Consolidated Edison
Based on Wikipedia: Consolidated Edison
Beneath the streets of New York City lies an invisible empire. Ninety-three thousand miles of underground electrical cable snake through the darkness—enough wire to wrap around the Earth three and a half times. Another seven thousand miles of gas pipes thread through the bedrock, a distance that could stretch from Manhattan to Paris and back again. And coursing through dedicated conduits beneath Midtown, superheated steam at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit heats and cools some of the most famous buildings on the planet.
This is the hidden infrastructure of Consolidated Edison, or Con Ed, the company that has kept New York running for two centuries.
To understand Con Ed is to understand how cities actually work—not the gleaming surfaces that tourists photograph, but the arteries and organs that make urban life possible. It's also a case study in something economists find fascinating: the natural monopoly, that rare creature where competition might actually make everyone worse off.
The Longest-Running Stock in America
The company's origin story begins in 1823, when the forty-sixth New York State Legislature incorporated something called the New York Gas Light Company. The founding directors included Samuel Leggett, a prominent banker, and Henry Eckford, a major real estate holder. Within a year, the company received an exclusive franchise to lay gas pipes beneath the streets south of Grand Street, and its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
That trading has never stopped. Con Ed holds a singular distinction: it is the longest continuously listed stock on the New York Stock Exchange. When you buy shares of Con Ed today, you're buying into a company that has been publicly traded without interruption since 1824—through the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and every financial crisis since Andrew Jackson was president.
But the early years of the gas company reveal something essential about how utilities work in America. To expand your business, you needed permission to tear up the streets. That permission came from the Board of Aldermen. And in mid-nineteenth-century New York, the Board of Aldermen meant Tammany Hall.
Tammany Hall was the notorious political machine that controlled Democratic Party politics in New York City from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. It was famous for corruption, patronage, and the exchange of political favors for money and votes. If you wanted to do business in New York, you dealt with Tammany.
By the time William "Boss" Tweed rose to power in the late 1860s, he had positioned himself on the County Board of Supervisors, which now controlled the franchise power. Tweed understood that the real money wasn't in running the city—it was in controlling what the city bought and who got to sell it. By 1871, Tweed himself sat on the board of the Harlem Gas Light Company, one of Con Ed's corporate ancestors.
This pattern—the intimate entanglement of utilities and political power—would persist for generations.
The Gas Wars and the Great Consolidation
Throughout the nineteenth century, New York was lit by gas. Gas lamps lined the streets. Gas heated homes and powered the stoves where families cooked their meals. But the gas business was fragmented. Different companies held franchises for different neighborhoods, and the competition—such as it was—created chaos.
On November 10, 1884, a decisive consolidation occurred. The New York Gas Light Company merged with five other gas companies: the Manhattan Gas Light Company (founded in 1830), the Metropolitan Gas Light Company (1848), the Municipal Gas Light Company (1874), the Knickerbocker Gas Light Company (1876), and the Harlem Gas Light Company (1855). Together they formed the Consolidated Gas Company of New York.
The word "consolidated" would become a recurring theme in the company's history. Over the next century, Con Ed would absorb more than one hundred and seventy individual gas, electric, and steam companies.
Enter Edison
In 1880, Thomas Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company with a revolutionary proposition: he would provide electricity to customers in Manhattan. The initial service area was modest—just one square mile in Lower Manhattan. His first customers numbered fifty-nine.
But Edison's electricity changed everything. Where gas was dangerous and smoky, electricity was clean. Where gas lamps flickered, electric lights burned steady. Where gas required extensive ventilation, electricity required only wires.
The transition from gas to electricity wasn't immediate—these shifts rarely are. For decades, both industries coexisted. But by the early twentieth century, the writing was on the wall.
In 1901, the Consolidated Gas Company made a fateful acquisition: it bought Edison Illuminating Company. This was not a company trying to protect a dying business; it was a gas company recognizing that electricity was the future and positioning itself accordingly.
What followed was a period of rapid consolidation. At the turn of the century, more than thirty companies generated and distributed electricity in New York City and Westchester County. The industry was a mess of competing standards, redundant infrastructure, and inefficient duplication. By 1920, that number had collapsed, and the electricity arm of Consolidated Gas—now called the New York Edison Company—dominated the market.
In 1936, the company changed its name to reflect the new reality. An annual report revealed that roughly seventy-five percent of gross operating revenue came from electricity, not gas. On March 16 of that year, stockholders voted to rename the company Consolidated Edison Company of New York.
Steam: New York's Secret Third Utility
Most cities have two utilities that matter: electricity and gas. New York has a third.
Since 1882, the New York Steam Company had been providing steam service to buildings in Lower Manhattan. Steam, it turns out, is remarkably useful. Heated to extreme temperatures and pumped through insulated pipes, it can heat buildings in winter and—through a clever engineering trick involving absorption chillers—cool them in summer. Steam sterilizes hospital equipment. It powers industrial processes. It heats water for restaurants and laundries.
