The organisation was unusual in that most of its senior staff were professional engineers, supported in financial and risk-management areas.

[2] In 1954, six years after nationalisation, the Government appointed the Herbert Committee to examine the efficiency and organisation of the electricity industry.

The committee found that the British Electricity Authority's dual roles of electricity generation and supervision had led to central concentration of responsibility and to duplication between headquarters and divisional staff which led to delays in the commissioning of new stations.

[4] It consisted of a Generating Board comprising a chairman and seven to nine full-time or part-time members, appointed by the Minister of Power, who had experience or capacity in "the generation or supply of electricity, industrial, commercial or financial matters, applied science, administration, or the organisation of workers".

The Headquarters Operations Department provided a service to the board and executive and could supply specialist staff.

The growth of the high voltage National Grid over the lifetime of the CEGB is demonstrated in the following table.

They constantly anticipated demand, monitored and instructed power stations to increase, reduce or stop electricity production.

They used the "merit order", a ranking of each generator in power stations based upon how much they cost to produce electricity.

A summary of the income and expenditure of the CEGB (in £ million) is as follows:[10][11] Detailed control of operational matters such planning, electricity generation, transmission and maintenance were delegated to five geographical regions.

The region produced more than a quarter of the electricity used in England and Wales and had a major share of the industrial construction programme mounted by the CEGB during the 1960s.

Previous chairman of the South Western Region were Douglas Pask, Roy Beatt, A.C. Thirtle and R.H.

In the 1970s and 1980s, for the real-time control of power stations the R&D team developed the Cutlass programming language and application system.

After privatisation, CUTLASS systems in National Power were phased out and replaced largely with Advanced Plant Management System (APMS) – a SCADA solution developed in partnership by RWE npower (a descendant company of CEGB) and Thales UK.

In contrast, PowerGen, later taken over by E.ON (which further split to form Uniper), undertook a programme to port the entire system to current hardware.

The most current version of Cutlass, 'PT-Cutlass Kit 9', runs on Motorola PPC-based hardware, with the engineering workstation and administrative functions provided by a standard Microsoft Windows PC.

The CEGB was subject to examination from external bodies and formed policies and strategies to meet its responsibilities.

[7] In 1964 the CEGB chose the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, developed by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, for a programme of new station construction.

[7] In 1981 the CEGB applied for planning consent to build a 1,200 MW pressurized water reactor at Sizewell.

[18][19] The shares in National Grid were distributed to the regional electricity companies prior to their own privatisation in 1990.

PowerGen and National Power were privatised in 1991, with 60% stakes in each company sold to investors, the remaining 40% being held by the UK government.

The combination process merged operations of UK's eight most advanced nuclear plants – seven Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR) and one Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) – into a new private company founded in 1996, 'British Energy' (now 'EDF Energy').

[21][22] The splitting process created a separate company in 1996 called 'Magnox Electric' to hold the older Magnox reactors, later combined with BNFL.

National Power split into a UK business, 'Innogy', now 'RWE npower', owned by the German utility company RWE, and an international business, 'International Power', now Engie Energy International and owned by the French company Engie.