Unfortunately, schools don't teach a detailed course of the history of electricity and the history of electric generators.
It's a great story and the most important thing to learn, and no one should graduate high school without knowing how to engineer and build an electric generator from scratch. That seems like a tall order until you consider that intellectual honesty in teaching it would make these tasks easily mastered by anyone who can graduate with a C average.
This field of study was a big deal in the 17th and 18th centuries, and by the 1860s the theories of electricity and how to make it were ready for deployment. A great physicist was needed, and a millennium-class physicist named Nikola Tesla did the work. (Wikipedia is a public encyclopedia, so disregard any references you may find to Tesla's being a useless psychotic. Those comments come and go when anyone can rewrite the narrative, and there are still people whose careers are devoted to suppressing this information.)
Tesla was the first to publicly demonstrate radio transmission and reception in 1893. That same day he demonstrated wireless transmission and reception of electric current. He had designed a system for the clean production of power and for delivering it worldwide, without cost, and without a grid.
That's not how you or I were taught, in spite of the fact Tesla was recognized as radio's inventor by act of Congress in 1943, after he died. Otherwise, the story before and since has been that Marconi invented radio, as well as the x-ray machine. He didn't. Tesla invented that, too.
I acquired a book titled The Man Who Tamed Lightning from Scholastic as a kid which claimed Charles Proteus Steinmetz invented alternating current and the AC induction motor. He didn't. It was Tesla. The authors, publishers and distributors of this trash lied to me and all of us. Marconi and Steinmetz were patsies, and we were played for loser fools.
Why does it matter? Very rich men, then and now, have done everything it takes to stop you from learning this so they can keep making money while enslaving humanity, and they hope to go on like this for all time. It was no big deal when oil sold for five cents a barrel. At today's prices, how do you like knowing you could have and should have had all the clean source electricity you could use, for free?
That's right, and you can read a scholarly, annotated essay that's quite good on that subject here. At the end, the authors state they have reason to believe Tesla was murdered minutes before the FBI confiscated all his files. Most sources say his patents numbered 700, only a few of which are in the public domain now, but other sources have said the real number is closer to 1,200. Most people know nothing about the suppressed ones, now classified, and they are most of his greatest ones.
The power supply the report refers to is the motionless electromagnetic generator, or MEG. After first reading about it 45 years ago, this last year I finally got an idea how it's supposed to work. Get ready to lose your temper.