Con Edison acquired the New York Steam Company in 1954 and now operates the largest commercial steam system in the world. Seven power plants boil water to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and distribute it to nearly sixteen hundred commercial and residential buildings in Manhattan, from Battery Park at the island's southern tip to 96th Street on the Upper East and West Sides.
The list of customers reads like a roster of New York landmarks: the United Nations complex, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each year, Con Ed produces thirty billion pounds of steam. If you want to grasp how much that is, imagine filling the Empire State Building—all one hundred and two floors of it—six thousand times over.
The next time you see those ghostly plumes of white vapor rising from orange-and-white striped stacks on Manhattan streets, you're witnessing the visible evidence of this hidden infrastructure. Those aren't decorative—they're venting excess pressure from the steam system running beneath your feet.
The Nuclear Interlude
In 1954, Con Edison acquired land on the Hudson River in Buchanan, New York, about forty miles north of Manhattan. The site would become Indian Point, one of the most controversial nuclear facilities in American history.
The first reactor began generating power on September 16, 1962. For a time, Indian Point represented the future of energy—clean, abundant, modern. But that optimism faded. In 1974, the first reactor was shut down because its emergency core cooling system didn't meet regulatory requirements.
Con Edison built two more reactors at Indian Point during the 1970s. But the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 transformed public attitudes toward nuclear power. The plant, located just thirty miles from the most densely populated metropolitan area in the United States, became a lightning rod for antinuclear activism.
In 1975, Con Ed sold the third reactor to the New York Power Authority. In 2000, it sold the second reactor—its last remaining power plant—to Entergy. With that sale, Consolidated Edison completed a remarkable transformation. The company that had once generated its own power was now purely a distributor. It bought electricity from others and delivered it to customers. The nuclear chapter was over.
The Natural Monopoly Problem
Why does one company control the electricity, gas, and steam for millions of New Yorkers? The answer lies in a concept economists call "natural monopoly."
Most industries benefit from competition. If there are ten pizza restaurants on your block, they'll compete on price and quality, and you'll get better pizza at better prices. But some industries don't work that way.
Imagine if electricity worked like pizza. Suppose you could choose between five different electric companies. Each company would need to run its own wires to your building. Your street would be crisscrossed with redundant cables. Each company would bear the enormous fixed cost of building its own transmission infrastructure, but would only serve a fraction of customers. Prices would actually be higher, not lower, because those massive fixed costs would be spread across fewer ratepayers.
This is the natural monopoly problem. In industries with very high fixed costs and low marginal costs—like utilities, railroads, and telecommunications—a single provider serving everyone can actually produce lower prices than competition would.
The catch is that monopolists, left to their own devices, will charge whatever they can get away with. So natural monopolies are typically regulated. Con Edison doesn't get to set its own prices. Instead, the New York Public Service Commission reviews the company's costs and determines what rates it can charge.
This regulatory bargain has shaped Con Ed's corporate character. It's not trying to disrupt anything or move fast and break things. It's trying to deliver reliable service at rates that regulators will approve. It's a company designed for consistency, not innovation.
A System of Astonishing Scale
The numbers are almost absurd. Con Edison's transmission system operates at three different high-voltage levels: 138 kilovolts, 345 kilovolts, and 500 kilovolts. (For context, the outlets in your home deliver electricity at 120 volts—about three thousand times less than the lowest of these transmission voltages.)
The company maintains interconnections with power systems across the Northeast. Two 345-kilovolt lines connect to upstate New York, enabling imports from Hydro-Québec in Canada. Another connects to Public Service Electric and Gas in New Jersey. Yet another links to Long Island. A new high-voltage direct current line, the Champlain Hudson Power Express, will create a more direct connection to Canadian hydropower when it comes online in 2025.
That ninety-three thousand miles of underground cable? It's complemented by nearly thirty-six thousand miles of overhead wires—enough cable to stretch between New York and Los Angeles thirteen times over.
The gas system's seven thousand miles of pipes serve Westchester County, the Bronx, Manhattan, and parts of Queens. (Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the rest of Queens get their gas from National Grid, a different utility—a reminder that even natural monopolies have boundaries.)
All of this infrastructure serves an area of six hundred sixty square miles with a population of nearly nine million people. Con Edison's largest subsidiary alone provides service to more than three million customers.
When the Lights Go Out
With infrastructure this vast and this old, things go wrong. Con Edison's history is punctuated by disasters that reveal just how dependent modern life is on invisible systems most people never think about.
On the night of July 13, 1977, lightning strikes hit several substations across New York City. The resulting cascade of failures knocked out power to virtually all of New York—every borough except the Rockaways, which get their power from a different utility. The blackout lasted through the night and into the next day. It triggered widespread looting and arson. It became a defining moment of New York's fiscal crisis, a symbol of a city that seemed to be coming apart.
