC's policy of preference for
domestic consumers (SMH 30.10.56,28.6.60). The ensuing dispute over Ranger’s power to make the
appointment raised important issues about control in local government electricity distribution.
The Labor councillors asked the Minister for Local Government for amending legislation to transfer some
of the general manager’s powers to the council: one of them, T.I.Morey, claimed that Ranger was a
‘dictator’ and that members were ‘mere rubber stamps’, terms almost identical to those used to criticise
Forbes Mackay some 25 years earlier. The Labor councillors called on the Minister, P.D.Hills, to bring
the SCC within the Local Government Act, a move which Hills had supported when he himself had been
chairman of the SCC in 1951 (SMH 30.6.60).
18
Ranger received public support from several influential quarters, including the leader of the opposition,
R.Askin (SMH 29.6.60), the former Professor of Public Administration at Sydney University, F.A.Bland
(SMH 1.7.60), the Sydney Morning Herald (eg SMH 7.10.60) and, eventually, P.D.Hills himself (ibid). In
one of its many editorials on the subject, the Sydney Morning Herald commented:
‘One wonders, in fact, whether councillors have anything better to do than to intrigue against
Mr. Ranger and in favour of their own self-aggrandisement. If this is the sum total of their useful
activity, there seems to be no point in having any councillors at all’. (SMH 17.1.61)
When Ranger retired in 1965, the SCC appointed as his successor the chief engineer, G.Washington, who
like Ranger had spent his entire working life within the undertaking. Maguire resigned from the SCC and
wrote a number of detailed articles on the costs which local government policies were imposing on the
NSW electricity system (eg Maguire 1966).
33
The Gas and Electricity Act 1935 was amended in 1948 to enlarge and reconstitute the SCC. From
January 1949 there were four constituencies. The First Constituency was the City of Sydney, with three
representatives; the others had two representatives each. The Second comprised 8 inner western
municipalities, the Third comprised 4 eastern municipalities and the Fourth comprised 7 municipalities
north of the harbour and the City of Parramatta. 1967 amendments to the Act, taking effect on 1 August
1968, reduced the City of Sydney representation to one, and reorganised the other three Constituencies
into four, with 2 representatives each. By that time less than 7% of the SCC’s customers were located in
the City of Sydney – although some of these customers were very large electricity users.
With the amalgamations of 1979 the Council was enlarged from 9 members to 16. The local government
areas comprising the former St George CC became the Sixth Constituency (with 3 representatives), and
those comprising the former McKellar and Brisbane Water CCs became Seventh and Eighth respectively,
with two representatives each.
34
Victoria, WA and Queensland also invested heavily in power generation in expectation of the same
boom, which allowed the aluminium smelters who finally did set up (few that they were) to negotiate
long term contracts at bargain prices with desperate governments.
35
The persistence of the institutional barriers to more rational pricing were amply illustrated by the 1986
McDonell inquiry. The SCC and the Local Government Electricity Association (LGEA), representing the
other county councils, both submitted that they were getting insufficient indication of the actual
economics of generation from the ECNSW, and that they strongly suspected that such signals as they
were getting from the bulk supply tariff were incorrect (McDonell,I,229). The inquiry found ‘The present
lack of information on current and projected costs of supply severely inhibits the development of a
rational approach to tariffs...’ (McDonell,III,60) and concluded that the ECNSW ‘...would need to
undertake a study of the way in which its costs are likely to vary over time and share this knowledge with
the distribution industry and consumers generally’ (ibid,69).
36
The amendments also transferred that part of the City of Parramatta served by the SCC to the Prospect
County Council. In May 1987 the NSW government announced a special Electricity Development Fund
to ‘help small businesses to be more competitive in international markets by reducing [energy] costs’ (DT
19.5.87). The EDF provided for grants, subsidies or loans to electricity councils, as directed by the
Minister, to reduce their charges or to meet construction or maintenance costs. In addition, an amount
equal to 0.125% of the value of NSW retail electricity sales was paid out annually to the State Energy
Research and Development Fund. In July 1987 the Minister directed the SCC to pay $52 million into the
EDF in 4 equal instalments. After some public disputes about the timing, the SCC complied. In August
1988 the Minister for Energy in the newly elected Greiner government directed the SCC to pay a further
$43 million.
37
There was some subsequent debate within the bureaucracy about the proper legal ownership of the
SCC’s assets, which had been funded by revenues from electricity sales and not by the State Government.
38
The Inquiry was chaired by Mr Charles Curran AO. The other members were M.W.Kennedy (Merz
and McLellan, UK), J.B.Kirkwood (Kirkwood Energy Services) and R.G.Shields (Cresap, USA) (Future
Direction: Inquiry into the Sydney County Council, Final Report, 18 October 1989)
39
The annual reports for the period are not entirely consistent with regard to the amounts transferred each
year, and amounts are sometimes revised in subsequent years. This may well be due to the complexity of
19
the transfers – by 1995 the simplicity of cash payments to the EDF was replaced by payments for annual
dividends, income tax equivalent, sales tax equivalent and community service obligations. The estimate
also depends on the valuation of the 132 kV transmission assets transferred from the ECNSW.
40
Energy Generation and Distribution. Industry Commission Report No 11, May 1991.
41
Telstra generally undergrounded its cables, while Optus strung its cables overhead, using the poles of
the local electricity distributors. This caused extensive community concern in Sydney, where residents
were looking forward to less overhead clutter, not more.
42
The Greiner Coalition government in NSW also implemented limited restructurings in the early 1990s.
Once the SCC and the other county councils had been ‘corporatised’, the ECNSW, renamed Pacific
Power, became six separate business units, three of which were for generation. The Carr Labor
government completed the restructuring of Pacific Power and made substantial changes to the distribution
sector, which its predecessor had been reluctant to do because of the Coalition’s historic sensitivity to the
wishes of local government. In 1995 the Carr government amalgamated the 25 local authorities into six
distribution and supply companies, including the merger of Sydney Electricity and Orion Energy. The
others were Integral Energy (from the Prospect and Illawarra County Councils), NorthPower, Advance
Energy, Great Southern Energy and Australian Inland Energy.
The structure of the NSW electricity system now resembled Victoria’s, but then the Victorian
Government went much further. In 1995 it sold all five of the newly created distributors to the private
sector for $ 8.31 billion - twice the book value of the assets, and well above expectations. Over the
following three years the Victorian government sold all of the former SECV’s generation assets and the
transmissions grid, realising a further $13.75 billion. United Energy sold for $1.55 billion, Solaris Power
for $950 million, PowerCor for $2.15 billion, Eastern Energy for $2.08 billion and CitiPower for $1.58
billion. Four of the distributors were sold to US utilities and one to a combination of US and Australian
utilities. All of the generators were purchased by consortia led by US or UK utilities, usually with some
passive Australian equity. The transmission system was purchased by a US utility. As well as realising
$22.9 billion through the sale of the entire electricity supply industry, the Kennett Government also
privatised the Victorian gas transmission network and distribution companies for a further $6.3 billion
(Booth).
43
Labor’s Energy policy: Cleaner and cheaper energy. Australian Labor Party, NSW Branch, March
1995.
44
Beder, S. Power Play: the fight for control of the world’s electricity. Scribe, Melbourne 2003.
45
In 2002 the new leader of the Liberal Party in opposition, John Brogden, promised not to privatise the
electricity system (Beder,259).
46
Orion Energy was still essentially constituted as a County Council. Although it had been declared a
Corporate Body in July 1993, all 15 of its board members were elected to the Orion board by their local
government councils. Unlike Sydney Electricity, there had been no transitional phase in the early 1990s.
The Energy Services Act 1995 provided for up to 7 directors for EnergyAustralia. Five of them were to be
selected by the voting shareholders (ie the NSW Government) and one was to be selected by a
specifically appointed committee from nominees of the NSW Labor Council. The remaining director was
the Managing Director, appointed by the Board.
47
On 1 October 1996 the 47 largest customers in NSW, with annual consumption of more than 40 GWh
each, became free to select a different electricity supplier (or remain with their existing supplier). In
April 1997 a further 660 customers (using 4 to 40 GWh per year) became eligible, and so on until 1 July
1999, when every customer in NSW, including residential customers, became ‘contestable’ by any
retailer with a licence to operate in NSW. Other States participating in the National Electricity Market
followed similar schedules.
48
A leaked consultant report recommended that the staff of 3,843 should be reduced to 1,590 over four
years (Australian Financial Review 7 May 1997).
20
5. Workers and Customers
The collective personalities, training and values of the people in any organisation, their
attitudes to their jobs and their relationships to colleagues, customers and rivals, grows
into a distinctive corporate culture, especially in organisations that remain relatively
unchanged over a number of decades. Because of the specific nature of electrotechnology, electricity supply organisations bear the stamp of their central purpose more
than, say, an insurance company, a retailer or even a manufacturing enterprise of equal
vintage.
At the same time electricity undertakings face the same changes and challenges as all
other large employers and deployers of public capital, and have to respond to the same
political pressures and global events – although how they handle matters such as labour
relations or marketing is of more than usual consequence, given the increasing
pervasiveness of electricity in the fabric of urban life.
The workforce of the Sydney Municipal Council’s Electricity Department grew rapidly
as its sales and the number of its customers increased. By 1923 there were 1,657
employees, about 300 of them at Pyrmont power station.1 The workforce more than
doubled over the following three years. About half the increase was labour to build the
Bunnerong power station and the rest to service continuing growth in the distribution
business, but in both cases employee numbers were greatly inflated by the fact that the
Council aldermen had regained control over hiring. Numbers fell sharply between 1929
and 1932, with the dismissal of the City Council, the completion of Bunnerong and the
onset of economic depression.
The workforce increased again as sales resumed after the depression, but dipped after
1941, when the Pacific war began. By 1943, 890 Council workers, nearly a quarter of
the total, had enlisted or were absent on war duties. The number may well have been
higher if electricity supply had not been designated an essential service. Numbers
increased after the war as staff returned, but this was offset by the resignation of some
of the women who had filled in for them. In 1945 the General Manager, D.J.Nolan, set
up a Personnel Division to be responsible for the reintegration of demobilised staff, as
well as the more normal activities of recruitment and promotion, pay and conditions,
training, health and safety. It was a mark of the importance attached to this branch that
an engineer, A.A.Tangie, was appointed to head it.
At the end of 1951 some 2,203 employees, nearly 36 per cent of the workforce, were
transferred to the Electricity Commission. (In the first example of a phenomenon that
would become familiar at each successive merger of electricity supply organisations, the
better wages and conditions that the ex-SCC staff brought with them flowed across to
the Commission.)2 After a brief hiatus, employment growth at the SCC resumed during
the long economic boom of the late 1950s and 1960s, and did not reverse until 1969
when, coincidentally, Labor lost its majority on the Council after seventeen years.
Although the councillors did not have direct control over employment, general
managers were often happy to accede to the relatively generous employment policies
which the councillors wanted in return for freedom in other areas, especially as
declining bulk electricity prices through the 1960s allowed the SCC’s tariffs to fall
anyway.
Workers and Customers (Chapter 5 of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia)
1
Engineers
For the first 93 years of its electrical engineers headed the organisation. Paul Broad, an
economist by training, appointed Managing Director of EnergyAustralia in 1997, was
the first non-engineer in this position. In his previous career he had run other utilities
normally headed by engineers, including the Hunter District Water Board and the
Sydney Water Board.
Not only did electrical engineers occupy the most senior positions as of right, the
structure of the organisation itself reflected specific branches of electrical engineering,
some of them considered higher status – and so better suited for the advancement of
ambitious engineers – than others.
When the Sydney Municipal Council created its Electricity Department the City
Electrical Engineer came under the supervision of the Town Clerk, as did the head of
every other department. The nominal control was vested in the aldermen on the Electric
Lighting Committee, which on technical matters acted on the recommendation of the
City Electrical Engineer, and on financial and pricing matters called for supplementary
reports from the Town Clerk, who was responsible for all ED accounts, stores and
staffing.
The relationship soon changed, due to the highly technical nature of the activity, the
dominant size of the department, the forceful personality and competence of the second
City Electrical Engineer H.R.Forbes Mackay, and the fact that he was an engineer. The
most advanced management thinking of the early 20th century grew out of the discipline
of engineering, with its analysis of functions and systems, efficient use of resources and
systematic forward planning.
