Since the late nineteenth century, human beings in many places have relied on centralized plants that burn fossil fuels and send electricity out to a system of cables, towers, and poles. As households adopt rooftop solar (increasingly accompanied and enabled by distributed energy storage), they transform generation and its ownership, shifting away from utility monopolies and making power production their own. As electric vehicles also spread, “gassing up” can be done at home, supplanting oil companies. With producer and user as one, energy gets democratized. Charles Fritts had this vision in
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