The War of the Electric Currents between Thomas Edison, and his direct current system, and George Westinghouse, and his alternating current system, played out as a drama before the entire nation in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But the War of the Electric Currents was only the first of many challenges to the delivery of electric energy in America. It was followed by the excesses of the Power Trusts of the 1920s, multiple large scale power blackouts, the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, California’s misadventure with competitive electric supply and Enron’s bankruptcy. The challenges continue to this day with fears of cyberattacks on the electric grid, the aging energy infrastructure, and the need to respond to the threat of climate change. As part of this journey through the evolution of electric service, forty-year industry veteran, I. David Rosenstein, shows that, no matter how daunting the challenges, the electric industry and its policy makers have always met the challenges head-on and ensured delivery of electric supply that meets the public interest. Free on Kindle.