For the first two years of operation the City Electrical Engineer had a professional staff
of five, assisted by a small number of tradesmen and technicians. The organism began
to subdivide, as it were, in mid 1906 with the appointment of a Power Station
Superintendent and a Wires Superintendent. In 1909, following the advice of the
Council’s consultant P.Cardew, Forbes Mackay established the positions of Mains
Engineer (the first appointee was R.Vine-Hall, who later succeeded him) and of New
Works Engineer, in charge of design and of supervising construction by contractors. In
1921 this evolved into the Design and Construction Branch, which carried out the work
using its own labour.
In 1910 a Testing Branch was created to take responsibility for all the instruments
including meters, to test equipment and generally to keep the undertaking up to date
with progress in electro-technology. In 1990 this branch became the first to be
commercialised as a distinct business unit, Testing and Certification Australia.
In 1911 a Substation Engineer was appointed to take charge of the rapidly growing
number of substations, leaving the poles and wires to the Mains Engineer. A
Distribution Superintendent was appointed to be responsible for both areas in 1917
(Vine-Hall again). A Protection Section, an area of engineering that is both highly
theoretical and essential to the safety and reliability of the distribution network, was set
up in 1924. The creation of the System Operating Branch in 1930 completed a structure
that was still recognisable in the County Council’s annual report some 60 years later,
6
In 1980 SCC staff numbers increased by 1,523 (23 per cent) following the incorporation
of 1,600 staff from St George, MacKellar and Brisbane Water County Councils. The
amalgamation legislation enacted by the Wran Labor government specified that there
would be no forced redundancies, and indeed no transfers to other positions or work
locations without the employee’s consent. Consequently the workforce of the merged
entity increased further, reaching an all-time peak of 8,107 in 1982, coinciding with the
introduction of a 72 hour, nine day fortnight for all employees. From the late 1980s the
national mood of micro-economic reform, coupled with the changes in governance,
prompted a sharp decline in staff numbers, a trend interrupted only briefly by the
merger with Orion Energy in 1996.
When Sydney Electricity came into being at the beginning of 1991, its staff, along with
that of Shortland Electricity, numbered over 7,000. Barely seven years later the staff of
the merged entity, EnergyAustralia, was 57 per cent lower. Several waves of voluntary
redundancies and greater reliance on outsourcing made this dramatic reduction possible.
Staff numbers increased somewhat after 1998, and in 2004 they happened to be similar
to the Bunnerong-induced peak of 75 years earlier.
The productivity of the organisation had increased tremendously over those 75 years.
There was, coincidentally, a 75-fold increase in annual electricity sales per distribution
employee (ie excluding power station staff), from less than 100 MWh in the mid 1920s
to nearly 7500 MWh by 2000. However these trends were common to all electricity
distributors, and were partly due to the enormous growth in average electricity use per
customer.3 The ratio of customers served per employee may be a better indicator of
productivity for an electricity distributor, since the staff resources required to meet each
customer’s needs are not necessarily related to the customer’s energy use. On this
indicator (coarse as it is) the Sydney County Council appeared somewhat less efficient
than the county councils it absorbed in 1980, although more efficient than Orion, with
which it merged in 1996. On both indicators there were enormous productivity gains in
the 1990s.
Like steelworking and car manufacture, electricity supply was an almost entirely male
domain. In 1923 the SMC Electricity Department employed only 13 women, less than
one per cent of the total workforce but 10 per cent of the clerical staff. Female
employment increased as the clerical functions of the undertaking grew. Women were
employed mainly as clerks, telephonists and ‘typistes’.4 Even so, it took until 1935 to
reach 100 female employees, five per cent of the total workforce.5
The war gave a large, if temporary boost to female employment, which peaked in 1942
at 57 per cent of the clerical workforce, and over 13 per cent of the total workforce
(excluding the power stations), a level not approached again until 1998. Most of the
women were located at head office in the QVB, which by all accounts became a livelier
and more sociable place as a result.6 As in other wartime workplaces however, many
women had to relinquish their jobs when the men were demobilised, and by 1946 the
female proportion of staff had fallen to barely seven per cent. Most of the women kept
on were still in the clerical area, but a growing number were involved in publicity,
cookery demonstrations and home economics advisory services. The first female staff
member on a professional grade is recorded in 1948, but the first female engineer was
not appointed until 1985.
2
After the war the SCC reverted to its previous employment policies, which
discriminated against women through industrial awards and through informal practice,
such as the expectation that single women would resign when they married.7 The SCC
took longer to shed these habits than other county councils. Although it employed
increasing numbers of female clerical assistants, the prohibition in the SCC Industrial
Award on the promotion of women to classified clerical positions remained until 1974.8
In 1979, on the eve of the amalgamation with the SCC, the female staff ratio of the
Brisbane Water, MacKellar and St George County Councils averaged nearly 14 per
cent, while Sydney’s was still about seven per cent. The female ratio of the merged
entity briefly approached 10 per cent, but in the rationalisations and job losses that
followed (mild though they were compared to what was to come in the 1990s) female
employment fell more than male, and was back to about 7.5 per cent by the end of the
1980s.
Women seemed to do much better during the downsizing of the 1990s. While male
employment declined significantly, the number of women employed more than doubled,
with the result that in the early 2000s the female employment ratio reached 17 per cent,
the highest in the organisation’s history.9 Not surprisingly, women were underrepresented at board and executive level, although the only woman ever elected to the
Council, Kathleen Anderson (Labor), became its longest serving member (1963-1990)
and its Chairman four times.10 The first woman senior executive was appointed in 1991,
coincidentally the year in which the organisation adopted its first Equal Employment
Opportunity Management Plan.11 In December 1994 Sydney Electricity received the
Australian Human Rights Corporate Award. Increasing gender equity and diversity in
the workplace brought its own challenges: a formal code of conduct for staff was
adopted in 1996.
Although the business of electricity supply has historically relied on electrical
engineering and the electrical trades, there is a very wide range of professions, trades
and skills in the organisation. These have been categorised and summarised in different
ways over the years. From the 1920s to 1950 the majority of the workforce were
classified as ‘manual’ workers of various skill levels, from qualified electrical
tradesmen to labourers. These workers correspond roughly to the ‘wage’ category in
later reports, with professional, clerical and miscellaneous making up the ‘salary’
category. The ‘wage’ category declined from over 70 per cent of employees in the early
1950s to about 50 per cent by the early 1990s, and by the mid 1990s Trade and
Technical workers made up less than 40 per cent. (From 1998 on, employment statistics
were published by salary band).
The workforce was also segmented, in a less public way, along sectarian lines. The
tensions between Catholics and Protestants evident in virtually all other aspects of
public life in NSW were also present in the electricity undertaking. In general the
engineers and managers tended to have a higher ratio of Protestants and the manual
trades, stores and transport sections a higher ratio of Catholics, so occasionally the
tensions between groups had sectarian overtones. These gradually broke down after
World War II, although they were revived in different form by the split between the left
wingers and the (largely Catholic) right-wingers in the Labor party and the union
movement in the 1950s. Sectarian sentiment survived into the early working lives of
senior staff still at EnergyAustralia in 2004, but in much diluted forms. In the 1960s
3
there was a conscious effort by management to overcome it, and thereafter Catholics
could and did rise to senior management ranks, including general manager.
The Sydney Municipal Council’s Electricity Department began in temporary offices in
the Queen Victoria Building opposite the Town Hall. Between 1910 and 1912 a new
two-storey building was erected for the ED in Kent St, behind the Town Hall.12 The
building was designed to take five additional floors, which were added in 1916. During
1935 the QVB was extensively remodelled as offices, showrooms and basement garage
for the ED, which moved into it in late 1935, on the eve of its transformation into the
Sydney County Council. In 1957 the County Council acquired the site on the corner of
George and Bathurst Streets where its present headquarters now stand. After some
delays and false starts (which incidentally delayed proposals to demolish the QVB)
construction began in 1965 and the new building opened on 5 April 1968.13
While the County Council’s headquarters have always been within sight of the Town
Hall, many of the service functions were established further out, or moved out over
time. There was a cluster of facilities near the power station site at Pyrmont, including
the main garage (1927) and workshops. The main store was originally at Camperdown,
but when the Royal Prince Alfred hospital needed the site for its own expansion in 1949
a new store was built at Rosebery (completed 1957). By 1960 there were twenty
subsidiary stores across the metropolitan area.
With the adoption of a policy of decentralisation in the 1950s, ‘area establishments’
were built at Chatswood (1954), Five Dock (1956), Hornsby (1965), Bankstown (1973)
and Sutherland (1975).14 These became the headquarters of the District Engineers of
the Mains and Substation branches, regional stores and also relocation sites for branches
as they were forced to leave the original Kent St building (although another building in
Kent St was purchased in 1966 as a City depot). The Metering and Testing branches
went to Rosebery and Chatswood respectively. From 1965 the workshops were
progressively concentrated at the current site at Zetland.
The public facilities of head office – appliance showrooms, payment facilities and
model kitchens for cooking demonstrations – were replicated in miniature in the
suburbs. By 1968 there were nine branch office showrooms. In 1980, with the
incorporation of the St George, MacKellar and Brisbane Water County Councils, there
were 18, and remained at around this number until Sydney Electricity began a program
of property disposals after 1990.
Such a widely dispersed workforce needed means of staying in touch, in addition to the
formal workplace chains of command. In February 1936 the new Sydney County
Council launched a monthly staff journal, The QVB. In October 1946 this was
succeeded by the SCC Journal which was replaced in turn by the long-running Power
Points, published two-monthly, March 1951 to 1995, and then by Inside Energy. In the
early decades the magazines encouraged and received original articles, photographs and
sometimes drawings from staff, but over time an increasing proportion of the copy was
written by the publicity department. Begun as an attempt to create a sense of
community, the journals ended up primarily as instruments of management to inform
workers and maintain morale.
4
From April 1935 to December 1977 the Council also published a somewhat more
technical magazine, The Contactor, initially for the benefit of the electrical contractors
and appliance retailers who were so essential to its growth, and circulated eventually
‘throughout the electrical industry, to architects and builders, and to interested people in
local government’. As well as updating tariffs and wiring rules and introducing new
types of electrical equipment, such as the off-peak water heater in January 1938, every
issue featured a newly built home, with careful count of the number of power points,
lights and appliances.15
The Sports and Social Club, formed in 1936 as the umbrella group for the large number
of sporting, social and cultural groups run by Council staff with the encouragement of
senior managers did create esprit de corps.16 Membership of the club, by then renamed
the Sydney County Council Sports and Social League, peaked in 1977 at around 5,800,
fully 84 per cent of the workforce. A retired employees club was formed the same year,
and that too had a membership of over 1,000 by the early 1990s. Another common
benefit was the Sydney County Council Employees Credit Union, which in the 1980s
was the eighth largest in NSW.
The Sports and Social League provided a valuable channel for informal
communications between staff and senior managers, who were also sometimes invited
to the functions of professional and trade groupings. As the organisation increased in
size, senior managers became more remote – partly through necessity, but sometimes by
design – and had to resort to other means of trying to disseminate important information
in a somewhat personal way.17 By the 1980s, this was done by circulating videos, and in
the 1990s, by email.
Feedback in the other direction was also encouraged. One tradition successfully
maintained in various forms since the 1950s was the staff suggestion scheme.
Suggestions for improvements in any area of work or equipment design were assessed
by a panel, and if accepted were implemented, with a cash award to the staff member
and an acknowledgment in the staff journal. In 1999 a more direct line of
communication was set up: the Managing Director’s hotline. For one hour each month,
at a time advertised in Inside Energy, any member of staff could telephone direct to the
Managing Director, Paul Broad. The only condition was that calls could not be
anonymous.
5
before the legislative and corporate changes of the 1990s took effect. The only
significant change in the organisational structure on the creation of the Electricity
Commission in 1950 was the transfer of the Power Branch to the Commission.
