Energy · 1882
Electric power grid
Central stations sell electricity to many customers through wires.
Edison's Holborn Viaduct station in London and Pearl Street Station in Manhattan opened in 1882, Pearl Street serving 59 customers at first. Central generation plus distribution became the backbone of 20th-century life: today grids deliver about 30,000 TWh a year.
What it built on 3
What it led to 17
- Transformer 1885
- Aluminum (Hall-Heroult) 1886
- Electric streetcar 1888
- Electric arc furnace 1900
- Czochralski crystal pulling 1916
- Home refrigerator 1927
- National grid 1933
- HVDC transmission 1954
- Shinkansen high-speed rail 1964
- Vertical farming 2012
- Grid-scale battery storage 2017
- Small modular reactors in service ~2031
- Cheap long-duration grid storage ~2032
- Hydrogen-reduced green steel ~2033
- Enhanced geothermal at scale ~2034
- Commercial fusion electricity ~2045
- Gigatonne-scale carbon removal ~2045
Related measurements
The dashed line marks when it first worked.
UK electricity output since 1896 Latest: 3.57M MWh (1998) Source: Our World in Data
US households with electric power Latest: 99 % of households (2005) Source: Our World in Data
World electricity generation Latest: 31.8k TWh (2025) Source: Our World in Data