Southern Electricity Supply
[1] Constructions managed by PWD included public buildings, dams, irrigation schemes, railways up to 1917, and for a time, ports outside Sydney.
Fortunately, Government Architect, Walter Liberty Vernon, was able to extend and adapt the empty and roofless powerhouse building, as a Mining Museum, but its never used octagonal chimney stack—a Sydney landmark—still stands as a reminder of the failed power station.
[2][3][4] Two later purposes that the chimney has had were as an elevated location for early panoramic photography[5] and, later, to support a neon sign advertising Metters domestic appliances.
[13][14] An attractive aspect of Burrinjuck's hydro-electricity was its low cost of production; it could be sold profitably at a rate lower than that generated with coal as the fuel.
[18] Goulburn was connected to the network, via Canberra, in 1938, but initially also retained its own municipal powerhouse, which remained in due to difficulties obtaining sufficient power from Burrininjuck.
The denser settlement pattern of irrigated land led to the establishment of new irrigation-based towns, such as Leeton and Griffith, which were remote from other sources of electrical power.
From Yanco, PWD built an isolated network, with main transmission lines, running west to Griffith and east to Narrandera.
[20] PWD completed the Wyangala Dam on the Lachlan River in 1935, and added a hydro-electric power station that opened in April 1947.
[23][24] Flows in the Lachlan are less regular than in the Murrumbidgee—generally falling off during winter—and PWD built a coal-fired power station, in the nearby town of Cowra, to complement the hydro-power from Wyangala and to meet generally rising demand.
Until that line was extended from Cooma to Jindabyne, to Adaminaby, to Tumut Pond, and to 'M.1.B' (Guthega Power Station), SES provided diesel-powered generation at construction sites.
After legislation was passed, in 1941, an interconnection was made, via a new SES transmission line, between Port Kembla Power Station and the Department of Railways substation at Sydenham, in Sydney.
[20] The Department of Railway's transmission lines, from Lithgow, extended as far as Wellington and passed through Orange, only around 90 km from the closest point of the SES network, at Cowra.
[38] However, despite the interconnections made during 1941 and 1942, there were still numerous isolated power systems serving regional cities and towns, and many rural areas still had no mains electricity.
Critically, there was no single entity responsible for planning and implementation of all new generating and power transmission capacity, in New South Wales, at a time when a major expansion would inevitably occur, due to rapidly growing demand[43] and the need to extend the network further.
New South Wales Government policy of the immediate post-war period was to create a single government-owned monopoly to control electricity generation within the state,[43] along broadly similar lines to what had been achieved in Victoria.
[52][53][54] However, the ECNSW also addressed long-standing issues; the lack of capacity planning, insufficient allowance for asset depreciation, fluctuating pricing depending upon the availability of relatively-cheaper hydro-electricity, greater interconnection and coordination, the need to rapidly expand generating capacity in response to rapidly rising demand, and funding of the new works.