Functions gradually devolved from the Town Clerk to the City Electrical Engineer,
designated General Manager of the Electricity Department in 1914. The transfer of
responsibility for electricity accounts from the City Treasurer to the General Manager in
1928, an important step both symbolically and practically, led to an immediate
reorganisation of the customer supply accounting, cost accounting and general
accounting of the ED under its own accountant.
The part of the organisation that took longest to develop was the ‘commercial’ which
dealt, in essence, with the value of electricity - as distinct from the means and costs of
its production - how customers used it and the equipment they needed to use it. The ED
had always employed ‘canvassers’ (door to door salesmen) but in 1926 it established a
Sales Branch to take charge of advertising and promotions and to sell appliances.18 In
1935 a senior position of Commercial Manager was created, to take charge of tariffs, as
well as promotion and sales. The first appointee was an engineer, D.J.Nolan, who had
joined the ED as Power Superintendent in 1929, and would later become General
Manager.
The creation of the Sydney County Council in 1935 gave its General Manager an
autonomy and status that was unique among electricity supply engineers. The other
county councils remained firmly in the local government mould, to the extent that at
council meetings the County Clerk sat to the right of the Chairman and in a somewhat
more elevated position than the Chief Electrical Engineer, who sat to his left.19 At
Sydney County Council meetings the General Manager sat to the Chairman’s right.
The only major constraint on the General Manager’s ability to appoint and manage
senior staff was the fact that there were two other ‘statutory’ positions other than his
own: the Chief Engineer and the Secretary. The former was by far the more important,
because it was reserved for an electrical engineer and it was, by tradition, next in the
line of succession. Six of the nine general managers after Forbes Mackay had held the
position of Chief Engineer. In the 1960s the selection of Chief Engineer became a
matter of acrimony, and represented for some councillors a way of getting at the
General Manager, manoeuvring against political opponents or, in the case of the Labor
Party councillors, rival factions or unions.
Every General Manager from Forbes Mackay’s retirement in 1938 until 1990 came
from within the organisation.20 There were well worn paths to the top, and the stepping
stones were carefully watched and guarded. General Managers adopted the practice of
appointing deputies in order to groom a favoured successor who would be presented for
Chief Engineer when the time came, or to keep alive the career of those whom the
Councillors had passed over. The manoeuvring began well down in the organisation,
and alliances between junior engineers and potentially helpful Councillors, and even
union officials, were not unknown. As in any other large organisation there were also
groups and factions, sometimes reflecting a sectarian basis, and sometimes mirroring
the political forces (conservative vs left wing vs right wing Labor) that permeated
public organisations of any size in Sydney.
7
Successions did not always go as planned. Timing was one factor: a Chief Engineer
may retire, or be too close to retirement (or not close enough!) to be elevated. A plan
could be derailed by the vicissitudes of the Council vote, which the Labor councillors
often decided in last-minute caucus, as in the case of Washington’s accession over
McGuire in 1965. A candidate long groomed for the job may die young, as did the
unfortunate D.J.Nolan in 1946. Or, more unusually, he might be found corrupt, as in the
case of S.Y.Maling in 1929.
All of this, however, was reserved for the engineers. The intrusion of accountants,
economists, lawyers or others from a non-engineering background was rarely welcome,
but unavoidable from time to time and occasionally useful.21 An accountant’s report on
the ED’s performance in 1913 had led to greater autonomy for it, but in the first
comprehensive analysis of the economic costs of expansion in 1922, the accountants
Smith and Johnson expressed surprise that neither the Council nor the ED appeared
aware of or concerned with the financial implications of the cross-subsidies between
regions and consumer classes.22 In 1936 the SCC did make some attempts to review its
costs and prices, commissioning a report into the costs of supply to various consumers
from a chartered accountant, E.S.Wolfenden, and requesting the General Manager to set
up a committee ‘...to thoroughly examine the rating to the various groups of
consumers…’23
As an issue such as economic analysis or personnel management became important to
the organisation the pattern was to have it taken up by an engineer, rather than to
employ a specialist in that area. Although non-engineers were responsible for key areas
such as billing, accounting and finance and had an important steadying role (the first
two Secretaries of the County Council, E.P.Austin and J.B.Enfield, held their positions
for 16 and 15 years respectively), they could not realistically aspire to the top job. In
1952 Councillor J.O.Cramer, was quoted as saying ‘...because the SCC no longer
controls the production of electricity but is now only a power distributor a commercial
man should be general manager’ (SMH 26.7.52), but it is likely that this was part of the
tactics surrounding the election of C.E.Ranger rather than the expression of a widely
shared view.
After 1990 the pattern of senior appointments changed completely. Chief executives of
Sydney Electricity and managing directors of EnergyAustralia were chosen by State
Government-appointed boards, who regarded a long association with the organisation as
a liability rather than a pre-requisite. Many senior executives, especially in new business
areas, were appointed from outside, from government departments and other utilities,
gas as well as electric. Few came from non-utility private companies. In general their
experience was in management and marketing - only the strictly engineering sections
were still run by engineers.
Such a technically dominated organisation placed great emphasis on both training and
formal qualifications, from trade certificates to university degrees. Undergraduate
engineers could gain practical experience with the Council during their training, and in
1953 the SCC implemented a system of engineering cadetships for young men (and it
was almost invariably men) fresh out of school, supporting them through technical
college or university, employing them during term breaks and giving them a job on
graduation. The number of cadet engineers in training at the one time peaked at more
than 50 in the 1970s. The scheme was progressively extended beyond engineering to
8
architecture, commerce, accounting and home economics, to diploma and certificate
courses as well as degrees, and for part time study as well as full time.
Young engineers began their careers at the bottom as Grade 3 Assistant Engineers (the
scales were reversed in the 1970s, making Grade 1 the lowest), getting their hands dirty
and learning their craft from the Council’s tradesmen and foremen as much as from
other engineers.24 Some senior engineers of the old school still boast that they could do
every job in their branch if they had to. This continuity of experience was disrupted by
major reductions in staff numbers in the 1990s, which changed the age structure of the
engineering staff from mainly linear to a ‘U’ shape – an over-representation of older
engineers and younger ones, but a gap in the middle. This was recognised as a problem
and mentoring, which had always occurred informally, became official policy.25
If reductions in staff numbers disrupted the organisation in 1951 and in the mid 1990s,
so did the sudden increases caused by the amalgamations of 1980, and to a lesser extent
1996. Each event - generally called a ‘takeover’ by those working for the smaller county
councils - was followed by least two to three years of sorting out administrative
structures, painstakingly renegotiating awards and pay scales and reallocating staff to
regional centres.26 Even after they had been distributed throughout the enlarged entity,
most former employees of the merged councils retained a separate social and
professional identity for decades afterwards. Almost every engineer still knew where
almost every other engineer came from.
The regional structure of the Council’s engineering and technical services was gradually
strengthened, under four Area Executive Engineers in 1977, and then six in 1983. Three
of these were in the ‘new territories’ – Manly, Gosford and Kogarah – while the others
were based at the older centres of Chatswood, Zetland and Bankstown. After the 1996
merger a new structure developed: Sydney and South, North (from the harbour to the
Hawkesbury river), Central Coast, Newcastle, Lower Hunter (by far the largest in area)
and Upper Hunter. However, the management structure of EnergyAustralia had also
changed, so the regions now functioned more as service delivery zones for whole-ofenterprise business units than as semi-autonomous regions.
The council’s engineering was said by some of its own staff to be on the conservative
side, although others point to the very high levels of reliability that were achieved,
especially in the City, due to the commitments made in the 1930s and earlier to high
protection levels and high ‘redundancy’ (ie ensuring multiple supply pathways). This
conservatism was also evident in the tendency for complete specification and micromanagement of outside contracts, eg for cable-laying, at least until the changes of
corporate direction in the 1990s made more tasks and functions ‘contestable’ by outside
businesses bidding against internal business units.
9
Tradesmen and Unions
There are many links between the history of EnergyAustralia and the development of
the union movement in NSW, especially the Municipal Employees Union (MEU)
established in 1903 and the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) established in 1902. The
MEU covered many of the workers in the Sydney Municipal Council and its electricity
department in the early years, when most of the workforce were construction workers
and labourers, and still covers many workers at EnergyAustralia. As the number of
workers with electrical skills increased, so did the importance of the ETU.27 Engineers
and middle management also became unionised over time, in what is now the
Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia (APESMA)
and the smaller Electricity Supply Professional Officers Association (ESPOA).28
The relationship between trade unions and management could be unusually close. Apart
from the normal management-employee relationship, there were many periods when
union officials participated directly in the governance of the organisation as City
Council Aldermen and, from 1936, as County Councillors. There were historic bonds
between the labour movement and Labor State governments, and sometimes direct links
between the MEU or ETU and particular Labor politicians.29 The unions were able to
use these many points of contact to influence Government policy as it affected the
undertaking, to influence management and work practices or to bring pressure to bear
during disputes.
After 1990 the roles of workers and the labour movement in the governance of the
enterprise were both formalised and limited. The Sydney Electricity Act 1990 provided
for one of the ten directors to be elected by staff, and the Energy Services Corporation
Act 1995 provided for one of the seven members of the board of EnergyAustralia to be
a nominee of the NSW Labor Council.30
The closeness of the relationship had both positive and negative consequences. On the
one hand most workers felt, with justification, that they had a stake in the organisation.
Labour turnover was generally low, many employees stayed for their whole working
lives, and workers responded admirably in emergencies when weather or accident
disrupted supply. On the other hand, inefficiencies and over-manning became
entrenched in some work areas, it was more difficult to introduce new work practices
and technology, and managers were often constrained by the perception - often the
reality - that the unions could go above their heads if it came to a confrontation.
The first labour disputes to disrupt electricity supply were not initiated by the electricity
undertaking’s own workforce but by coal miners’ strikes in 1916 and 1917.31 In
November 1916 the State Government introduced the Electric Lighting and Gas
Emergency Act, at the request of the Sydney Municipal Council. This, the first
emergency regulation of electricity supply, released the electricity and gas companies
from their contractual obligations to consumers and constituted emergency ‘Boards of
Control’ to administer rationing.32
Many jobs were lost during the depression, which coincided with the winding down of
the Bunnerong power station project. During 1931 the Conciliation Committee, set up
under the Industrial Arbitration Act 1912, approved reductions in salaries and wages
and the rationing of work among employees in areas where this would not affect
10
electricity supply. Some workers lost one day’s work in five and others one in ten, and
pay reductions ranged from 33⅓ per cent for the highest paid to 8⅓ per cent for the
lowest paid (Anderson,116). The ETU endorsed the principle of ‘last on, first off’ where
staff numbers had to be reduced (ETU,50).
As the depression passed the Council’s workforce became more active in pursuing
improvements in wages, working hours and conditions, often with the support of the
Councillors. The ETU succeeded in its claim for a 44 hour work week in 1935, and in
1936 began a campaign for a 40 hour week.
The power station workers at Bunnerong were the most militant section of the Council’s
workforce. There were reports of Communist party members infiltrating the unions
there as early as 1932 (SMH 28.1.32), but there were no major strikes until 1945. The
intensification of industrial problems on the NSW coal fields after 1942 led to a fall of
more than two thirds in coal stockpiles by 1945 (Butlin and Schedvin,444). The SCC
had difficulty in obtaining priority in coal allocation, and substituted fuel oil where
possible.33 With the reduction in coal quality and the use of oil in boilers not designed
for it, plant efficiency fell and the need for maintenance grew.
Maintenance schedules began to slip as early as 1940 due to wartime shortages in
skilled manpower and by 1944 the backlog was acute. (Anderson,206) In May 1944 the
ETU opposed attempts to introduce regular shift maintenance, on the grounds that it
was contrary to the Award. The dispute was referred to the Industrial Commission
several times over the following 2½ years before the matter was resolved, and there
were major strikes in May and September 1945 and November 1947. A special
investigating committee set up by the SCC in December 1947 found that the behaviour
of management as well as labour had contributed to the tension (ibid,210).
