Turbine and Condenser

The words This is just temporary are stencilled across the side of a large turbine in the hall at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, set against a backdrop of gauges, control panels and pipe runs receding into the lower foreground. From a high walkway the view looks down into the machinery floor, where rust has taken hold across railings and housings on the right side of the frame. Rows of tall gridded windows run along the upper walls, throwing flat daylight across the concrete and steel below. The hall is wide and open above the machinery, the turbine and its associated plant filling the floor in a dense run of metal.

The 1950 contract scope was two 30,000-kilowatt back-pressure turbo-generators supplied by Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Export Co. Ltd. of Manchester, with feed-heating plant. The 1954 revised plan added a 20 MW low-pressure condensing turbine to lift power output. These machines turned steam raised from Latrobe Valley brown coal into electricity, the centrepiece of Victoria's postwar policy to sever the state's reliance on black coal from New South Wales. Electricity production commenced in December 1958. Brett photographed the turbine and condenser on 14 April 2017, in the closed complex before the demolition program began.