Electrical Control Room

The electrical control room at Wangi Power Station is a tall room with a control desk down the centre and switchboards along three walls. The switchboards are panelled in dark grey enamel, mounted with rotary switches, indicator lamps, and analogue meters. Each panel covers a section of the plant: generator one, generator two, the auxiliary buses, the outgoing feeders. The desk in the centre has chairs for the duty operator and his assistant. Pendant lights hang overhead. The flooring is timber strip, varnished brown, scratched in front of the most-used positions. The room is quiet now; in operation it would have been full of the steady hum of the bus.

Power stations like Wangi were managed from the electrical control room. From the desk in this photograph, an operator could monitor every generator, switch every breaker, and respond to every fault on the plant's electrical system. The room ran on twelve-hour shifts for the full working life of the station. Wangi closed in 1986. The control room was decommissioned with the rest of the plant. The switchboards and panels were left in place because they were too heavy and too integrated to remove without serious cost. The room in this photograph is a record of how a working coal-fired plant was supervised from a single desk.