The influence of the MEU and the ETU increased after 1953, when the NSW
Arbitration Act was amended to require employers to give preference in employment to
members of the appropriate unions. The unions acted in concert with the rest of the
labour movement to pursue general improvements in wages, working hours and leave,
but in addition the ETU sought official recognition of the electrical trades as the most
highly skilled and paid.34 This was recognised in the Electricians State Award granted
in 1968, after a period of labour unrest; the SCC reported over 15,200 days lost to
stoppages in 1968, its highest number ever as a distributor.35 In the following decade
there was occasional industrial action by SCC workers in support of campaigns by the
power station workers for a 35-hr working week.36 This peaked in 1973, when industrial
action at power stations caused supply restrictions on four occasions. Industrial action in
support of wage claims eased after 1975, with the adoption of ‘wage indexation’,
automatic increases linked to the consumer price index.
The ETU ‘staunchly believed that in the family of trades, the electrical tradesman was at
the top of the tree’ (ETU,93). The union was especially concerned that the pay premium
for electrical skills should be preserved at the SCC, which it considered its ‘number one
shop’ in terms of the number of its members working there and its historic role as wages
and conditions pace-setter for the electricity industry, a role which passed to the power
station workers at the ECNSW in the 1970s. The issue of skill and wage differentials
arose again when Sydney merged with St George, MacKellar and Brisbane Water
County Councils, whose workers were under local government awards. Time lost to
11
labour disputes increased in 1980 and 1981 as the ETU campaigned to preserve a skills
margin in pay even in areas where non-electricians performed identical jobs. The
merging of awards provided fertile grounds for pay increases: in 1981 there were three
separate across-the-board wage rises of 3.7 per cent, 3.6 per cent and 11 per cent
respectively.
The training of apprentices was a shared concern of the County Council and the unions.
Apprenticeships were initially for five years (reduced to four years in 1971), and
apprentices made up between 5 per cent and 7 per cent of the wages workforce in most
years. In the 1950s the Council took on around 20 apprentices each year, mainly in the
electrical trades. In the 1960s and 1970s the Council regularly reported a lack of
workers with skills in the areas it needed. The apprentice intake was progressively
increased to a peak of 96 in 1981, after which it fell to little more than 30 in the early
1990s.37 The trend reversed after the merger with Orion, and in 2003 there were 57 new
apprentices, including several women.
Safety has always been the most important shared concern of workers and management.
The work of electricity distribution is inherently dangerous, and there were fatalities in
most years up to the 1950s.38 In 1937, after a number of fatal accidents, the Sydney
County Council and the ETU participated in three sub-committees set up to implement
more stringent safety regulations, especially concerning work on live mains.39 It was
difficult to assess the safety performance of the undertaking before publication of data
on lost time injury rates in a consistent form began in 1989. On this indicator there were
remarkable gains in safety performance between 1989 and 2003, with lost time injury
rates per hour worked falling by 90 per cent. Some of this improvement came from the
elimination of dangerous methods and hazardous materials: for example, hot lead-wiped
joints, a staple of cable laying for over a century, were replaced by new techniques in
1993.40
12
Reaching the Customer
The customer continues to be the reason for the existence of the organisation. The most
basic aspects of the relationship involve connecting, maintaining the supply and
collecting the money, but services and points of contact soon multiplied. The Council
did not have to convince customers to connect – the advantages of the electric light over
gas were clear enough – but it had to work hard to get them to appreciate the other
things that electricity could do for them and to use more of it. By 1933 about 97 per cent
of the dwellings in the Council supply area were connected, but average household
consumption was less than 550 kWh per year.
The best way to increase residential load was to capture the thermal uses which
householders still associated with gas, to make necessities of the electric appliances that
people thought luxuries, to introduce new electric appliances and to help customers buy
them. The new appliance showroom in the renovated QVB, opened in December 1935,
was designed to do all of these things. It included a ‘model kitchen’ (along with model
living-room, bedroom and laundry). The display windows promoted the latest electric
appliances (available for sale within on easy terms) and the model kitchen inside
became a permanent base for cookery demonstrations
By 1951 there were regional showrooms at Bondi, Burwood, Crows Nest and Campsie,
replicating in miniature the facilities at the QVB. New regional showrooms were
opened at Sutherland (1955), Bankstown (1956), Kingsford (1958), Hornsby (1958) and
Chatswood (1968). After the 1980 amalgamations the number of regional showrooms
reached 18, and stayed near that number until the 1990s, when they were progressively
closed and the sites sold.
The QVB and the suburban showrooms accepted payments of accounts, and the Council
also sent staff to take payments at ‘receiving centres’, usually local town halls, to a
rotating schedule. In 1956 it appointed agents to take payments, and these proved so
much more cost-effective that the receiving centre system was soon abandoned. The
Commonwealth Bank was later appointed as the Council’s main collection agent and
was eventually collecting more than half of residential account payments. In 1992
Sydney Electricity launched ‘Phonepay’, Australia’s first fully automated payment
system, allowing customers to make payments by credit card or by direct transfer from
their accounts, using the telephone touchpad.
Metering of electricity use is an essential function of an electricity utility. All of the
Council’s meters were imported until 1920, when the Electric Meter Manufacturing
Company started production of its own design in Sydney. The Council’s engineers
assisted the firm with design, and placed meter orders of increasing size, and soon
adopted a similar policy toward the local transformer industry. (Anderson,84) The
Council has used several meter suppliers over the years, and in general the meters have
proved remarkably durable and accurate.41 Not all electricity users bothered with
metering, however. In the early 1990s the organisation set up a revenue protection
group to detect theft, and by 1995 the unit was recouping about $200,000 per year (SE
1995,17).
The work of the staff who went from house to house and building to building to read the
meters changed hardly at all from 1904 to the early 1990s, when hand-held data loggers
13
were introduced. Remotely readable electronic time of use meters (which signalled
variations in prices during the day and metered energy and demand accordingly) were
first introduced, for business customers, at about the same time (SE 1992,51).
Compiling and printing electricity accounts was the most labour-intensive task of the
administrative division, partly because of checks to minimise billing errors. The
Council’s mainframe computer systems, beginning with an IBM 1401 installed at the
QVB in 1963, were used initially for billing, and later for financial management,
payrolls, staff records, stores and job control. Efficiency gains were slow to come,
because manual checking continued for some time after automation. After 1980
considerable effort was needed to integrate the computing, billing and payroll systems
of the three other County Councils.42 (SCC 1963,6,1967,5,1981,12) Computers were
not widely used in technical areas such as mapping, system design or operation until the
early 1980s.43
One of the main ways for the organisation to communicate with its customers was
through advertising. A constant advertiser rather than an extravagant one, the messages
changed to suit the times. Like many patriotic enterprises, much of its advertising
during World War II supported public morale, but by 1944 the future beckoned with
‘advertisements ... designed to create good-will and to maintain public interest in the
use of electricity in all fields, and particularly in the complete electrification of post-war
homes’.(SCC 1944,8).
In 1967 the Council ran a television campaign to remind the public how much cheaper
electricity had become over the previous ten years. In the early 1970s its regular TV
spots were titled Switched on Living. In 1982, when plant failures at the Electricity
Commission’s Liddell power station placed pressure on supply, the Energy Authority of
NSW ran the first ever television campaign to inform the NSW public how to minimise
or avoid the use of electricity. In the same year there were unprecedented price
increases. In 1984 the Council felt obliged to run a campaign to “restore public
confidence in our product” (SCC 1984,3).
Perhaps the most unusual transaction between the undertaking and its customers
occurred in 1989, soon after the Council had begun to pay dividends and special
payments to the NSW government for the first time. The Minister for Energy in the
Greiner Government, N.Pickard, announced that every one of the SCC’s 1.1 million
customers would receive a ‘rebate’ of $75 as a benefit of the restructuring. There were
several months of bickering between the Minister and the Council over mailing lists and
rules (eg did every meter qualify for a rebate?) which threatened to go to court. In the
end the cheques were mailed out from June 1990, with letters bearing the signatures of
both the Minister and the Chairman of the County Council, saying ‘the refund is the
result of a drive by the NSW State Government and the Sydney County Council to
provide cheap, safe and reliable electricity to all customers’.44
14
Chapter 5 Notes
1
1923 was the first year that Electricity Department staff numbers were published, in the annual report of
the General Manager of the undertaking. Before then they were included with general staff numbers in the
annual report of the Sydney Municipal Council.
2
The number transferred was nearly 500 more than the workforce of the Power Branch (which may itself
have been fattened up for the occasion), so the SCC took the opportunity to divest itself of a significant
number of surplus staff. As another farewell gesture, the SCC promoted all of its junior engineering staff
to senior grades on the eve of the transfer. When the ECNSW took control of the Railways electricity
system in 1953, some 1,800 power station workers received a 10% wage increase to bring them into line
with the higher ECNSW rates, which were themselves set by the wages of the workers transferred from
the SCC (SMH 8.9.52).
3
The dip in average MWh per customer in 1980 was due to the fact that the service areas of the three
county councils acquired in that year were predominantly residential, so average consumption was far
lower than the SCC’s own service area, which had many large commercial and industrial customers.
4
The ‘e’ was officially dropped shortly after the war (Jobson,174).
5
Power Points (February-March 1975) records that Ms Adele Madden (Chairman’s receptionist) retired
on 1 November 1974 after 45 years service, the longest of any woman then working at the Council. When
she started in 1929 she was one of 65 women (2.1% of the workforce). In the year she retired there were
518 women (7.2%).
6
In 1941 the house journal, The QVB (published monthly since February 1936) carried its first caricature
of a woman staff member. The 1941 Annual Ball of the Sports and Social Club, its third, was
remembered by some staff as ‘the best SCC ball ever’ (Jobson ,126).
7
In 1947 Miss N.Cochrane, who had applied for and won the job of Statistical Officer in the Power
Branch, was forced to resign when the union successfully appealed the appointment on the grounds that
this was a ‘man’s job’. Miss Cochrane also resigned from the union (Jobson). There were still separate
men’s and women’s jobs in 1959, when the SCC Annual Report noted that ‘…in July, 1958, it was
necessary, because of the enactment of the Industrial Arbitration (Female Rates) Amendment Act of
1958, to enter into new Agreements during 1959 to provide for the payment of equal pay for certain
female classifications included in …Industrial Agreements’.
8
This followed a 1973 decision on the State Equal Pay Case handed down by the State Industrial
Commission. The Annual Report states, a touch condescendingly:
As a result women, for the first time, were permitted to attend the clerical lectures and sit for the
annual examination. Of the thirteen women who undertook the examination, seven were
successful in all subjects. In view of their limited experience in clerical duties, these results were
most commendable (SCC, 1974).
9
The merger with Orion, which had a female employment ratio of 16%, helped in this regard. Another
contributing factor was that most of the work outsourced was in areas of traditional male employment.
Men would still be doing that work, but as contractors rather than employees.
10
There were no women board members of Sydney Electricity (1991-1995). There were women on both
the first EnergyAustralia board (Ms P.Morris) and the second (Ms B.Hutchinson).
11
Ms.M.Pailthorpe (General Manager, Marketing Division, 1991-92) was one of the senior executives
reporting to the Chief Executive.
12
The the site was later occupied by the City Council’s own offices (Town Hall House).
13
When the decision to build a new head office was taken in 1957 the QVB held nearly 1,200 staff. The
numbers reached nearly 1,500 before the new building was ready. In 1958 the Council had to take legal
action to evict the tenant on the site, and in November 1959 initiated an architectural design competition,
15
the assessors for which were the architects M.Collard, G.Molnar and W.O.McCutcheon. The winner,
announced in June 1960, was the Sydney firm of Fowell, Mansfield and Maclurcan. In August 1961
County Councillor Doherty announced that the project would be abandoned because the estimated cost
had increased from £3 million to £ 4.5million. A few months later, against the advice of the general
manager, C.E.Ranger, the Council decided to sell the site by tender (exercising one of its few statutory
rights, the buying and selling of property). No bids were received, and in June 1963 the Council decided
to proceed after all. First it had to acquire the site to the north as well to allow it to build the height and
bulk it wanted within the City Council planning guidelines. Construction started in 1965 and the building
was opened by the Governor of NSW, Sir Roden Cutler, on 5 April 1968.
