This great utility concern was founded in 1855 on the strength of a concession granted by Duke Leopold Friedrich of Anhalt-Dessau, to build a gas plant in Dessau and supply the town with town gas for street lighting. The entrepreneur Hans Victor von Unruh and the Dessau banker Louis Nulandt were the driving forces behind the company, which was capitalised at half-a-million thalers, a very large sum for that time. The first gasworks in Dessau was completed in 1856, and the concern rapidly expanded to construct gasworks gas works in several dozen cities of home and abroad, including Mönchengladbach, Magdeburg, Frankfurt an der Oder, Mülheim am Ruhr, Potsdam, Warsaw, and Lvov. In 1859 Wilhelm Oechelhäuser emerged as the sole general director of the concern, which continued to expand its networks of gas supply across the nation. In 1871 the concern established the Centralwerkstatt Dessau, where new equipment, such as coin-operated gas meters and gas-consuming appliances such as lamps, stoves and engines were designed and manufactured. In 1921 the Centralwerkstatt merged with the Carl Bamberg Werkstätten für Präzisionsmechanik in Friedenau.
In 1883 the concern entered the field of electricity generation and distribution, obtaining a concession to erect Germany's second electricity-generation plant in Dessau. By the time of the Great War the generation of electricity absorbed much of its concern, and in 1915 concern took the lead in establishing the Elektrizitätswerk Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle, which marked the concerns entry into the great mid-German energy market. It remains one of the largest companies in Germany with a leading position in the gas and electricity markets and a dense network of investments. It employs more than sixty-thousand workers in its mines, works and distribution networks.