The project began in 1913. At that time, North Point was genuinely peripheral to Hong Kong's urban core — Victoria City occupied the western and central stretches of the island's northern waterfront, and North Point was considered safely remote, which was exactly what a power station required. The World War I interrupted construction, delaying commissioning until the summer of 1919. When the plant finally came online, its initial generating capacity was approximately 3 megawatts — modest by any measure, but adequate to serve a city that was still growing into its electrical appetite. The plant had been built to replace the inadequate Wan Chai Power Station, and it succeeded at that task for decades. As Hong Kong expanded east, North Point stopped being peripheral; the city simply grew around the plant, assimilating it into the urban fabric it was helping to power.

In December 1941, as Japanese forces invaded Hong Kong Island, North Point Power Station became a military objective. Japanese troops landed on the North Point shore and pushed toward Wan Chai, and the power station lay directly in their path. The plant was defended by a mixed force of Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps members, soldiers of the Punjab Regiment, and stragglers from the Middlesex Machine Gun Unit — an improvised, outnumbered defence. The power station fell after fierce fighting. A counter-attack by a platoon of HKVDC Armoured Cars failed: all the vehicles took hits from Japanese artillery and armoured weapons, and every member of the platoon died except a single lieutenant who escaped. Among the casualties was the plant's manager, Vincent Sorby, who survived the initial fighting but later died in a Japanese prison camp from wounds received during the battle. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the plant was repaired and extended to meet the demands of Hong Kong's rapid postwar growth. By 1966, its output had reached 34 megawatts — more than ten times its original capacity.

North Point Power Station's operational record was remarkably clean for a plant of its era — but not spotless. Two notable blackouts stand out from 1930: one caused by a fire at the plant, and one caused by something considerably stranger. A shoal of fish was sucked into the cooling water intake, blocking the system and forcing a shutdown. The fish-caused outage is the kind of event that belongs in footnotes and finds its way into conversation — a reminder that industrial infrastructure, however engineered and maintained, sits within a natural world that occasionally does not cooperate. The more serious incident came later: at 10:26 on the morning of 25 March 1977, a fire broke out in a cable terminating room on the ground floor, fuelled by oil-filled cables and cable oil. The resulting power cut stretched from Central to Shau Kei Wan — much of Hong Kong Island going dark simultaneously. Traffic signals failed; trams stopped. The fire was out by 12:57 that afternoon, but the city had been reminded of what it depended on.

By the late 1960s, the very success of the Hong Kong economy that North Point Power Station had helped enable was working against it. The plant's environmental impact on what was now a dense urban neighbourhood had become significant enough that Hongkong Electric built a new power station at Ap Lei Chau — an island off the southern coast, where there was distance from residential areas and access to cooling water. That station came online in 1968, its site having been acquired and blasted out of solid rock starting in 1964. North Point was officially decommissioned in 1978, sixty-five years after construction began. The site was cleared and redeveloped into the City Garden housing estate, a large-scale residential complex that still occupies the ground today. Electric Road retains its name as the last visible trace of what stood here: a plant that lit the city, fought a small war, and eventually outlived its usefulness to become apartments, as so much of Hong Kong eventually does.