In 1961 the City Council (under Labor Lord Mayor Harry Jensen, himself a former County Councillor
and chairman in 1954) announced its intention to demolish the QVB – a proposal that had some public
support – and redevelop the site, possibly as a plaza with underground parking station. The City Council
however, was legally unable to terminate the County Council’s lease (SMH 8.2.61). In the seven years
before the completion of the new County Council headquarters, public and City Council sentiment
towards preservation of buildings such as the QVB changed, so the delays almost certainly saved it.
14
Many of these sites took several years to develop and changed their function and status over the period,
so dates are approximate only. Many functions were spread across several sites. For example the main
test laboratories were at Mowbray Rd Chatswood, but the high voltage test centre was at Lane Cove and
the chemical test centre was at Pyrmont.
15
By 1962 over 5,000 copies of The Contactor were being distributed each month. The bungalow at
Gordon featured in January 1938 had 19 lighting points and 18 power outlets. The Chatswood house
featured in February 1973 had 51 lights and 55 power outlets. In the farewell issue, the General Manager,
R.W.Mitchell, wrote
There have been many changes since 1935, and one of the most significant changes has been the
great increase in the amount of published information available to the electrical industry. We are
proud that The Contactor was a pioneer in this filed and was able to provide a worthwhile
service for so many years. Now, However, it has achieved its purpose.
16
Membership grew phenomenally after 1951, when the County Council decided to donate 10/- ($1) per
enrolled member. In 1952 the Sports and Social Club was renamed the Sydney County Council Sports
and Social League.
17
The layout of the George St building may have contributed to maintaining some distance between
senior management and staff. The General Manager and the senior managers were located on level 21,
which, was served by its own (attended) lift. Level 22 was reserved for the Council Chamber, with its
own kitchen. Well into the 1980s, the General Manager and the Chairman of the Council each had the use
of a chauffeur-driven car (originally Bentleys, later Mercedes).
18
In 1928 this divided into three sections, dealing with (a) appliance sales and repairs (using both
showrooms and visits to customers homes) (b) illumination (residential, commercial and industrial) and
(c) industrial power and heating (Anderson,109).
19
See for example St George County Council Electricity Supply Undertaking: Twelve years of Progress,
1920-1932, p40.
20
With the exception of D.J.Nolan, who joined in 1929, every general manager until 1965 had been with
the organisation since 1916 or earlier.
21
The SCC staff magazine The QVB reported that the topic of the Debating Club’s first debate in April
1936 was that ‘Public Utilities Should be Controlled by Engineers, not Accountants’. The speakers for the
affirmative included a Mr Edwards of Sales Branch and Eric Ranger, the future General Manager, who
argued that financial considerations were secondary in importance to the provision of service, and only
engineers could be relied on for this. Speakers for the negative included C.Cupit, the Assistant
Accountant, who argued that a utility could not work properly without professional financial planning,
which only accountants could provide. The affirmative carried the evening (Jobson).
22
They wrote:
16
Apparently the policy of extending into the suburbs has been followed by the Council without
counting the cost. Indeed, until we prepared - with difficulty - an analysis of the capital cost of
the undertaking as between the City and Suburbs, we are not aware that anything of the sort had
previously been attempted, while no attempt has been made since 1916 to analyse the revenue
earned in various districts. How then can the Council - being in ignorance of the capital cost of
each area, and knowing nothing of the proportion of revenue earned in each - frame a
satisfactory policy of expansion ? (Smith and Johnson,15).
Smith and Johnson found that the suburbs giving the highest return on capital invested were to the east, a
compact area with a high density of predominantly residential consumers, and the south, which was
principally industrial. The mixed western zone gave a consistently negative return, as did the newly
connected northern zone, which was almost entirely low density residential.
By the time the County Council was formed in 1936 there was even more scope for cross-subsidisation,
but it was not clear who was subsidising whom. Forbes Mackay stated that the bulk supply rate barely
covered costs, while Councillor Cramer was under the impression that it was ‘one of the most profitable
sections of the council's undertakings’ (SMH 12.8.36). Councillor Gardiner said that street lighting was
subsidising industrial sales, but Vine-Hall, then Deputy General Manager, denied it (SMH 17.3.37).
23
The terms of reference were ‘...to thoroughly examine the rating to the various groups of consumers
to:(1) simplify the system of charging so that it is readily understood by the average consumer
(2) adjust the rates in order that all groups of consumers are on an equitable basis of charge
commensurate with the service rendered and the present and future needs of the Undertaking, and
calculated to promote the widest possible use of electricity’ (SCC 1936,11).
The committee rejected any major simplifications, such as the introduction of a flat rate of charge, on the
grounds that some consumers would inevitably pay more, forcing them either to economise or, in the case
of industrial consumers who received the benefit of very low marginal rates, to leave the system and
generate their own electricity (SMH 4.2.37).
24
In the 1950s junior engineers were generally called ‘Mr’, as a midshipman might be (‘Mr Smith’), and
then by their first names (‘John’). Once they were accepted they were called by their surname only
(‘Smith’).
25
The sense of continuity was also strengthened by the surprising number of successive generations of
the one family that have worked for the County Council, Sydney Electricity and now EnergyAustralia.
Three generations is not uncommon.
26
In the 1979 legislation amalgamating the Sydney County Council with St George, Mackellar and
Brisbane Water County Councils in 1980 the (Labor) State Government stipulated that no employee
would be made redundant, and none would be forced to relocate to a different workplace. This
institutionalised an additional layer of inefficiency that took most of the 1980s to overcome.
27
The Electrical Trades Union of NSW was formed in October 1902. The union was federated in 1920,
but the NSW Branch of the Electrical Trades Union of Australia was registered again in its own right in
1961, to protect members working under NSW State awards. In 1991 the federal ETU amalgamated with
a number of other unions to form the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU), but the
NSW branch retained its State registration.
28
APESMA dates back to the formation of the Post-Master General’s Department (State) Heads of
Branches Association formed in 1921, the successor of which merged in 1994 with the Australian
Broadcasting Commission Senior Officers’ Association and the Association of Professional Engineers
and Scientists, Australia to form APESMA, which then amalgamated with the smaller Australian
Collieries Staff Association (2001) and the Managers and Professional Association (2004). A report on
the last merger noted that the ‘membership base is in finance, human resources, engineering, sales,
pharmacy and architecture and many members earn more than $70,000’ (AFR 27.01.01). ESPOA was
formed in 1947 (Australian Trade Union Archives).
29
J.H.Mostyn (Lord Mayor of Sydney) and H.Jensen (Lord Mayor of Sydney and Chairman of the
Sydney County Council) were both ETU members. Prominent NSW politicians who have been ETU
members include B.Unsworth (Premier of NSW), L.Brereton (NSW and Federal Minister) and N.Thom
17
(MLC and President of the Labor Council of NSW). ETU members prominent in the labour movement
and in industrial relations include C.Dolan (President, ACTU) and J.McBean (Secretary of the Labor
Council, President of the NSW ALP and Deputy President, Australian Industrial Relations Commission).
F.Campbell, an ETU member and President of the NSW ALP, was one of the three original NSW
Electricity Commissioners, and also Chairman of the Electricity Authority of NSW. Some of these ETU
members spent part of their working lives at the Sydney County Council, as did P.Keating (Prime
Minister of Australia), who at the time was a member (and later industrial advocate) of the Federated
Municipal and Shire Council Employees Union, a predecessor of the MEU.
30
The only staff-elected director to serve on the board of Sydney Electricity was J.Thoms, a Sydney
Electricity employee. The first Labor Council appointee to the Board of EnergyAustralia was
J.Robertson, later Secretary of the NSW Labor Council. Both were ETU members.
31
In 1914 the ETU adopted the Labour Council policy not to strike during the war, but in 1917 it
triggered a transport strike over the introduction of a ‘card system’ to monitor the progress of jobs at the
Randwick railway workshops. This led to the jailing of strikers, the sacking of unionists and the creation
of a separate public transport electrical union (Pola 1982,28).
32
The act was passed within two days, and emergency rationing proclaimed (SMH 18.11.16).
At that stage the SMC only had enough coal for four days and AGL for one week. In opposing the Bill,
the Labor party advocated that the coal strike could be ended by legislating for an eight hour workday. It
also objected to the SMC’s proposals for rationing, under which street and domestic lighting was to be
maintained in preference to power for factories, of which nearly 2000 were said to be dependent on
electricity (NSWPD 16.11.16,2766). One Labor members said:
As one of the representatives of the toiling masses, I want them to be retained in their
occupations in preference to taking special measures to promote the convenience of the people at
Potts’ Point (ibid, 2775).
Although the restrictions were lifted on 12 December 1916, the Act remained in force until repealed by
proclamation in May 1917 (NSWPD 16.8.17,586). In August 1917, in response to another coal strike, the
government on its own initiative brought in a new Emergency Act, though it was content to leave the
administration of rationing to the SMC, as before (NSWPD 16.8.17,584).
33
All of the boilers at Bunnerong were equipped with supplementary oil burners in 1946 (Anderson,200)
and in 1947 large oil storage tanks were constructed at the power station (SCC 1947,8). Two oil-fired
steam boilers ordered in 1947 increased the steam output by 15 MW each, when installed in 1950 and
1951 respectively (SCC 1951,14).
34
In 1952 the average electrician’s wage was 1.25 times the average weekly wage. The ratio increased to
1.37 by 1967 and 2.89 by 1982 (Pola 1983).
35
This represented over 2 days lost per employee. In the 10 years from 1969, average days lost annually
dropped to 1855, or 0.26 per employee. At the height of the ‘skills margin’ campaign in 1981, time lost
again approached 14,000 days (it was reported as 0.74% of available work time lost).
36
In April 1971 the NSW Labor Council adopted the goal of cutting the working week of workers under
State awards from 40 to 35 hours. After the claim was rejected by the NSW Industrial Commission in
1973 (on the grounds that it would reinforce existing wage-price inflation) the ETU initiated a campaign
of industrial action. This spread to Bunnerong power station, but operations were maintained by
engineering staff, under police guard. The federal Labor Government also became involved, when the
Minister for Minerals and Energy, R.F.X.Connor, instructed the Snowy Mountains Council to operate the
hydro output of the scheme ‘in a manner that does not run counter to the intentions of the 35 Hour Week
Committee Unions’ (SMH 29.9.73). In October the NSW coalition government and the NSW Labor
Council accepted Prime Minister Whitlam’s offer to have a President of the Commonwealth Arbitration
Commission arbitrate between the parties.
The campaign simmered through the 1970s. The Minister for Energy, P.D.Hills (a former Chairman of
the SCC) said in 1973, as leader of the opposition, that a Labor government would phase in the 35-hr
week over three years (Jobson, 215). In January 1981, 6,000 ECNSW workers were granted a 35-hr week
and most County Council workers agreed to a 36-hr week and 9-day fortnight after a six week strike
18
(ETU,98). The premier at the time, N.Wran (who had succeeded Hills as Labor leader) had as a barrister
represented the unions in the 35-hr week case before the NSW Industrial Commission in the early 1970s.
37
In 1994 the ETU helped found the Electro Group Training Company, which employs apprentices
during their training, some of which is undertaken at the facilities of participating organisations, including
EnergyAustralia.
38
Although the SCC did not publish statistics, its annual report for 1952 commented that the year was the
first without a fatality since 1941.
39
The safety of electrical workers outside the distribution industry was also of concern. Despite frequent
fires and electrical fatalities, licensing for electricians was not introduced until well after plumbers,
gasfitters, drainers, dentists, medical and veterinary practitioners. The Electrical Contractors Licensing
Act 1924 was framed primarily to license electrical contractors rather than their employees, causing some
MLAs to suspect that its effect would be more to increase contractors’ power over their customers and
employees than to enhance public safety. For these reasons it was resisted by the Labor Party, but
nevertheless passed, making it an offence for any unlicensed individual to perform electrical work in
NSW. The succeeding Lang Labor government amended the act in 1927, to specifically include the
licensing of individual electricians.
40
In 1996 EnergyAustralia signed a contract with Olex Cables for the delivery of precut cable lengths to
order. XLPE cables were introduced in 2003.
41
In the 1970s and 1980s there were several thousand customer requests each year to test meters for
accuracy, and tens of thousands of normal maintenance inspections. The proportion of meters found to be
outside statutory tolerances for accuracy was usually less than 1 per 1,000.
