WI cogeneration was standard from the 1880s?

[Riain]

From the wiki article on "cogeneration".

Perhaps the first modern use of energy recycling was done by Thomas Edison. His 1882 Pearl Street Station, the world’s first commercial power plant, was a combined heat and power plant, producing both electricity and thermal energy while using waste heat to warm neighboring buildings. Recycling allowed Edison’s plant to achieve approximately 50 percent efficiency.
By the early 1900s, regulations emerged to promote rural electrification through the construction of centralized plants managed by regional utilities. These regulations not only promoted electrification throughout the countryside, but they also discouraged decentralized power generation, such as cogeneration. They even went so far as to make it illegal for non-utilities to sell power.

So WI this cogeneration became the norm right from the word go? WI utilities sold their waste heat? Or even better WI industry used it's waste heat to generate power (boilers on top of coke ovens for example) and feed it back into the grid right from the start of the industrial revolution?

 

[Orville_third]

Well, we'd have more electricity and possibly fewer power plants. Pollution would be lessened. America might be more disposed to seek energy efficiency.

 

[Orioes]

Perhaps DC remains the standard (say Edison and Tesla stay friends and Edison buys Tesla's patents and uses control of them to suppress AC adoption) thus necessitating local low voltage power grids. Every neighborhood now requires a local power plant which makes cogeneration more practical. Upsides: Roads and sidewalks kept ice free with waste heat, free/cheap radiative heating and hot water for showers and cooking, you can tie into the line to run a Stirling engine. Downsides: Everyone lives next to a smoke belching power plant, possibly more pollution.

The effects down timeline would be interesting. Heat and hot water generation is now more centralized (coming from the power plant not from the heater in the basement) but the grid is built with the idea of many small local power sources some of them from non-utilities which may position it for the adoption of roof top solar cells and microturbines.

 

[Riain]

I never thought of melting snow.

How was heat provided in cities in the century from 1882? Electricity was wired in but didn't buildings have their own furnaces? Wouldn't these furnaces be just as smokey as decentralised powerplants providing Combined Heat and Power (CHP)?