A cartogram is a map based on something other than land area and distance. A cartogram based on gross national product data, for instance, would depict the United States as 12 times the size of Mexico instead of the actual five times.

In 1921, someone at General Electric drew a map of the United States with each state scaled according to the proportion of population that had central station electricity. This being 14 years before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA)—when roughly 11 percent of the American countryside had such access to electricity—you can imagine the gross distortions.

New York takes up roughly one-fifth of the map, with Massachusetts and Illinois taking up another fifth. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and California also are fairly large, but most of the other 42 states are tiny. All the big prairie and western states are slivers, with hardly enough space for the state’s name.

At the time, only 57.3 percent of the U.S. population had electricity, 62 million out of 108 million people. Washington, D.C., had the highest percentage of electrified households at 98.2 percent, higher than New York City. The state with the highest penetration was Massachusetts, with 97.8 percent.

This likely explains why Massachusetts has never had an electric co-op. It didn’t need one; rural electrification had largely been accomplished by the time REA came along. Its neighbors, Rhode Island and Connecticut, are the only other co-op-less states, and on the GE map they are much larger than they should be—Connecticut is about the size of Texas.

The GE map started to change ever so slowly as rural electrification, or the lack of it, became a national embarrassment.

In 1935, only 10.9 percent of American farms (744,000) enjoyed central station power, compared with Germany and Japan at 90 percent, France between 90 and 95 percent, and New Zealand at 60 percent. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, was also doing a better job of extending power lines outside cities to farms, ranches, and small towns: In 1935, Ontario was the provincial leader with about 20 percent.

Go back to the early 1920s, and the U.S. numbers drop to somewhere between 2 and 3 percent, although former REA Administrator Harry Slattery (1939–1944) argues in his book Rural America Lights Up that the real number might have been closer to 1 percent because more than half of the power was consumed by big irrigation and drainage projects, not farmers directly in their homes and barns.

In those pre-REA years, only an elite class of farmers were utility customers. REA economist Robert T. Beale described them in a classic article on rural electrification in the 1940 Yearbook of Agriculture: “Generally, these farmers were located along the main highways extending out from urban centers, where density of population was relatively high, or in sections of the country where the nature of farm activity made large power loads immediately available.”

Irrigated California farmlands fit that bill, as did large dairy and poultry operations there and in other states. But in the many regions devoted to general farming, rarely were lines extended more than a mile or two outside a city or big town and not before the serving utility had determined the profit potential of each farm along the way.

REA and electric co-ops changed all that. In 1940, just four and a half years after Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 7037, 25 percent of American farms had been electrified. Among the bigger farm states, Indiana (37 percent), Ohio (42 percent), and Washington (57 percent) were electrifying fastest.

Ten years later, 90 percent had been electrified nationally. REA was proving to be one of the most successful government infrastructure-building programs in U.S. history.

The post Flashbacks: Rural Electrification By the Numbers appeared first on RE Magazine.

Every organization has its colorful characters, men and women who are still talked about years after they have retired. NRECA’s J.C. Brown, editor of RE Magazine and the old Rural Electric NEWS Letter from 1973 to 1993, was just such a character.

A high-wattage intellect, an absurd sense of humor, and a big heart combined to produce his colorful personality. A talent for editorial column writing spread his legend around the electric co-op community and beyond.

After Brown shut off his electric typewriter for the last time, NRECA collected the best of the “Conversation Pieces” he wrote for the NEWS Letter in a volume titled Twenty Years of Wit and Wisdom.

In the book’s 32 columns, Brown writes about the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), electric co-ops, and Washington politics and media, of course, but he also gives baseball, a 1988 flu epidemic, scam artists, the Eagle No. 2 pencil of his school days, and small town milkmen their due. One column is titled, “Dear SOB.”

The proof that REA was a successful federal agency, he wrote in an April 1990 column, was that “you and I can go to almost any inhabited place in the United States and find reliable electric service at a reasonable cost, settle down and do business, or just relax and watch TV.”

On November 18, 1988, he observed, “Government is a bother, and bureaucrats are often, well, bureaucratic…”

After J. Peter Grace, of the infamous Grace Commission, recommended privatizing REA and then wrote to the NEWS Letter, Brown retorted: “August is when psychiatrists close down for a month, leaving their clients on their own, therefore I shouldn’t be surprised by irrational appeals…”

On August 30, 1985, the subject was co-op loyalty: “Rural people have learned to be wary of itinerant roofers, termite exterminators, and snake oil salesmen. The promises of power companies whose ownership control is several states removed are just as suspect. If it is a good deal for the power company to take over the co-op, why is it not a good deal for the members to keep it?”

Public greed never failed to get under Brown’s skin. “The failure of government to put reasonable restraints on money manipulators made magazine cover boys of the truly greedy, who came to take billions from the economy and cost a lot of people their businesses and jobs,” he wrote on January 31, 1992.

In his baseball column on June 4, 1982, he said he had noticed that people who wrote bad poetry and liked baseball also liked the REA. Then he told the story of the unknown pitcher who drifted into Elkin, N.C., in overalls one Sunday afternoon a long time ago, pitched 13 scoreless innings against the visiting HiToms, “getting stronger as he went, and [then] when the fog threatened to end the game along about midnight, [he] went to the plate and effortlessly won his own game with a home run.”

J.C. and other people in the stands that night took up a collection for the phenom, turned it over to him, and then “watched him amble off into the fog toward the river,” never to be seen or heard from again.