42
Some of the problems were decidedly low-tech. One of the councils still paid workers in cash, and the
SCC arranged for this to continue for the time being. However, the payments were made first thing in the
morning, and wives complained that too much had been spent by the time the men got home. The SCC
gave permission for wives to be present during pay.
43
The SCC formulated its first five year Electronic Data Processing (EDP) Strategy in 1983, by which
time there were 330 terminals for a staff of 7,680.
44
The delayed distribution of the cheques coincided with an announcement of increases in household
tariffs amounting to about $27 per quarter. Ms Jane Graham, who received her cheque from the Premier,
N.Greiner at an event staged for the media, was quoted as saying that it would go towards paying off her
next power bill (Jobson, 253).
19
6. Challenges
A city-scale electricity distribution system needs constant attention. Demand varies
from moment to moment, and supply can be disrupted by random events such as
lightning strikes or equipment failure. Changes in urban energy demand patterns are
usually steady and constant, but from time to time special events such as the 2000
Olympic Games will test resources and ingenuity. After nearly forty years of stability,
between the cessation of generation in 1951 and the end of the County Council in 1990,
the organisation entered a period where new business models were possible and many
things were tried, not all of them with success. Inevitably there is more change to come.
Perhaps the greatest challenges facing EnergyAustralia come not from the business
climate but the physical climate. The organisation’s main business input – electricity –
was for the most part made by burning coal and releasing carbon dioxide, which by
2004 was widely accepted to be the main contributor to global climate change. This
brought a twin challenge - decoupling the business from carbon, and accommodating to
a Sydney that will almost certainly become drier, warmer and more prone to bushfire
and storm.
Storm, Fire, Flood and Failure
Many who work for EnergyAustralia see natural disasters as bringing out the best in the
organisation. Hundreds of workers are mobilised and work unceasingly until service is
restored. Customers become voices on the phone, faces in the street and people who
need immediate help in their homes and businesses, rather than abstract account
numbers and the anonymous end points of energy flows.
The emergency callout rate reflects both the underlying robustness of the electricity
distribution system and the severity of weather events. The underlying rate increased
from less than 0.4 emergency callouts per customer in the early 1950s to nearly 0.5 in
the mid 1960s. This deterioration may have reflected the addition to the County District
of outer suburban areas with more exposed infrastructure, which had been starved of
capital investment - the main reason for their amalgamation. As feeders in exposed and
lightning-prone areas were progressively undergrounded and the system became more
robust in general, the callout rate fell to little more than 0.1 callout per customer per
year by the 1990s.
Unusual weather events caused visible spikes in this trend. In November 1961, when
Sydney received eight times its average November rainfall, the rate of emergency
callouts set a new monthly record. In 1963 annual rainfall was the fourth highest
recorded, causing another spike in callout rates. One of the most destructive storms on
record happened in January 1991, when wind gusts of up to 250 kph were concentrated
in the tree-lined streets of Sydney’s upper north shore.1 164,000 customers lost power
and much of the distribution system in the area had to be rebuilt rather than repaired. It
took several days to assess and repair the damage because fallen trees, power poles,
wires and other debris made many streets inaccessible to vehicles. That event, together
with a storm the previous August, raised emergency callout rates in 1990-91 to nearly
double the background rate.
Challenges (Chapter 6 of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia)
1
Fire can also interrupt supply. The bushfires in Sydney’s outer suburbs and on the
Central Coast in January 1994 affected 250,000 customers, over 10% of the total, and
left 150,000 homes without power at the height of the emergency.2 Oil-filled
transformers are a perennial fire risk, and there were major substation fires at Pymble
(1984), Chatswood (1999) and Sydney (2003). Many of these events caused less supply
interruption than they might have in earlier times, because of the existence of more
alternative routes to maintain supply. After each event there was a review of causes,
risks and procedures to reduce the chance of a similar event, but risks cannot be
removed altogether, especially the risks of accidental damage. The ‘worst blackout in
NSW history’ occurred on 11 September 1958, when a floating crane being towed by a
tug struck the Electricity Commission’s 132 kV line across the Parramatta River at
Silverwater, in western Sydney, blacking out most of the City and the central west of
NSW for about 12 hours.3
Natural disasters also bring out the best in cooperation between electricity suppliers.
Following the devastation of the city of Darwin by cyclone on 25 December 1974, the
Sydney County Council was requested by Commonwealth and NSW government
agencies to co-ordinate assistance from NSW electricity distribution authorities.
Cables, insulators and other heavy equipment was immediately sent by Navy vessels
and volunteer crews and their vehicles were transported by RAAF aircraft. The Darwin
power station was brought back into operation by 31 December.
The Games
Soon after Sydney’s successful 1994 bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games,
EnergyAustralia signed up as the ‘energy partner’ to provide the electricity
infrastructure. The main Olympic site, on obsolete industrial land at Homebush Bay in
Sydney’s middle west, was within EnergyAustralia’s distribution area. By the time of
the event itself new electricity market rules allowed EA to retail energy to the other
venues as well, including those further west in Integral Energy’s distribution area. In
June 1997 EA became the Official Energy Management Partner, which meant that it
was also responsible for maintaining energy supply during the Games, and in September
1998 it became Official Energy Management Partner for the Sydney 2000 Paralympic
Games as well.
The most ambitious of the many projects that EA carried out at Homebush was to
underground 80 km of overhead 132 kV lines and remove 46 towers, partly to improve
reliability but mainly for aesthetic and other non-tangible benefits. Sydney had won the
Games partly on the strength of a commitment to a ‘green’ Olympics, in which venues
would use renewable energy where possible and the worst of the old industrial
landscape would be cleaned up, and too-prominent power lines would have clashed with
the images beamed to what became the world’s largest television audience.
A new 132/11 kV zone substation was built at Homebush, to ensure supply in the event
of outages at the existing Flemington or Mason Park substations and to support postOlympics residential and commercial development in Homebush. During 1997 and
1998, 12 new substations were completed at the new Showground, relocated next to the
stadium, and another four in the stadium itself. This period coincided with changes in
EnergyAustralia’s structure made necessary by the merger with Orion and by the
impending changes in the electricity market. The newly created business units gained
2
experience competing with outside companies, and won contracts to design and build
electricity and communications systems for the International Broadcast Centre, the
Main Press Centre and the SuperDome and the solar collectors on top of the lighting
towers on the plaza outside the stadium. Collectively, the Homebush Bay development
was the largest single electricity supply development ever undertaken in Australia.4
The full cost of EnergyAustralia’s association with the Olympics and the Paralympics
has not been revealed, but there is no doubt that the organisation made the most of the
marketing opportunity. It launched the EnergyAustralia brand at events such as ‘Lights
On’ in March 1999, the first major sporting event at Stadium Australia. By supplying
gas to the Olympic flame, it made a point of publicising its new natural gas retail
licence, with the gas coming from Bass Strait via Duke Energy International’s newly
completed Eastern Gas Pipeline.5
The sponsorship enabled EnergyAustralia staff to run in the Olympic torch relay and to
attend the opening ceremony and other Olympic events. More than 80 employees
worked as volunteer stewards, drivers and marshals. In the meantime, 40 EA power
managers and several hundred staff worked around the clock at the venues, under the
supervision of a special Olympic Monitoring Centre at George Street head office.
Between the opening ceremony on 15 September 2000 and the closing ceremony on 1
October EnergyAustralia achieved 100 per cent reliability of electricity supply to the
Games venues, surpassing Georgia Power’s record of only 9 seconds of outage at the
Atlanta Games in 1996 (EA 1997,54; 2000,17).6
The Environment
The first conscious effort to soften the impact of electrification on the urban landscape,
the design of substation buildings in harmony with their neighbours in the city and the
suburbs, became Council policy as early as the 1920s. The soot pollution from urban
power stations did not seem to be a major public issue, possibly because so many
factories and domestic fires also contributed to Sydney’s pre-war pollution, and by the
time public awareness of urban air quality had increased – prompted mainly by the
exponential proliferation of internal combustion engines – power generation had moved
to the coalfields.7
When ‘Environment’ first appeared as a heading in its own right in the 1979 Sydney
County Council Annual Report, the issues were the undergrounding of high voltage
mains, ‘aesthetic lopping’ of street trees to clear overhead wires, the ‘sensitive’ design
of zone substations and the practice of planting as many trees as possible to hide less
attractive Council installations.
The idea that the production and use of electricity could have wider impacts on the
global environment via the ‘greenhouse effect’ first came to public prominence in the
late 1980s. In June 1988 the International Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in
Toronto declared that ‘The Earth’s atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented
rate by pollutants from human activities, inefficient and wasteful fossil fuel use and the
effects of rapid population growth in many regions’. The equally novel proposition that
electric and magnetic fields from high-voltage power lines could have a detrimental
effect on human health emerged at about the same time.
3
The term ‘greenhouse effect’ first appeared in Sydney Electricity’s 1991 annual report,
along with the a commitment to ‘take into account the demands of the community for
more efficient use of energy and the conservation of resources’. Of the three appliances
chosen for promotion as ‘energy-efficient’, the electric water heater unfortunately led to
far higher greenhouse gas emissions than its gas competitor and the reverse cycle air
conditioner became, a decade later, a problem in its own right because of its
contribution to peak load.8 The microwave oven, however, fitted the bill.
In the early 1990s the organisation began encourage domestic customers to use less
electricity, subsidising the purchase of compact fluorescent lamps, time controllers and
movement-sensitive switches, under its ‘PowerSmart’ program. In 1993 it launched a
new business unit, Sydney Electricity Energy Services (eventually renamed Australian
Energy Solutions), to review the electricity use of business customers and identify ways
to save costs by using electricity more efficiently or using it at different times. In an
effort to lead by example, more energy-efficient fluorescent lighting with movement
and daylight sensors was installed throughout the head offices at George Street.
There was also, for the first time, public acknowledgement that the electricity that
Sydney Electricity supplied was generated largely from coal, and that there were ways
of generating electricity that produced less greenhouse gas or none at all. In 1993
Sydney Electricity became a foundation supporter of a new solar energy research
facility at the University of NSW, and made arrangements for its first purchase of
electricity generated from a ‘renewable’ source, methane gas drained from the Lucas
Heights municipal waste landfill. It also began to support natural gas-fired combined
heat and power projects in the metropolitan area.
In 1995 Sydney Electricity and Orion Energy both found that many of their customers
would be willing to pay more than the normal tariff for ‘green’ electricity, generated
from renewable sources rather than from coal. In August 1996, soon after the two
organisations merged, EnergyAustralia launched ‘Pure Energy’ whereby it undertook to
buy, from renewable sources, enough electricity to cover the energy requirements of
Pure Energy subscribers. The sources included EA’s own 600 kW wind generator at
Kooragang Island in Newcastle, and a 400 kW photovoltaic array at Singleton. EA also
launched PowerOn, which offered integrated solar and diesel generator remote area
power packages for customers not connected to the distribution network.
Participation in Pure Energy peaked in 2000/01, at over 15,600 customers (1.1 per cent
of all EA customers) and 175 GWh sales (0.6 per cent of the total), making it for a time
the largest program of its type in the world.9 Participation then began to decline, but
greenhouse gas reductions and the use of renewable energy became a matter of
government mandate rather than personal choice. The Commonwealth Renewable
Energy (Electricity) Act, which took effect in 2001, required electricity distributors to
source a specified amount of electricity – rising to about 2% - from conforming
renewable energy sources, and set up a complex system of tradeable Renewable
Electricity Certificates (RECs). As the largest electricity retailer in Australia, EA had to
purchase more RECs than any other.
The NSW government imposed separate greenhouse gas ‘benchmark’ requirements for
electricity distributors in 1997. These were voluntary at first, and had little real impact,
4
but in 2003 they were made mandatory, with fines for non-compliance. Another
complex system of tradeable certificates was set up, this time called NSW Greenhouse
Abatement Certificates (NGACs) and, again, EA had to purchase more than any other
electricity retailer.
There were other changes as well. In the 1960s and 1970s community support for new
electricity infrastructure could be taken for granted, but by the late 1990s each major
development had to be justified to both the community at large - who were no longer
keen on large substations or overhead transmission lines - and to the Independent
Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal. EnergyAustralia was obliged to explore means of
avoiding or deferring new infrastructure, for example by encouraging customers to
reduce their electricity demand at certain times.
