Commonwealth Edison
electric company in Illinois
Commonwealth Edison, commonly known by syllabic abbreviation as ComEd, is the largest electric utility in Illinois, and the primary electric provider in Chicago and much of Northern Illinois. Its service territory stretches roughly from Iroquois County on the south to the Wisconsin border on the north and from the Iowa border on the west to the Indiana border on the east. For more than 100 years, Commonwealth Edison has been the primary electric delivery services company for Northern Illinois. Today, ComEd is a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corporation, one of the nation's largest electric and gas utility holding companies. ComEd provides electric service to more than 3.8 million customers across Northern Illinois. The company's revenues totaled more than $7 billion in 2023.
As of 2015, ComEd has interconnections with We Energies, ITC Midwest, Ameren, American Electric Power, Northern Indiana Public Service, and MidAmerican Energy Company (MEC).
History
Founding
The earliest predecessor of Commonwealth Edison was the Isolated Lighting Company, established in early 1881 by George H. Bliss as a subsidiary of Thomas Edison's company to sell small Edison-patented generators and lighting systems, each serving one building or several nearby buildings. In 1882, this company was taken over by the Western Edison Light Company, which was chartered by several prominent Chicagoans to not only take over Isolated Lighting's role as Edison's agent in Chicago, but also to develop a central station electric system. Western Edison installed the first incandescent lighting in a Chicago home, that of stockholder John W. Doane, in 1882, and it was first lit on November 10 of that year.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Commonwealth Edison” is electric company in Illinois. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Commonwealth, Edison and electric, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “electric company in Illinois” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2986833. VIAF identifies the subject as 122361800. The Library of Congress control number is n79078629. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2015, 1881 and 1882.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commonwealth Edison” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.