Morwell, Victoria - 1956-2014

Morwell Power Station

Morwell Power Station operated in the Latrobe Valley from 1956 to 2014, burning brown coal from the open-cut mines that define the region. Victoria's electricity supply for most of the 20th century came from the Latrobe Valley, and Morwell was one of the stations that carried that load.

Brown coal, or lignite, has lower energy density and higher moisture content than black coal. The Latrobe Valley stations were designed specifically for it. The turbine hall at Morwell was built for the volume and character of this fuel, with equipment sized accordingly. Workers operated the plant across continuous shifts through privatisation of the state's electricity network in the 1990s and into the 2000s.

The station changed ownership several times as the Victorian electricity market restructured. It finally closed in 2014, one of the later brown coal stations to go as the grid moved away from carbon-intensive generation. The turbine hall retained its full complement of equipment after closure.

The Latrobe Valley is not a tourism destination in the conventional sense, and Morwell is not a building that many Victorians have stood inside. The scale and character of the turbine hall reflect a specific industrial moment that is now past.