Yallourn Power Station

Golden steam billows from three cooling towers at dawn in the Latrobe Valley, the plumes catching early light above a valley floor buried in fog. A pine silhouette frames the left edge, its canopy level with the base of the rising columns. Below the mist line the ground has disappeared entirely. A 30-second exposure stacks the steam into solid gold columns over a sea of cloud.

Yallourn W is a working brown-coal station, built in two stages from 1970 into the early 1980s and still feeding the Victorian grid, supplying around a sixth of the state's electricity in 2024. It is the survivor of a much longer complex. The State Electricity Commission of Victoria began generating here in 1928 with Yallourn A, and stations B, C, D and E followed into the 1960s. The SECV also built a company town to house the staff, which reached a population of about 5,000. In 1969 it was announced that the town would be demolished so the open cut could expand, and it was gone by 1982. The plant outlived the town built to run it. Brett photographed this at sunrise on 28 August 2011. EnergyAustralia has announced that Yallourn W will retire in mid-2028.