In 1812 Frederick Winsor, a madcap entrepreneur, invented the public utility. The idea behind his Gas Light and Coke company, which would supply residents of London, was that instead of each household buying its own energy—bags of coal, bits of firewood—the stuff would be piped directly to them from a central location. More customers, with differing patterns of demand, would allow power plants to be used more efficiently. It was a natural monopoly: scale would spread the cost of the gasworks, the pipes and so on across large numbers of customers, each spending less than they would individually to consume just as much. The idea of “energy as a service” spread across the world.
