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Hey there! 👋
Skander here.
We listened to the full Stepchange Show episode on the US electricity grid so you didn’t have to.
OK fine, you should still listen to it. It's incredible.
When Ben from the show asked us to join as an expert and give feedback on the research, we were happy to oblige. The result is one of the best pieces of energy content produced this year.
But if you want the cocktail party version, the investor dinner version, or just the “blow your colleague’s mind on Slack” version, here are 100 facts that stuck with us.
From amber-rubbing ancient Greeks to Enron traders yelling “burn, baby, burn,” the grid’s story is wilder than most fiction.
🌊 Let’s dive in
The word “electricity” comes from the Greek word for amber, elektron, because rubbing amber on cloth made it attract feathers.
Benjamin Franklin didn’t fly a kite to get struck by lightning. He flew it to prove lightning was electrical. Within months, lightning rods were appearing on buildings across Philadelphia, Boston, London, and Paris.
Franklin coined the terms “positive” and “negative” charge and called an array of connected Leyden jars an “electrical battery,” the first use of that word in an electrical context.
The first battery was born from a feud over dead frogs. Luigi Galvani believed frog legs twitched because of “animal electricity.” Alessandro Volta disagreed, built a stack of zinc and copper disks separated by salt-soaked cardboard, and created a continuous flow of electricity in 1800. No dead frogs required.
Michael Faraday started his career as a bookbinder. He read the scientific texts he was supposed to bind, impressed Humphry Davy with beautifully bound lecture notes, and got hired as Davy’s lab assistant.
Faraday’s 1831 breakthrough (moving a magnet through a coil of wire to generate current) is the operating principle behind every power plant on Earth today.
In 1809, Humphry Davy created an arc of electricity between two carbon rods so bright that audience members had to shield their eyes. It was the first time electricity produced something useful.
Edison’s first customer for electric light was J.P. Morgan, who had a private generator installed in the cellar of his brownstone. It was so loud it shook the walls and terrified the neighbors.
Edison went to the press in October 1878 to announce that electricity would light homes, heat rooms, and cook food. He didn’t even have a working bulb yet. His announcement crashed gas stocks on both sides of the Atlantic.
The British Parliament investigated Edison’s claims and concluded his dreams were “unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”
Edison’s team tested everything for a lightbulb filament: platinum, bamboo, even human beard hair. A carbonized cotton thread finally burned for 14.5 hours.
On September 4, 1882, Edison’s Pearl Street Station in Manhattan lit up 400 lamps across a one-square-mile radius. The New York Times reported a “soft, mellow light, grateful to the eye.”
Edison’s team had to invent everything from scratch: the wiring, insulation, junction boxes, meters, safety fuses, and even the way light bulbs screw into sockets.
Edison priced electricity at the same cost per hour as gaslight on purpose. If the light was better and the price identical, gas companies would have no argument.
Nikola Tesla had his breakthrough in a Budapest park in 1882, allegedly mid-poem. He grabbed a stick, started drawing in the sand, and nearly wept. “I have solved the problem. I can now die happy.”
Tesla’s AC motor had no brushes, no commutator, no physical contact between moving parts. It worked through rotating magnetic fields, like a maglev train for electricity.
When Tesla arrived in New York in 1884, he had 4 cents, a book of poetry, and a letter of introduction to Edison. Edison dismissed AC immediately as “the executioner’s current.”
After leaving Edison and being pushed out of his first company by investors who wanted arc lighting (not revolutionary motors), Tesla went from premier inventor to ditchdigger. Literally.
Over one year, Tesla filed more than 40 patents covering the motor, generator, transformer, and transmission system for AC. He had blueprinted an entire alternate electrical universe in a single sprint.
George Westinghouse recognized the transformer’s power immediately because of his background in gas pipelines: pump something at high pressure, regulate it down locally. Same idea, different medium.
Edison’s anti-AC propaganda included an 84-page pamphlet titled “Warning,” demonstrations where dogs were electrocuted on stage, and lobbying for the electric chair to use AC so people would associate it with death. He tried to make “Westinghoused” a verb meaning “to be killed by electricity.”
AC won because of copper. AC central stations required one-third the copper of DC systems. In an era when copper costs could make or break profitability, the math was fatal to DC.