All of this set up tensions that will be difficult to resolve. For example the steady
buildup of off-peak water heating load since the tariff was first introduced in the 1930s
meant that about 800 MW of demand had been shifted out of the evening peak period
by 2001, fully 20 per cent of the peak load in that year – an excellent outcome from the
viewpoint of utilisation of capital resources. Yet the off-peak water heating load had
become a liability under the State greenhouse benchmark legislation, and, unlike solarelectric water heating, attracted no RECs under the Commonwealth’s renewable energy
scheme.
Commercialisation and Diversification
The abolition of the County Council structure in 1991 brought a new freedom to
diversify, to open up to outside competition and to compete in turn for outside business.
Following its commercialisation in 1990, Testing and Certification Australia (TCA)
became the first business unit to market its services and products throughout Australia
and beyond - in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and South Africa.
By 1993 Sydney Electricity had sold network installation and maintenance services to
several Australian and New Zealand electricity suppliers, and over the following years
formed joint ventures with power companies in Vietnam, China and Indonesia. It also
sold spare fibre optic capacity to a telecommunications company, and - harking back to
the 1910s, when customers needed equipment and expertise, not just electricity introduced security lighting services.
The merger with Orion and the impending start of the national electricity market
refocused attention on the structure of the organisation and on Australian rather than
international opportunities. The overseas projects were wound down, although the
‘vision’ was ‘to become the leading multi-utility company in the Asia-Pacific region’.
EnergyAustralia became a holding company with four subsidiary businesses – Retail
and Marketing (which contested the market for electricity and gas), the Network (the
regulated entity owning the physical infrastructure), Customer Service (handling all
interactions with customers) and EnerServe, which supplied design, construction and
maintenance services. All except Network had to compete with outside businesses to
supply services to the other divisions, and were also free to compete for outside
business. The Customer Service business included not just the normal utility functions
such as call centres and billing, but also TCA and EnergyFix, which supplied standard
5
electrical fitting and maintenance services to builders, householders and small business,
often using independent contractors.
In 1999-2000 external business sales were about $ 155 million, over 7 per cent of total
EA revenue, although this dropped somewhat in the following years. However, this did
not include revenues from energy sales to new contestable customers outside the EA
distribution system, including those in other States, which were not publicly reported
for reasons of commercial confidence. When large electricity users became contestable
between 1996 and 1998, EA decided not to offer unprofitably low contracts to retain or
build market share, with the result that it lost 30 to 40 per cent of its larger business
customers, and total revenues fell from $ 2,090 million in 1995-96 to $ 1,870 million in
1998-99. By 1999 about 10 per cent of the lost market share had returned, and by 200203 total revenue was 30 per cent higher.
The forays into non-energy businesses were less successful. In 1998 EA formed a new
venture called Downtown Utilities, in partnership with two other electricity suppliers,
Energex in Brisbane and CitiPower in Melbourne, and a telecommunications provider,
Williams Spectrum, to run fibre optic cable through the three Central Business Districts
to use as a platform for marketing telecommunications services. This venture developed
into a separate company, PowerTel, in which EA invested nearly $73 million by 2001.
The business faced keen competition in the telecommunications field, and by 2004 had
yet to be profitable.
Another, shorter-lived joint venture was the clearChoice credit card, which gave
cardholders points to be ‘automatically exchanged for a guaranteed discount on their
energy bill or other household bills.’ (EA 2000,24). Launched into a crowded field, the
card did not achieve a critical mass of takeup, and was abandoned.
The next 50 years
When the Sydney County Council published 50 Years of Electricity Supply, the
foundations laid down in 1904 were still recognisable. At the Jubilee Celebrations on 8
July 1954 the Chairman, H.F.Jensen, concluded his address:
What of the future? It is our responsibility to retain for local government the
important function we now discharge; this can only be done by retaining and
extending the service we provide. Additional municipalities are now
considering, or have already agreed to apply for, inclusion in the County area.
This augurs well for the future…(Anderson,247)
In fact, local government had already lost its lien on electricity and the organisation was
well into its next phase, managerial control enlivened by party political conflict. After a
phase of informal then formal State government control, it adopted the structures and
modes common to most modern corporations, whether publicly or privately owned.
No longer was it enough to attract municipal councillors into the fold, so they would
bring with them the growing electricity demand of suburbs-full of houses, shops and
factories. By 2004 every house and business in NSW, and the other States in the
national energy market, was an independent customer in its own right, to be attracted
and retained, if not on a daily basis than at every contract renewal cycle.
6
Barring some global catastrophe, there will still be two great constants in another 50
years – Sydney and electricity. Greater Sydney will be a more crowded place –
although if the right land use planning and green space decisions are made, not
necessarily a less pleasant one.
Electricity will still be the only means of energising lights, motors, and of course the
‘infostructure’ of data and communications devices. What is less certain is how it will
be produced, and who will supply it. It is likely that renewable sources of electricity
such as wind and photovoltaics will be exploited more than they are today, but
interacting with the network and with fossil fuel generation, rather than independent of
it. The network will still be essential for concentrating energy into high density areas
such as Sydney, and to balance and distribute electricity generated from an increasing
number of small sources, many of them driven by the cycle of wind, sun and water
rather than by energy demand.
The geographic extent of the electricity grid may shrink, in the face of the enormous
costs of renewing the long carriers built to supply the outlying areas of NSW from the
1950s to the 1970s. Stand alone power supplies (such as those offered by
EnergyAustralia’s PowerOn business) have long been cost-competitive against grid
connection at the edges of the network, and given the changes in the energy market
politicians will be less able to insist on uneconomic projects for their own constituents
than in the past.
If reducing greenhouse gas emissions does become a serious public objective, it will
most likely be accomplished by switching from coal-derived to natural gas-derived
electricity, by switching from electricity to direct natural gas use for heat and by
dramatically increasing the efficiency of all energy use, using technologies that have
long been available but not widely taken up because energy prices have been so low.
Renewable energy sources do not yet have the capability to maintain the energy
economy, and could not compete economically if large and rapid reductions in carbonintensity were called for in the near future. Natural gas use will almost certainly
increase, and the gas may well be used in novel ways such as fuel cells to generate heat
and power silently at the user’s site.10
EnergyAustralia is fortunate to be positioned, by accident as much as strategic intent, at
the energy use end of the business rather than at the coal-fired electricity generation
end, and to have gained a foothold in natural gas, which may well provide the pathway
to a hydrogen-based – or at least hydrogen-rich – energy economy.
How the organisation makes and grasps its opportunities and manages its risks remains
to be seen. In one sense it has already left home. EnergyAustralia is a brand name under
which a household in Melbourne, say, or Wagga Wagga may get a bill for natural gas,
rather than a shopfront on the high street where you could marvel at the latest electrical
appliances offered by the Sydney County Council.
The organisation is not likely to again occupy the foreground of the urban scene as it
did from the 1930s to the 1960s, when it strove to teach Sydneysiders how to be
modern. But EnergyAustralia, its predecessors and successors, will remain part of the
fabric of the city as long as Sydney is Sydney.
7
Chapter 6 Notes
1
The Sydney hailstorm of 20 April 1999 was the worst natural disaster to hit NSW since the 1989
Newcastle earthquake, and caused the greatest insurance loss in Australian history to that time. However,
the damage to electricity distribution infrastructure was minor compared with the 1991 storm. At the
peak of restoration work in 1991 the Restoration Task Force comprised 1,045 staff from Sydney
Electricity and 408 from other supply authorities. Some 150 poles, 3,500 streetlamps, 139 km of overhead
mains and 38 km of house service cable had to be replaced.
2
Sydney Electricity losses included 108 poles, 5 substations and 40 km of overhead mains.
3
It was said at the time that, while better communications between the Maritime Services Board and the
Commissions might have prevented the event, the impact would have been far less if it had occurred after
the Commission’s new 330 kV system for supplying Sydney, then under construction, was complete
(SMH 13.9.58).
4
EA’s EnerServe business installed 60 distribution substations and their infrastructure, 300 km of cable
and 13,000 lights at the Olympic Site and the Olympic Village.
5
The 795 km Eastern Gas Pipeline runs between at Longford in Victoria and Horsley Park at the
southern outskirts of Sydney. The completion of the pipeline enabled Bass Strait producers such as BHP
and Esso to compete in the NSW gas market for the first time, against the SA Cooper Basin producers led
by Santos, who supplied AGL. To get its gas to retail customers, EA Retail and Marketing had to make
network access arrangements with AGL, just as AGL’s electricity retail arm had to make arrangements
with EA Network to supply customers in EA’s area.
EA reported that the cauldron consumed 14,500 gigajoules of gas during the Olympics Cauldron - more
than 595 average Sydney households need in a whole year, and that ‘a fine-tuned air to gas ratio is
required for the Olympic Cauldron to achieve a luminous type of flame rather than the blue flame
normally associated with gas’ – an association forged by AGL's very effective ‘Living Flame’ advertising
campaign launched in 1979.
6
Ironically, the only public near-disaster involved the Olympic flame, for which EnergyAustralia
supplied the gas. From the moment the flame cauldron was lit by the 400 metre runner Cathy Freeman
until it completed its journey to the top of the Olympic Stadium, where it was to burn for the duration of
the Games, the flame relied on bottled gas. The carriage jammed for about a minute and, it was learned
afterwards, was running dangerously low on bottled gas before it reached the permanent gas supply of its
docking station.
7
When Balmain and White Bay power stations were briefly recommissioned in 1982 after the plant
failures at the Liddell power station, there were complaints from the residents of Balmain that washing
left on the line was spotted with soot.
8
In an attempt to retain the domestic hot water load against growing competition from natural gas, NSW
electricity distributors, with the support of the ECNSW, introduced the ‘Big Blue’ off peak water heater
in 1990. This had a second heater element connected to the day rate supply, placed high in the tank to
limit the volume of water it could heat (and hence limit the amount of energy that it could draw outside
the off peak period). The intention was to counter AGL’s marketing claim that gas water heaters would
never run out of hot water, whereas conventional off-peak electric water heaters could. All of the ‘Big
Blue’ energy use was charged to the user at off peak rates, although the electricity distributor purchased
the energy for the upper element from the ECNSW at higher daytime prices. There was a complicated
formula to reimburse the difference.
9
In June 2000 the Pure Energy program had 14,592 domestic and 908 business customers. In December
2003 domestic customers had fallen to 8,249 but business customers had increased to 1,479.
10
Fuel cells can operate with any chemical that produces a hydrogen ion, including methane (natural gas)
and pure hydrogen. They can convert up to 40% of the chemical energy to electricity and another 40% to
8
heat, with the main combustion product being water (where pure hydrogen is the feedstock), with small
amounts of CO2 (where methane is the feedstock).