In 1989, a steam pipe exploded in Gramercy Park. Workers had failed to drain water from the pipe before turning the steam on. The explosion killed three people and injured twenty-four more. But the disaster compounded when it emerged that the blast had released asbestos into the air. Residents of a damaged apartment building had to evacuate. Con Edison eventually pleaded guilty to lying about the absence of asbestos contamination and paid a two-million-dollar fine.
The September 11, 2001 attacks destroyed Con Edison's electricity substation at 7 World Trade Center when the building collapsed. Restoring power to Lower Manhattan became part of the broader recovery effort.
In 2004, a woman named Jodie Lane was walking her dog in the East Village when she stepped on a service box cover. The box wasn't properly insulated. She was electrocuted. The intersection where she died—East 11th Street and 1st Avenue—was renamed Jodie Lane Place in 2005.
In 2007, an eighty-three-year-old steam pipe failed beneath Midtown Manhattan near Grand Central Terminal. The explosion that followed killed one person and injured more than forty. The same year, an eighty-year-old cast iron gas main ruptured in Queens, critically burning a woman named Kunta Oza, who died on Thanksgiving Day. Her family eventually settled with Con Edison for three and three-quarter million dollars.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused a transformer explosion at a Con Ed plant on the East Side that became an iconic image of the storm—a bright flash of blue-green light illuminating the night sky as the city flooded. Some customers lost power for eleven days.
In 2014, two apartment buildings exploded in East Harlem after a gas leak. Eight people died.
In 2018, a transformer short-circuit at a power plant in Astoria, Queens, briefly shut down LaGuardia Airport and caused delays throughout the transit system. The incident produced an eerie phenomenon: a large portion of the sky lit up in brilliant blue from electrical arc flash. Social media filled with photos of the glow. Some people thought aliens were arriving.
The Smart Grid and the Future
Con Edison is in the midst of a transformation that most of its customers will barely notice: the replacement of nearly every electric and gas meter in its service territory.
Traditional utility meters are mechanical devices that require someone to physically visit your building to read them. Smart meters communicate wirelessly, sending usage data back to the utility automatically. They can detect outages instantly. They enable time-of-use pricing, where electricity costs less during off-peak hours. They let customers monitor their own usage in near real-time.
Con Edison awarded its smart meter project to a company called Aclara. Over five million meters were replaced. The rollout was largely completed in 2022, though several thousand meters still needed to be changed in 2023 due to difficulties accessing certain properties. If you've noticed a lime-green seal on your electric meter, that's the indicator that a contractor replaced it as part of this project.
The company has also invested heavily in renewable energy, though its clean energy ambitions have shifted. At one point, Con Edison had invested three billion dollars in solar and wind projects and announced plans to invest another billion and a quarter over three years. Its renewable portfolio reached more than 1.5 gigawatts of operating capacity, three-quarters of it from solar.
But in 2023, Con Edison sold its clean energy business to RWE, a German energy company. The utility is returning to its core identity: distribution rather than generation.
To support the transition to electric vehicles, Con Edison partnered with a company called FleetCarma to offer five hundred dollars in rewards to electric vehicle owners who agree to charge their vehicles when energy demand is low. This kind of demand management—shifting consumption from peak periods to valleys—is becoming increasingly important as the electrical grid takes on loads that used to belong to gasoline.
A Company Older Than Photography
Consider what it means for a company to have been publicly traded since 1824. The daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process, wasn't invented until 1839. The telegraph came in 1844. The telephone in 1876. The lightbulb in 1879. Radio, television, computers, the internet—all of them postdate Con Edison.
Through all of it, the company adapted. It went from gas to electricity. It survived the political machines of the nineteenth century and the regulatory reforms of the twentieth. It built nuclear plants and then sold them. It invested in renewables and then divested. It replaced mechanical meters with digital ones.
Today, Consolidated Edison, Inc. is one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the United States, with approximately fifteen and a quarter billion dollars in annual revenues and over seventy billion dollars in assets. It operates through several subsidiaries: Consolidated Edison Company of New York handles electric, gas, and steam service in New York City and Westchester County. Orange and Rockland Utilities serves customers in southeastern New York and northern New Jersey. Con Edison Transmission invests in electric and natural gas transmission projects across the region.
The company's revenue breaks down roughly as follows: about seventy percent from electricity, fourteen percent from gas, five percent from steam, and the remainder from non-utility businesses.
For most New Yorkers, Con Edison is simply the name on their utility bill—a necessary expense, usually unremarkable until something goes wrong. But beneath that mundane surface lies one of the most extraordinary infrastructure systems ever built: a network of wires and pipes and steam conduits that makes life in one of the world's great cities possible.
Every time you flip a switch, turn on the stove, or walk into a heated building, you're relying on systems that date back to the age of gas lamps and Boss Tweed, expanded and modernized across two centuries by a company that has outlasted empires. It's easy to take for granted. But it's worth pausing occasionally to appreciate the invisible machinery humming beneath your feet—ninety-three thousand miles of it, wrapping around the Earth three and a half times, keeping the lights on.