In one year of selling AC systems, Westinghouse built 68 central stations. Edison, after eight years of DC, had only 121.
J.P. Morgan merged Edison’s company with a competitor without telling Edison until the day before. The new company was called General Electric. Edison’s name didn’t make the cut.
In 1893, Westinghouse lit the Chicago World’s Exposition with the largest AC station ever built, 25 times larger than anything in existence. 27 million people walked through. Within a year, AC had captured 50% of the electricity market.
103 of America’s richest men pooled $2.6 million to harness Niagara Falls. Early proposals for how to do it included rope, water pressure, and air pressure. Nobody was sure.
In 1896, electricity flowed 26 miles from Niagara Falls to power Buffalo’s streetcars. It was the first proof that long-distance AC transmission worked at commercial scale.
Niagara’s first plant produced 11 megawatts, nearly 20 times what Edison’s Pearl Street Station had managed.
Cheap hydropower from Niagara turned aluminum from a precious metal (more expensive than gold, reserved for Napoleon’s most honored dinner guests) into a commodity (under $1 per pound). Smelting one ton of aluminum takes enough electricity to power a home for over a year. Industry joke: aluminum is just congealed electricity.
Samuel Insull was Edison’s personal secretary, matching the boss’s four-hour sleep schedule. When Edison needed copper at 2 a.m., Insull placed the order. He grew Edison’s Schenectady factory from 200 to 6,000 employees.
Insull turned down a top job at the newly formed General Electric and instead took a position at Chicago Edison, a company worth less than a million dollars at a third of the salary. Everyone thought he was crazy.
When Insull arrived at Chicago Edison, the plant was running at 5.5% capacity. He told his board the only question was when they’d be bankrupt.
Insull’s solution: find customers who needed power at different times. Streetcars peaked during morning and evening commutes. Meatpackers needed 24/7 refrigeration. Skyscraper elevators ran during business hours. He even invented “signing as a service,” leasing electric signs for free so businesses would pay monthly electricity bills.
By 1910, Insull had pushed Chicago Edison’s capacity utilization from 5.5% to over 50%, the highest in the nation. He’d solved the puzzle of time.
Insull cut electricity rates from $0.20 to $0.025 per kilowatt-hour, a nearly 90% drop in 12 years. His competitors thought it was suicide. His customer base grew from 5,000 to 200,000.
In 1902, generating one kilowatt-hour required about seven pounds of coal. Thirty years later, Insull’s system needed just over one pound. He passed the savings to consumers instead of boosting profits.
Insull is essentially the inventor of the regulated monopoly. He went to Progressive Era reformers and said: give me exclusive territory, and you can regulate my rates and profits. By 1915, 41 states had utility commissions.
Insull’s bet on the unproven steam turbine transformed the industry overnight. His first unit at Fisk Street Station in Chicago produced twice as much power as any steam engine ever built. Within a year, utilities worldwide were ordering turbine capacity.
In 1915, your home’s “electrical panel” was a wooden board with a knife switch (a literal blade of copper you slammed down) and a couple screw-in fuses.
There were no wall outlets. Power went to ceiling light sockets. To use a new GE toaster in 1915, you unscrewed your light bulb, screwed in an adapter, ran an extension cord to your kitchen, and ate toast in the dark.
If you blew a fuse and had no replacement, you might stick a penny in the fuse box to bridge the connection, overheat your knob-and-tube wiring, and burn your house down.
It took nearly 30 years from the introduction of household electricity to get wall outlets and circuit breakers that let you run a toaster, vacuum, radio, and iron without blowing fuses.
In 1907, about 8% of Americans had electricity. By 1920, 35%. By 1929, 70%. That’s smartphone-adoption speed.
In the 1920s, GE, Westinghouse, and every utility ran ads in Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping targeting women, promising electric irons and washing machines as “your willing electrical servant.”
Consumer installment credit was pioneered to sell electrical appliances. A $150 washing machine on credit for a few dollars a month.
In 1934, only 10% of American farms had electricity. A family 50 miles outside LA hauled water by hand, washed clothes manually, and went to sleep at sundown, while a family in the city had a toaster, washer, and radio.
Stringing power lines to farms cost $2,000 per mile. Private utilities needed 3-4 customers per mile to break even. Farming regions had 1-2.
Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration used 25-year loans at 2-3% interest and let farmers form cooperatives. The REA slashed rural line costs from $2,000 to $600 per mile using standardized designs and local labor.
In just two years, 350 cooperative projects across 45 states electrified 1.5 million farms. Today, rural co-ops still serve 42 million Americans across 47 states.
The Tennessee Valley Authority was so enormous that private utilities filed 38 lawsuits trying to block it between 1936 and 1939.
Building one B-17 bomber required massive amounts of aluminum. Between 1939 and 1944, aluminum and magnesium production alone consumed one-seventh of all US electricity.
Three-quarters of TVA’s power went directly to the war effort: smelting aluminum for bombers and producing nitrates for munitions.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a secret city of 75,000 people built from scratch to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb. This small city drew as much electricity as New York City. The TVA’s own chairman didn’t know what the power was being used for until mid-1945.
The government forced utilities to interconnect during WWII. Consumption rose 60% during the war, but generation capacity only needed to grow 25%, because interconnection unlocked load diversity and coordinated dispatch.
Texas interconnected its utilities in 1941 to support Gulf Coast war production but kept the grid entirely within state borders to avoid federal jurisdiction. It’s been doing its own thing ever since.
In 1956, 300 utilities and 180 appliance manufacturers launched the “Live Better Electrically” campaign. Their spokesman? Ronald Reagan, touring his all-electric Pacific Palisades home on GE Theater.
A GE internal memo stated: “By Thanksgiving, there should not be a man, woman, or child in America who doesn’t know you can live better electrically.”
TV ownership went from 10% in 1950 to 90% in 1960. Americans watched the electric future on an electric device.
By 1970, a million homes had been certified as “Gold Medallion Homes”: fully electric, no gas lines, no oil tanks.
Average household electricity consumption went from about 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year in 1945 to nearly 5,000 by the mid-1960s. Prices fell nearly 60% in real terms over the same period.
Between 1950 and 1963, American utilities built 80,000 miles of transmission lines. Enough to wrap around the Earth three times.
Every AC generator on a given interconnection spins at exactly 60 Hz (3,600 RPM). The turbines at Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam are physically locked in electromagnetic sync as they spin, like synchronized swimmers across thousands of miles.
When you flip a light switch, the drag is felt electromagnetically by turbines potentially a thousand miles away. That braking force triggers governors to open more fuel valves within milliseconds.
If frequency drops from 60 Hz to even 59.3 Hz, the grid is in serious trouble. During Winter Storm Uri in Texas, operators were less than five minutes from a complete grid collapse.
The three US grids (Eastern, Western, and ERCOT/Texas) emerged by the mid-1960s and still exist today. Texas keeps its grid within state borders to avoid FERC oversight.
The grid wasn’t planned top-down. There is no blueprint for a continental-scale synchronized machine. It emerged through thousands of utilities forced to connect, one line at a time, until the whole thing became inseparable.
On November 9, 1965, a single relay tripped at the Niagara Falls power station. Within 12 minutes, 30 million people across eight states and Ontario lost power. 800,000 riders were trapped in New York subways.
That 1965 blackout led to the creation of NERC (National Electric Reliability Council), the industry’s attempt at self-regulation to preempt federal control.
Between 1971 and 1978, the cost of building a coal plant increased about 70% in real terms. Nuclear increased 140%. Of 253 nuclear plants ordered during the boom, almost half were canceled.
The Southern Company and other nuclear utility builders reportedly made more money going over budget than turning plants online, because cost overruns still went into the rate base earning guaranteed returns.
Drivers in Pittsburgh in the 1960s had to use windshield wipers in the middle of the day to clear away soot from coal plants.
The first Earth Day in 1970 drew 20 million people, the largest demonstration in American history at the time. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and created the EPA.
Over 50 years, emissions of the six most common pollutants dropped about 80%, even while the economy tripled in size.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, US utilities spent billions converting coal plants to oil. Then OPEC’s 1973 embargo hit. Oil prices quadrupled. The speed limit was dropped to 55 mph to save fuel.
President Carter went on TV in a cardigan sweater and told Americans to turn down their thermostats. “We must face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent.”
Interest rates hit 21%, crushing utilities that had financed nuclear plants on debt. Residential electricity prices tripled from 1970 to 1985. Industrial prices quadrupled.
