Welsh Journals

THE ELECTRICITY INDUSTRY IN SOUTH WALES TO 1949 IN a previous issue of this review, R. H. Morgan examined the early growth of the electricity supply industry in Wales. His main focus of attention was on the political aspects of the industry's developments; this, of course, has acquired more interest in the light of the debate in the later 1980s over the desirability of private, compared with public, ownership. This article seeks to provide a corrective to the basic emphasis of Morgan's article. By focusing, as have others before him,2 on the issue of statutory supply undertakings, whether private companies or municipal authorities, Morgan fails to consider the growth of electricity supply where that supply was self- generated by the consumer. This omission would, of course, be of little significance if the scale of such self-generation were small, but in Britain generally, and in south Wales in particular, it was not. In the early twentieth century, about sixty per cent of all the electricity used in Britain was generated by the end-user,3 particularly large industrial users. In south Wales the most significant concerns which generated their own electricity requirements were the larger coal and steel companies, especially the former, though it is impossible to establish with complete accuracy the importance of self-generation in the region because of the incompleteness of the data for non-statutory concerns. Nevertheless, there is sufficient documentary material available to give an indication of the relative importance of some of the major self-generators compared to the main statutory undertakings, and this data is presented in Table 1 below.4 It is quite clear from Table 1 that some colliery companies were substantial producers of electrical power even before the First World War and remained so for much of the period prior to the completion of the grid system in the 1930s. The size of Powell Duffryn alone is quite phenomenal. In 1922 it could boast that additions currently being made to its generating capacity R. H. Morgan, "The Development of the Electricity Supply Industry in Wales to 1919', ante, Vol. 11, No. 3 (June 1983), 317-37. See, for example, I. C. R. Byatt, The British Electrical Industry, 1875-1914 (Oxford, 1979), and L. Hannah, Electricity before Nationalisation (London, 1979). 3 Byatt, op. cit., p. 95. 4 Prior to the completion of the grid, the difference between electricity generated and sold for any undertaking was small, but the grid enabled companies to purchase supplies in bulk from one another and, thus, after 1933 sales are no longer such a good indicator of output. See R. H. Morgan, 'The Development of the Public Utility Industries in Wales to 1939', (unpublished University of Wales M.Sc.Econ thesis [Aberystwyth], 1981), pp. 59-62.