Northern States Power Company () was a publicly traded S&P 500 electric and natural gas utility holding company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that is now a subsidiary of Xcel Energy (). History The company's founder, Henry Marison Byllesby, had worked for two electric utility industry pioneers before getting into the business for himself. He was one of Thomas Edison's draftsmen when the Pearl Street Station was being built. He then worked for George Westinghouse, starting as a sales agent and working his way up to vice president of Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. Byllesby's next job was with the Thomson-Houston Co. (one of General Electric's two predecessors) before settling down in Chicago in 1902 and establishing the H. M. Byllesby Co., which provided engineering and management services to electric utilities. Byllesby acquired the Stillwater Gas & Electric Co. of Stillwater, MN in 1909, and reorganized it as the Washington County Light & Power Co. This was the first company added to Byllesby's Consumers Power Co., which then added three companies in North Dakota in 1910 (Minot Light & Telephone Co., Red River Power Co., and Union Light, Heatng, & Power Co.). Over the next few years, Consumers Power Co. grew rapidly as companies across the Twin Cities and central Minnesota were acquired and linked with transmission lines. These lines linked Minneapolis, St. Paul, Shakopee, Faribault, Mankato, Northfield, Coon Rapids, Rockford, Delano, Watertown, and even distant places such as Crookston and Pipestone. The last addition to the company's territory was when a group of towns around Waconia was acquired from Interstate Power Co. in 1956. There may have been confusion with an unrelated company by the same name in Michigan, so in 1916, the company changed its name to Northern States Power Co. The company acquired the Minneapolis General Electric Co. the same year, and continued its acquisitions, with 42 more systems added over the next seven years. The company has always been publicly traded, and which consistently did well enough to pay a cash dividend to shareholders every year since 1910. While the bulk of the company's territory has always been in Minnesota, it has some territory in and around the larger towns in North Dakota (Minot, Grand Forks, and Fargo) as well as southeastern South Dakota (Sioux Falls area). Its territory also extends east across Wisconsin and into the upper peninsula of Michigan, but due to state regulations requiring