What Insull wanted and strove to build was an infrastructure the inverse of what he was saddled with upon his arrival in the Midwest. Instead of many little generating stations, with many owners, running intermittently, he wanted one that he owned and which ran all the time. In order to do this he needed to acquire “load” for each time period during the day. He needed streetcar companies to buy from him at dusk and dawn, residential customers for the late evenings and early nights, municipal street lights for nighttime, businesses for the late afternoons and early evenings, and most important
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