9
Appendix 1. Interviewees
Don Anderson, Executive Manager Retail and Marketing, EnergyAustralia
Susan Bailey, General Counsel, EnergyAustralia
Penny Campion, Senior Counsel, EnergyAustralia
Paul Broad, Managing Director, EnergyAustralia
Mervyn Davies, former General Manager Network, EnergyAustralia
John Earls, former Manager Network Business Operations, EnergyAustralia
Michael Egan, Treasurer, Government of New South Wales
John Eisenhuth, General Manager Enerserve, EnergyAustralia
Allan Gillespie, former Chief Executive, Sydney Electricity
Colin Harris, former Organiser, Electrical Trades Union of Australia, NSW Branch
Lynton Jamieson, Manager Network Business Systems, EnergyAustralia
Geoff Lillis, General Manager Customer Service, EnergyAustralia
Chris Mahony, Manager Customer Supply, EnergyAustralia
George Maltabarow, General Manager Network, EnergyAustralia
Bob Parkinson, Manager Technical Services, EnergyAustralia
Fred Rainbird, former General Manager, Sydney County Council
Bernie Riordan, Secretary, Electrical Trades Union of Australia, NSW Branch
Nick Saphin, General Manager Retail, EnergyAustralia
Mike Winspear, Manager Network Control, EnergyAustralia
Ted Woodley, former Managing Director, EnergyAustralia
Appendix 2. Office Bearers
The Electric Lighting Committee of the Municipal Council of Sydney,
1904
J.G.Griffen
T.Henley, MLA
T.Hughes
E.Jones
R.Mackey
A.McElhone
J.L.Mullins
A.Taylor
E.L.Thompson
J.C.Waine
E.G.Watkins
W.C.Wilkinson
City Electrical Engineers, 1904 -1935
T.Rooke
H.R.Forbes Mackay
Resident Electric Engineer, 1902 to 1904
City Electrical Engineer, 1904 to 1908
City Electrical Engineer, 1908 to 1935
Chairmen of the Sydney County Council, 1936 - 1990
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
S.A.Lloyd, MLA
S.A.Lloyd, MLA
A.McElhone
J.H.Gardiner
S.E.Parry
E.P.Tresidder
The Hon.S.E.Parry, MLC
W.N.Harding
A.McElhone
J.O.Cramer
F.G.Pursell
J.O.Cramer
J.O.Cramer, MP
W.P.Henson
W.P.Henson
P.D.Hills
R.A.Triggs
H.F.Jensen
F.Green
N.G.Crook
F.B.Joyce
E.C.O’Dea
The Hon.W.T.Murray, MLC
The Hon.W.T.Murray, MLC
W.Doherty
Concluding sections of Electrifying Sydney: 100 years of EnergyAustralia
2
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987/88
1988/89
1989/90
1990/01
G.R.Ibbett
The Hon.J.I.Armstrong
K.H.Anderson
K.H.Anderson
K.H.Anderson
G.I.Ferris
G.I.Ferris
J.A.L.Shaw
G.I.Ferris
S.L.Hedges
S.L.Hedges
I.Haviland
I.Haviland
Sir Emmett McDermott
D.B.Carruthers
M.K.F.Bray
M.K.F.Bray
The Hon.K.H.Anderson, MLC
P.C.Lewis
N.A.Reidy
N.A.Reidy
N.A.Reidy
I.J.Petch
I.J.Petch
G.F.Moore
G.F.Moore
K.H.Hill
N.A.Reidy
N.A.Reidy
M.K.F.Bray
M.K.F.Bray
M.K.F.Bray (to 1 January 1991)
Statutory Officers of the Sydney County Council, 1936 - 1991
General Managers
H.R.Forbes Mackay (January 1936 to October 1939)
R.Vine-Hall (October 1939 to April 1944)
D.J.Nolan (April 1944 to May 1946)
G.S.Boyd (May 1946 to August 1950)
J.C.Craggs (August 1950 to September 1952)
C.E.Ranger (October 1952 to June 1965)
G.Washington (June 1965 to October 1970)
R.W.Mitchell (October 1970 to December 1978)
F.J.Rainbird (January 1979 to August 1987)
D.K.Gray (August 1987 to January 1991)
3
Chief Engineers
R.Vine-Hall (January 1936 to October 1939)
G.S.Boyd (October 1939 to August 1950)
J.C.A.Fraser (August 1950 to July 1960)
G.Washington (July 1960 to June 1965)
J.R.Faulks (June 1965 to July 1967)
R.W.Mitchell (July 1967 to October 1970)
F.J.Rainbird (October 1970 to December 1978)
T.E.Jeans (January 1979 to May 1983)
D.K.Gray (May 1983 to August 1987)
K.Goodrick (August 1987 to June 1990)
Secretaries
E.P.Austin (January 1936 to March 1952)
J.B.Enfield (March 1952 to February 1967)
J.H.Borserini (February 1967 to September 1972)
R.J.Pemberton (September 1972 to June 1983)
B.M.Fallon (July 1983 to July 1986)
W.R.Hunter (July 1986 to April 1990)
A.H.Smith (June 1990 to January 1991)
Chairman of Sydney Electricity, 1991 - 1995
A.G.Moyes
January 1991 to July 1995
Chief Executives of Sydney Electricity, 1991 - 1995
D.K.Gray (acting)
A.Gillespie
January 1991 to August 1991
August 1991 to July 1995
Chairmen of EnergyAustralia, 1995 - 2004
P.Hughes
J.C.Conde
February 1996 to November 1997
Appointed November 1997
Chief Executives and Managing Directors, EnergyAustralia, 1995 2004
A.Gillespie (acting CE)
A.Smith (acting CE)
E.A.Woodley (MD)
M.Davies (acting MD)
P.A.Broad (MD)
July 1995 to September 1995
November 1995 to June 1996
June 1996 to May 1997
May 1997 to September 1997
Appointed September 1997
4
Sources and Further Reading
International context
The best social history of electricity is David E.Nye, Electrifying America: Social
meanings of a new technology, MIT, Cambridge Mass. 1990. For an overview of
electrical engineering see Percy Dunsheath, A History of Electrical Engineering, Faber
and Faber, London 1969. See also T.P.Hughes, Networks of Power, Electrification in
western society, 1880-1930, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1983.
Sydney and Newcastle
The best two sources for Sydney are Shirley Fitzgerald, Sydney 1842-1992, Hale and
Iremonger, Sydney, 1992, which covers the Sydney Municipal Council and its various
boundaries; for metropolitan Sydney see Peter Spearritt Sydney’s Century: a history,
UNSW Press, 2000. For Newcastle see J.C.Docherty, Newcastle: the making of an
Australian city, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1983.
Manufacture, distribution and supply of electricity
This book draws heavily on George Wilkenfeld, the Electrification of the Sydney
Energy System 1881 – 1986, unpublished PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 1989. See
also Sandra Jobson, Power for the People, an unpublished manuscript commissioned by
EnergyAustralia in 1999. For gas see Rosemary Broomham First Light: 150 years of
gas, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1987. For the Sydney County Council see
G.F.Anderson, Fifty Years of Electricity Supply, Sydney County Council, 1955. For
local government electricity undertakings the best sources are local histories and
F.A.Larcombe, The Advancement of Local Government in NSW 1906 to the Present, 3
vols, Sydney University Press, 1978. See also Appendix 3, this book, which lists current
and former municipalities now served by EnergyAustralia.
Organisational sources
The most immediate sources for the major organisations involved in this history are
their annual reports, including the Sydney Municipal Council (and its electricity
undertaking), the Sydney County Council, Sydney Electricity, the Shortland County
Council and EnergyAustralia. The dates of all these organisations can be found in the
preliminary pages. For the Shortland County Council see Peter Armstrong, From
Council to Corporation: the history of Newcastle’s electricity supply, the author,
Newcastle, 2002, and R.A.Low, Switched on in the Hunter: a history of electricity
supply to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley 1889-1996, the author, Newcastle, 2004. For
western Sydney see R.A.Low, Switched in the west: a history of electricity supply to
Parramatta and the western region of NSW 1890 to 1990, Parramatta and District
Historical Society, c.1992.
5
Electricity in the workplace and home
See R.S.Cowan, More Work for Mother: the ironies of household technology from the
open hearth to the microwave, Basic Books, New York, 1984. Andrew Spearritt, The
Electrification of the Home in NSW, unpublished BA (Hons) thesis, Department of
History, University of Sydney, 1983. On women’s work, including domestic service,
see Beverly Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann, Nelson, Melbourne,
1975. On workplaces, see the histories of individual industries, from automobile and
appliance production to office work, retailing and information technology.
Trade Unions
There is a pictorial history of the Electrical Trades Union in NSW, Anna Collins, 100
Years of Lighting the Way, Focus Publishing, Sydney, 2003. For sources on labour
relations see the chapter by Peter Love in D.H.Borchard ed., Australians: a guide to
sources, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, Sydney, 1987 and the journal Labour History,
1962 to the present.
Environmental issues
D.H.Coward, Out of Sight: Sydney’s environmental history 1851-1981, Department of
Economic History, ANU, Canberra 1988. See also the annual State of the Environment
reports published by the federal government.
Pictorial and archival sources
The book draws heavily on EnergyAustralia’s own extensive photographic archives,
including material from former organisations, especially the Sydney County Council.
EnergyAustralia holds well over 100,000 negatives covering the period 1935 to the
1980s. Pictorial material since then is more spotty. The Sydney Municipal Council
archives cover the electricity undertaking to 1935, and their database is available at
www.cityofsydney.nsw,gov.au Extensive photographic records of Sydney are held by
the Mitchell Library and the State Archives, which also hold Newcastle material, as
does the Newcastle Public Library. There are many published photographic accounts of
Sydney and Newcastle over this period.
Full references for Electrifying Sydney
A fully referenced version of the text for Electrifying Sydney, including extensive
explanatory notes and sources, can be found on EnergyAustralia’s website,
www.energy.com.au In addition to the sources cited above, the following sources are
directly quoted in the text.
Black, George A History of the NSW Political Labor Party from its Conception until
1917, Sydney not dated (c.1926)
Cusack, Dymphna and Florence James, Come in Spinner, Heinemann, London 1951
EANSW (1954) Organisation of Electricity Distribution in the County of Cumberland,
Electricity Authority of NSW, March 1954
6
EANSW (1977) Inquiry into the Feasibility of Combining 18 Nominated Electricity
Distribution Areas into Four New Areas, Statement by the Electricity Authority of New
South Wales, April 1977
Lang, Jack T. I Remember, Invincible Press 1956 (reprinted MacNamara's Books,
Katoomba 1980)
Pearce, S.L. Municipal Council of Sydney - Electricity Supply Undertaking, Sydney
Municipal Council 1924
Smith, F.J and Johnson Municipal Council of Sydney Electricity Supply Department:
Report by Messrs. F.J.Smith & Johnson, W.E.Smith Ltd, Sydney 1922
Wicken, Harriet F. The Kingswood Cookery Book, Edwards, Dunlop & Co, Sydney
1891
Data and Graphs
The graphs appearing throughout this book are based on many data sources, including
published annual reports, published and unpublished government reports, company
archives and censuses. Many of the grphs are based on data sets in G.Wilkenfeld (1989,
op.cit), and the sources are documented there. The data series have in most cases been
extended to to 2003. For data gaps of up to two years the missing points have been
interpolated, but there has been so extrapolation or filling of longer gaps.
7
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date of publication is given for newspapers and parliamentary debates. The meeting date
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AET Australasian Electrical Times
AFR Australian Financial Review
Allbut, Guy A Brief History of Public Electricity Supply in Australia and the Formation
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Anderson, Gordon F. Fifty Years of Electricity Supply: The Story of Sydney’s Electricity
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Australians 1888 Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Sydney 1987
AWW Australian Women’s Weekly
Batson, L.D. Electrical Development and Guide to Marketing of Electrical Equipment
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Beder, S. Power Play: the fight for control of the world’s electricity, Scribe, Melbourne
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Black, George A History of the NSW Political Labor Party from its Conception until
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9
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Municipal Council 1924
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10
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(NSW Branch), 2B Graphics, Sydney 1983
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Engineering Association of NSW Vol. 1, 1885-6
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Report by Messrs. F.J.Smith & Johnson, W.E.Smith Ltd, Sydney 1922
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Unpublished BA (Hons) Thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney 1983
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11
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12
Author notes
George Wilkenfeld
Originally trained as an architect in Adelaide, George Wilkenfeld’s interest in how
buildings and cities use energy was sparked by the oil crises of the 1970s. His
experience in energy policy began in the NSW public service and he now works as an
independent energy consultant in Sydney. His doctoral thesis at Macquarie University
charted the evolution of Sydney’s energy system. He helped set up Australia’s appliance
energy labelling program in the 1980s and is currently measuring greenhouse gas
emissions and creating water efficiency labelling systems.
Peter Spearritt
Currently a Professor of History at the University of Queensland and Director of The
Brisbane Institute, Peter Spearritt writes about the evolution of Australian cities. His
books include The Sydney Harbour Bridge:a life, and Sydney's Century, which won the
NSW Premier's prize for Australian history in 2000. He is the co-author of Holiday
Business; Tourism in Australia since 1870 (2000), Jack Lang (1977), Sydney: A Social
and Political Atlas (1981), Planning Sydney's Future (1988) and The Open Air
Museum: the cultural landscape of NSW (1980).
13

Electrifying Sydney: 100 years

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