A 1918 act of the Victorian Parliament appointed a board of Electricity Commissioners to investigate the feasibility of exploiting the substantial brown coal deposits in the Latrobe Valley.

A shell entity remained to administer residual assets and liabilities, and to manage a small number of government-subsidised power contracts.

During the 2022 state election campaign, the Victorian Labor Party led by Daniel Andrews pledged to revive the SEC as a participant in the deregulated National Electricity Market.

Following Labor's victory at the election, an initial $1 billion investment was allocated in the 2023–24 state budget to new state-owned company SEC Victoria.

A series of legislative reforms introduced in late 2023 will, if successful, entrench a mandate in the Victorian Constitution for the new SEC to act as a renewable energy provider, and restrict its abolition or privatisation without a special majority of the Parliament.

As a result, electricity generation and distribution tended to be carried out by municipalities, by private companies under franchise to the councils, or by joint private-public bodies.

These early generators all relied on a fuel supply provided by the strike prone black coal industry of New South Wales.

Brown coal has a low energy density due to the high moisture content and would have been uneconomic to transport to Melbourne.

He was subsequently appointed to the Victorian Government Brown Coal Advisory Committee (chaired by Department of Mines director Hyman Herman), which reported in September 1917.

It recommended the establishment of an Electricity Commission to develop the brown coal reserves, construct a power station and transmission lines.

[5] The first capital works to be carried out by the SECV was the development of the 50 MW Yallourn Power Station, briquette factory, and open-cut brown coal mine in the Latrobe Valley.

As a result, the SECV was not forced to raise power costs during the 1970s oil price shocks, in contrast to other electricity suppliers around the world.

[1] Expansion in the Latrobe Valley continued through the 1970s with the Yallourn W plant replacing the older units and delivering much greater reliability with Japanese and German technology, compared to the previously utilised equipment from the UK.

In the 1980s work on a third open cut commenced at Loy Yang, as the Yallourn and Morwell coal fields were both committed to fuel existing power stations.

[17] It held indentures for debts owed to it by brown coal gasification company, HRL Limited,[18] and remained the electricity supplier for the Portland aluminium smelter, under the name Vicpower Trading.

[27] Andrews committed to amending the state’s constitution to protect public ownership of the revived SEC if re-elected, to make it harder, although not impossible, for it to be privatised again in the future.

[34] The new renewable energy, alongside existing private investment, was planned to facilitate the shutting down of the state's largest coal plant, Loy Yang A, between 2028 and 2030.

[37] Simon Corbell, a former deputy chief minister of the Australian Capital Territory, was appointed chairman of the SEC board in April 2024.