Munson (director, Northeast-Midwest Institute, a non-partisan research center) presents a history of the development of the US electric power industry, tracing its development from the founding of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company to the current state of the electric sector, characterized in Munson's view by a centralized and monopolized paradigm that limits innovation, entrepreneurship, and efficiency. In telling the industrial restructurings, technological innovations, corporate activities, and political battles that have characterized the power industry's 100 year development, it seems that Munson's primary goal is to draw lessons applicable to the regulation and structure of today's power industry, which he believes is in need of ''innovation-based restructuring.''