The Brown Mountain Power Station

The Brown Mountain Power Station

There is an intriguing signpost near the bottom of the Brown Mountain road pointing to a Brown Mountain Power Station. Not that it’s accessible; a locked gate keeps those who may want to visit well away.

The Brown Mountain Power Station produces hydro-electricity…but, today, ‘it is an anomaly…an insignificant trickle…and only a sneeze worth’ of power is generated. It is probably the oldest and the smallest power station still feeding electricity into the NSW grid.

That was not always the case.

When it was planned in the mid-1930s, and when it opened in 1944, it was envisaged that it would supply power to the entire population in a 7,000 square mile area serviced by the Bega Valley County Council (basically all of the area from the Victorian border to Batemans Bay and west to Bemboka) and the initiative was proudly touted as ‘the greatest single development in the history of the far south coast of New South Wales.’ (The population serviced by the Bega Valley County Council was, at that time, under 20,000; today the combined population of the Bega Valley and Eurobodalla Shires is around 75,000.)

The Brown Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme was the result of community pressure spearheaded by a Bemboka shopkeeper named Dan Finn. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme had been mooted, but local feeling at that time was that the South Coast could not wait for that to be constructed, and the success of the Brown Mountain Scheme would help demonstrate the value of building the Snowy Scheme! (Not this this was necessary, because hydro-electric power stations had already operated successfully for some time on the Nymboida and Dorrigo Rivers in Northern NSW and at the Barron Falls in North Queensland.)

The Brown Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme commenced in 1924 when a gauging station was installed on Rutherford Creek that basically follows, but runs to the north of, the Snowy Mountains Highway down Brown Mountain. Water flow readings were taken from there for the next seven years.
In 1935 a proposal was submitted to Bega Valley County Council to construct a weir across Rutherford Creek and, two years later, a second-hand 450Kw generator was purchased from the Old Federation Tin Mine in Zeehan, Tasmania.

In 1942 – at the height of World War II – construction of the weir and associated power station was commenced. The work was undertaken by men who were well over military age, and practically all of their work was performed by hand.

Power to Bemboka, then Bega and Candelo, from the Brown Mountain Hydro-Electric Power Station power station became available in 1944. (The first Snowy Hydro-Electric power became available 11 years later in 1955.)

The supply was life-changing for many. Local dairy farmers (once they had been convinced that use of electricity to milk their cows would not harm their cows) scrambled to be connected to the electricity grid; refrigerators and electric stoves became ‘must have’ appliances; all-night lighting of streets in towns such as Bega became a reality: ‘kids loved it because we had a street light right outside our place. We would gather there on summer nights with bats, balls, and skates and play for hours’; ‘many families who had one or more members away fighting would listen to radio reports on the war to see if any ships were sunk or other developments had taken place’; and ‘we were allowed to listen to all our favourite programmes: Dad and Dave, Blue Hills, Bob Dyer's quiz and the concerts, which were wonderful.’

The Brown Mountain Power Station, however, soon proved to be inadequate. The late Kevin Tetley, a local historian, recalled ‘in the early 1950s the Bega Power House in Auckland Street (sited where Bega Village now stands] was still required to meet peak loads and I well remember how the diesels would start up around 2pm every day when the farmers began their afternoon milking. The constant drumming of the big diesels necessitated closing the north facing windows of the Bega High School each afternoon…But regular blackouts were still necessary in order to shed some of the load and the diesels had to be constantly monitored to avoid overloading. On one occasion a large diesel did fail in the Bega Power House’ and power was unavailable to the area for about a fortnight.

In 1946, feasibility studies had commenced into the possibility of expanding the facility by having a larger, 1,050 million gallon (4,800 megalitre – about half the storage capacity of Brogo Dam) dam constructed near the junction of the Bemboka River and George’s Creek (further to the north of Rutherford Creek) and by installing extra generating equipment in the Brown Mountain Power Station.

This upgrade, which included a 2 mile long pipeline that dropped 1,842 feet (560 metres) from the dam (which was named Cochrane’s Dam, in honour of Mr A.T. Cochrane who had been Chairman of the Bega Valley County Council for 15 years, while the construction was being undertaken) and the installation of two additional 1-Megawatt generators, was not completed until 1958.

A secondary benefit foreseen for this dam and pipeline was that it would provide a reliable supply of water for irrigation to 30 dairy farmers downstream on the Bemboka River.

It seems, however, that the new dam and upgraded power station did not provide all the benefits expected by the Bega Valley County Council.

Four months after the Cochrane Dam was officially opened, the Bega District News was reporting that the ‘Hydro Station Needs Heavy Falls of Rain’ – necessitating a rapid restart of diesel engines at the Bega Power House and in smaller power houses in other towns along the coast. (Three months later the Bega District News was reporting the dam was a quarter full, such were/are the vagaries of weather in the area.) And, eventually the debts accrued by the Bega Valley County Council from construction of the dam, having to extend transmission lines over long distances, and having erected a substantial office facility in Auckland Street, Bega (now used by Services NSW) resulted in the State Government forcing it to ‘amalgamate with’ (i.e. be taken over by) the Illawarra County Council. At the same time, control of the power station was transferred to the Electricity Commission of NSW.

In 2007 several of the older generators were replaced by one larger 4.35 megawatt generator.
Today, the Brown Mountain Power Station is privately owned by Cochrane Dam Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of Hydro Power. Its output is around 5 megawatts (in contrast to the Tumut 2 Hydro-Electric Power Station which produces 286 megawatts).

Sources: ‘Brown Mountain Power Station’ video (available to view at Bega Library and Bega Pioneers’ Museum); The Valley Genealogist, June 2013; Wikipedia; Canberra Times 23.8.1987; Bega District News 19.12.1958 and 10.3.1959; Information supplied by Peter Rogers and Warwick Wilton.

Photograph: Inside the Brown Mountain Power Station, 2004. Courtesy Bega Valley Historical Society.