The Rise of Rural Electrification
- In the 1920s, the "great white way" of artificial light cleaved the night in two in America's major cities-but stopped at the outer dark of rural America.
- Utilities grew quickly by means of technological improvement, savvy ratemaking, holding company shenanigans, and a regulated monopoly status that sheltered them from competition.
Then the Depression brought its scythe to every industry, even reliable utilities
- FDR castigated the nine major utilities that controlled most of the nation's power at the time
- Roosevelt laid into the utilities for neglecting farmers who had already suffered so much
- In 1920, only 130,000 American farms had central station service
- By the close of 1932, the count rose to 709,449 farms
- The utility industry learned from the government’s experiments and applied what they could to their own rural electrification efforts
- As the REA “cream skimmed” the best rural customers for its co-ops first, utilities rigged up “spite lines” which wired up the most prosperous farms in an area, neglecting the rest
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/america-on-the-grid/
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