CEGB
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Image:CEGB.png The Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) was the cornerstone of the British electricity industry for almost 50 years, from its nationalisation in 1947 to privatisation in the 1990s.
The organisation was unusual in that most of its senior staff were professional engineers (see Cochrane's monograph), but with excellent support in financial and risk-management areas.
Some people feel that it represented the best of Government planning, others feel that it had become a monolith that exemplified the worst aspects of central planning, and was ripe for reform. It is probably the case that, in its most successful period, up until the mid 1970s, it was managed in a way broadly comparable to large private-sector energy majors such as BP, but that it was late to respond to the changed pattern of energy growth following the second oil crisis.
The CEGB was created from the Central Electricity Authority (formerly the British Electricity Authority) in 1957. At the centre of the infrastructure was the central control room of the National Grid. The engineers who worked there had information about the running costs and availability of every power producing plant in England and Wales. Here they would constantly anticipate demand, monitor and instruct power station managers to produce electricity, or stop producing electricity, by reference to what was known as the "merit order". The objective was to ensure that output was always achieved at the lowest possible cost.
The CEGB had an extensive R & D section with its three principal laboratories at Leatherhead (Central Electricity Research Laboratory, CERL), Marchwood Engineering Laboratory (MEL) and Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories (BNL). There were also five regional facilities.
Although electricity privatisation began in 1990, the CEGB continued to exist until The Central Electricity Generating Board (Dissolution) Order 2001, a Statutory Instrument, came into force on 9 November 2001.
The present electricity market in the UK was built upon the breakup of the CEGB into three generating companies and the National Grid Company. The three generating companies were Powergen, National Power and Nuclear Electric. The first two were privatised in the early 1990s and the latter was held in public ownership for several years before combining with Scottish Nuclear and privatised as British Energy. A proportion of the CEGB's nuclear fleet, its older Magnox reactors, remained in public ownership as Magnox Electric, and were later combined with BNFL.
Powergen is now owned by the German utility company E.ON. National Power split into a UK business, Innogy, now owned by the German utility company RWE, and an international business, International Power.
See also
Timeline of the UK electricity supply industry
References
- The CEGB Story by Rob Cochrane (with additional research by Maryanna Schaefer), CEGB (1990)
- The Central Electricity Generating Board (Dissolution) Order 2001 full text.