Southern California Edison and its predecessor companies have been powering the lives of Angelenos going back to late 1880s, just a few years after Thomas Edison patented the incandescent light bulb and launched the electric power industry.

Today, the utility is the main business line of Rosemead-based Edison International, providing electric power to more than 15 million people across a 50,000-square-mile service territory, including most of Los Angeles County. (The city of Los Angeles and a handful of other cities have their own municipal utilities.) Edison International now has roughly 14,375 employees and posted $16.3 billion in revenue in 2023.

“For more than a century, we’ve powered the expansion of Southern California through technological advancements, boom-and-bust cycles and natural disasters by investing in infrastructure and renewable energy solutions,” said Steve Powell, chief executive of Southern California Edison.

Multiple roots feeding into the company

Southern California Edison as a corporate entity came into existence 115 years ago, in late 1909. However, according to a detailed timeline on Edison’s website, it was formed through the agglomeration of several small electric power companies that began springing up around the region more than 20 years earlier.

The first of these predecessor companies was some 150 miles north of Los Angeles County in Visalia in the Central Valley. There, on July 4, 1886, a local business partnership provided power from a steam engine for the holiday festivities. The partnership eventually became the Visalia Electric Light and Gas Co.

A few months later, another small electric power company launched in Santa Barbara.

Over the next 15 years, several other small electric power companies launched in San Bernardino County, Pomona and other locales. The first power company in the city of Los Angeles launched in 1896 as the Westside Lighting Co.; the following year, it changed its name to Edison Electric Co. of Los Angeles. Around the year 1902, Henry Huntington, creator of the Pacific Electric Railway network, formed the Pacific Light and Power company to provide power for the railway.

In the first few years of the new century, a wave of consolidation swept through the fledgling industry, led by Edison Electric Co. President John Barnes Miller, who became known as the “great amalgamator.” Many of these smaller outlying power companies – including Visalia Electric Light and Gas – were acquired by Edison Electric.

In 1909, Edison Electric, which by then had emerged as the biggest regional player, reorganized and re-incorporated as Southern California Edison Co., its current name. The company’s regional dominance was cemented in 1917 when it acquired its largest remaining competitor, Huntington’s Pacific Light and Power.

But there was one major carve-out: the city of Los Angeles in 1912 began negotiations with Southern California Edison to buy out the latter’s transmission and generation facilities within city limits to form the power backbone of the city’s Department of Water and Power. Those negotiations continued over the next 25 years.

In 1931, Southern California Edison moved into an art deco-style headquarters office at 5th Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Some 40 years later, in 1971, the company moved to Rosemead, where it is still headquartered today.

Corporate restructuring and ill-fated deregulation

In recent decades, Edison has undergone several corporate transformations, starting in 1988 with the creation of a holding company, SCEcorp and an unregulated power generation entity that came to be called Edison Mission Energy. That move positioned Edison for the deregulation movement that was sweeping through the industry and the intense competition of the 1990s. Soon after this, the holding company changed its name to the one that holds today: Edison International.

In the late 1990s, as part of California’s energy deregulation program, Edison was forced to sell most of its natural gas-fueled generation plants.

Then, in 2000-2001, California’s energy deregulation scheme ran amok and fell victim to market manipulation by now defunct Enron Corp. and others. In the ensuing power crisis that included rolling blackouts, the state’s largest investor-owned utility, San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric, declared bankruptcy and Edison teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for nearly a year until it negotiated a financial recovery package with the California Public Utilities Commission.

Shortly after that, the Mission Energy affiliate sold off most of its international power generation assets and eventually shut down completely.

Wildfires scorch Edison

In the last decade, Southern California Edison has faced two major challenges: racing to meet state mandates to convert its power generation system to run on renewable fuel resources such as wind, solar and geothermal; and hardening its power transmission system to reduce the risk of sparking wildfires.

On the wildfire front, Edison was hit hard by findings that two of the most destructive fires in state history – the Thomas Fire and resulting mudslides of Dec. 2017 and Jan. 2018 and the Woolsey Fire of Nov. 2018 – were sparked in part by Edison equipment. That opened the door to thousands of lawsuits filed against Edison by homeowners and businesses that suffered damage; the company is still working through settlements of those lawsuits. Edison is also seeking approval from the Public Utilities Commission to pass on much of its costs from those fires to its ratepayers.

To reduce the risks of sparking similar fires in the future, Southern California Edison is nearing the end of a multibillion-dollar effort to insulate thousands of miles of transmission lines – more than 6,000 miles of wire have been insulated to date.

Preparing for a renewable future

Meanwhile, on the renewable energy front, Edison has signed scores of major contracts with companies owning wind and solar generation facilities and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on preparing the power grid to handle the increased use of renewable energy sources.

“Our team is bringing more clean energy resources to serve customers through a resilient, modern electric grid that meets the growing needs of customers and withstands more frequent and severe weather events,” Powell said.

“We’re committed to the communities we serve and recognize that an electrified, clean energy future must be affordable, resilient and free from the harmful effects of carbon emissions for the health and prosperity of our customers,” he added.