Ken Thornton is a self-confessed power station tragic. For half a century he has done everything from operating them to writing their histories.
His latest assignment is to trawl through a virtual vault of technical, financial, and human resources documents relating to Eraring Power station's pre-privatisation years between 1982 and 2013.
At the end of 18 months he will advise Origin Energy what from the hundreds of thousands of pages of material should be retained by the company, sent to the state archives or be destroyed in the lead-up to the plant's scheduled closure in 2025.
"I am part of a small team concerned that as power stations close, they will probably be demolished. Little, if any, tangible objects will likely be retained to remind the future of what these complexes did, why they did it and how they did it," he said.
Dr Thornton's career began as an assistant power plant operator at Liddell Power Station in 1972 before he moved to Eraring Power Station as a power plant instructor in 1979. He retired as the plant's training manager in 2007.
During his time at Eraring he also completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in history, which he would build on in his so-called retirement.
Within a year of leaving Eraring he was immersed in a PhD at the University of Newcastle, which culminated in a thesis titled The Electricity Commission of NSW and its place in the rise of centralised coordination of bulk electricity generation and transmission 1888-2003.
In the years since graduating he has compiled histories of Munmorah and Liddell power stations.
While much of his work focuses on the technical history of the region's coal-fired power plants, it is the human impact that Dr Thornton says leaves the most significant legacy.
"There's the machinery, the equipment, the plant, but then there are all those people that you worked with over the years," he said.
"People generally say what's the thing you miss the most when you retired? The majority of people say it's the people. That's why there are so many retiree groups - we want to talk to these guys about their experiences. There were the mundane periods but also the incidents and things that frightened the hell out of them. They are the sorts of things that we want to capture so our grandkids know about them."
Dr Thornton is philosophical about the closure of coal-fired plants like Liddell, Eraring and Loy Yang in Victoria.
"The stone age did not end because of a lack of stone," he said.
"It ended because something new took its place. The same applies to coal.
"The implications of closure are issues the companies and their workforces will have to work through."
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