Bryan Leyland

The 2006 Life Membership Award was presented to Bryan Leyland, who has had a long and distinguished engineering career, both in New Zealand and overseas.

Bryan is an Electrical and Mechanical Engineer specialising in power generation and power systems. He was the IPENZ "Communicator of the Year" in 2001.

Bryan's career started in 1956 as a cadet engineer for the Auckland Electric Power Board. In 1961 he sailed to Tahiti on a yacht and then on to USA on a sailing ship. After nine years of varied experience, he returned to New Zealand in 1970 to work for one of New Zealand's great engineers, Lloyd Mandeno. In 1974, he set up his own consulting firm, which merged with Sinclair Knight Merz in 1998. Bryan retired from Sinclair Knight Merz in 2002 and now acts as a power industry consultant.

Since the early 1990s, Bryan has been a regular industry commentator. He has warned of the need to prepare for the rundown of the Maui field; the need for the government to monitor supply and demand; the increasing risk of blackouts and shortages; the supply issues in Auckland and the South Island; impacts of the market and regulators, and alternatives to them; as well as numerous other topical matters. Bryan has been interested in climate change for several years and his views have evolved as he has learned more about the uncertainties underlying claims of manmade global warming. Bryan has worked around the world in many exotic locations, including Mauritius, West Africa, Cyprus, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Bhutan, Iran, Samoa, and East Timor.

He has been a member of the EEA for 30 years, having joined the Association in 1976. If you read through EEA Conference papers over the last four decades, you will see that Bryan has been a prodigious writer of technical and strategic electricity industry material, and has been a regular in EEA Conference Panel debates. He has assisted in the writing of numerous technical guides used by the industry, particularly in the areas of hydro generation.