Charles C. Mann Quote

Because energy is critical to modern life, these utilities, as we now call them, became so politically important that many governments seized them as essential tools of the state; other nations contented themselves with heavy regulation. Either way, utilities have become a prominent feature of the contemporary landscape. Economically speaking, the advantages of Wizard-style, hard-path centralization and scale were so overwhelming that until recently efforts to promulgate Prophet-style distributed power systems almost vanished.