Amory Lovins coined the phrase that still haunts utility executives: “The cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one that you never had to generate.”
PURPA, the 1978 law that cracked the utility monopoly on generation, was born from a New Hampshire senator’s desire to help a trash-burning plant sell electricity. Utilities barely noticed. It changed everything.
California went wild with PURPA. In 1981, the state had 10 MW of grid-connected wind. By 1985: 100 MW. By 1990, California housed 85% of the world’s wind capacity and 95% of its solar.
When regulators asked Virginia for 1,000 kilowatts of independent generation, they got bids for 5,000 kilowatts from 53 different companies. PURPA was called “the Full Employment Act for economists.”
AT&T’s 1984 breakup proved you could smash a vertically integrated monopoly into pieces and the system could still work. Everyone asked: why not electricity?
Chile restructured its electricity sector in the 1970s using advice from “the Chicago Boys,” economists trained under Milton Friedman. The World Bank held it up as a model and exported it worldwide.
California froze retail electricity rates at 6.7 cents per kilowatt-hour while deregulating wholesale prices. When wholesale prices spiked to 20 cents, utilities lost money on every customer.
Enron traders bought up transmission rights, claimed lines were congested (they weren’t), and collected payments to “free up” capacity that was never actually constrained. Strategies had names like “Death Star” and “Get Shorty.”
When a forest fire shut down transmission lines, Enron traders were overheard saying: “Burn, baby, burn. That’s a beautiful thing.”
Fortune named Enron “most innovative company” six years in a row, including 2001, the year it filed for bankruptcy. Arthur Andersen was involved in the fraud. Again.
California lost $40 to $70 billion in excess electricity costs during the crisis, a direct transfer of wealth from ratepayers to energy traders. PG&E declared bankruptcy. Governor Gray Davis was recalled from office.
In August 2003, overgrown trees touching a transmission line in Ohio knocked out power for 50 million people across eight states. FirstEnergy had completed only 17% of their scheduled maintenance that year, with a backlog of 11,000 items.
American power consumers average over five hours of outages per year. In Japan and Germany, the figure is about 10 minutes.
The number-one cause of blackouts in the world’s most advanced economy is the combination of overgrown vegetation, storms, and squirrels. Squirrels have shut down the NASDAQ twice.
In 2018, a one-inch cast-iron hook, installed in 1921 on a transmission tower in the Sierra Nevadas, snapped after 97 years. The Camp Fire killed 85 people, destroyed 18,000 structures, and wiped out a town. PG&E pled guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter.
PG&E had paid $5 billion in shareholder dividends in the five years before the Camp Fire while deferring maintenance. Post-fire inspections found 250,000 needed repairs.
In 1980, China’s entire grid capacity was 66 GW. America’s was 600 GW. China then compressed a century of electrical development into two decades, building the equivalent of one new medium-sized power plant every two weeks.
China has built over 40 ultra-high voltage transmission lines since 2009, some running at 1,100 kV DC and carrying power 3,000 kilometers. The US has zero.
In 2025 alone, China added 430 GW of new wind and solar capacity. The US added 63 GW of all technologies. China was operating at nearly seven times the pace.
40% of global shipping exists just to move fossil fuels around.
Solar panels cost $76 per watt in 1977. Today: about $0.13. That’s a 99.8% cost decline. In 2023 alone, the world installed more solar than it did in the 63 years from 1954 to 2017.
The US grid runs at roughly 50% capacity. It’s sized for the worst hour of the worst day of the year. One analysis estimated $150 billion in potential savings over 10 years from better utilization alone.
In 2024, data centers consumed about 5% of US electricity. A Duke University paper found that if data centers accepted just one day per year of curtailed load during peak hours, the US could add over 75 GW of new data center capacity without building a single new power plant.
The US currently gets about 20% of its total energy from the grid. To keep pace with electrification of transport, heating, industry, and AI, that share needs to reach 40-50%. We need to build two or three more grids over the next 20 years. The grid’s story is just getting started.
This list was collected from the Stepchange Show’s “The Story of the Grid” episode. If you enjoyed these facts, listen to the full episode for the complete four-and-a-half-hour story.
And for more on the energy transition, the companies building it, and the capital flowing into it, subscribe to Climate Drift.