J.C. always kept the co-op consumer in mind. “Whatever we do is useful only if it serves the welfare of the families at the end of the line,” he reminded his readers on August 14, 1987. Co-ops were “their main hope for an improvement in a dismal economy. Who else is strong enough and has a broad interest in rural America to do anything for them?”

He got into the business at a time when animosity between co-ops and investor-owned utilities was red hot, and his rhetoric on the subject stayed that way throughout his career. He devoted his column on December 17, 1976, to power company executives: “I recall being seated in a church pew beside one, who cordially introduced himself. As soon as I identified myself, he reddened and sped off to another pew with his somewhat startled wife.”

J.C.’s last “Conversation Piece” was published on June 18, 1993. He recalled a late 1950s visit to a rural North Carolina home on the day after it had been electrified. He noticed the new radio, electric stove, refrigerator, freezer, and washing machine.

But it wasn’t until the woman of the house opened a cabinet and took down an electric iron that he really understood the significance of the occasion. She looked at it like it was “a fragile jewel, and asked me to show her how to use it.

“Never in her life had she used an electric iron. That more than the washer or the freezer or the radio was what electricity meant to her. REA? REA was not a federal agency. It was an electric iron.”

The post Flashbacks: The Legendary Wit of J.C. Brown appeared first on RE Magazine.

It started with 13 eighth-graders brainstorming in a rural Montana school and culminated with a co-op throwing a switch that changed their lives forever.

The teacher had told the boys and girls about a statewide good-citizenship contest with the theme of community betterment. The prize was $100, a lot of money in 1938.

Forty-seven years later, on a sunny spring morning in 1985, one of those eighth-graders, now a 60-year-old rancher, recalled what happened next: “Rural electrification was hot then,” Miles Swan said. “We met with Carl Gunderson—he was the superintendent of schools in Highwood—to see what might be a project we could work on. A water system was out; the town wasn’t incorporated. A sewer system was voted down; it wouldn’t affect the whole community. We talked about telephones, but everything seemed to center around electricity.”

Lucille Walker, a cook at the Highwood Cafe, remembered the gas lamps in school and in Charlie Berkner’s butcher shop. She also remembered the noisy gasoline generator behind Ben Gossack’s general store and the one in Community Hall.

The students decided to write to the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in faraway Washington, D.C., and ask about electricity for Highwood.

The REA responded and said, yes, Highwood was the kind of place the agency helped, but only if the community got behind the effort.

The nearest REA borrower, Sun River Electric Cooperative, was 70 miles west in Fairfield. Halfway between was Great Falls, “the Electric City,” which got lights and power in 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams on the Missouri River was completed. At night, the ranchers and dry-land farmers in the Highwood area could see the glow of those city lights, but they knew it was a pipe dream to think they would get central-station electricity anytime soon. Montana Power, the investor-owned utility, certainly wasn’t going to do it for them.

But those 13 teens ignored that sensible adult outlook and spent the winter of 1938–’39 doing what they later told their contact in Washington was their biggest hurdle: “getting their parents and the people in town interested in electricity.”

Swan’s dad, “Torchy,” was the exception. After a community meeting in February that drew people from miles around, he went to work for the kids.

“Our ranch was seven miles out of town on the South Bench,” Miles Swan told Marty Erickson, editor of Rural Montana, over coffee at the Highwood Cafe. “We knew what electricity could do since we had a 32-volt light plant.

“I went out night after night with my dad when he signed up people in the North Bench and Shonkin areas. Dad had to explain everything to prospective co-op members. Each pitch took an hour or more, but dad said he could sign up three people a night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Of all the people he talked to, only two didn’t sign up.”

At first, Swan recalled, REA required three consumers per mile, but his father and his classmates wrote to Washington and got that cut by two-thirds. “To tell you the truth, it stretched it to get one person per mile.”

The kids, Torchy, and some other prominent adults, including Gossack, who was chairman of the school board, met with the general manager and board president of Sun River Electric. Later, they agreed to apply to REA for a $69,000 loan to build a line to Highwood from the co-op’s nearest substation.

Walker’s father, Fred, pitched in once construction began. He took time away from the family’s farm to haul line poles with a tractor.

What began in an eighth-grade current events class brought modern lights and power to a 500-square-mile area in 1940, an accomplishment that made the $100 contest prize seem like kids’ stuff, even to the boys and girls themselves.

“We started out to win a prize, but we don’t care about that now,” the class said in one of their many letters to REA. “All we want is electricity for our town and community and to make it just as good a place to live as any other in the United States.”

The post Flashbacks: The Kids Who Electrified Highwood, Montana appeared first on RE Magazine.

We’re in the middle of a wind-power boom. Installed capacity has increased from just over 4,000 MW in 2001 to close to 70,000 MW today. This happened once before in the United States, although with a tamer technology.

Between 1920 and 1935, farmers and ranchers purchased a million wind chargers—not the iconic windmills used since the 1850s to pump water for crops and livestock and still seen along rural back roads, but small, propeller-driven electricity generators.

Old black-and-white photographs show the propellers and attached tail vanes sticking up from farmhouse and barn roofs like TV antennas. Others perched atop lightweight steel towers. A big, prosperous farm might have had two or three towers.

The essential components were the propeller and tail, an attached generator, and wires leading indoors to a control panel and a battery.

The smallest wind chargers were ideal for charging radio batteries. At its peak, the Wincharger Corporation, the leading manufacturer, produced 2,000 of its 6-volt “DeLuxe” models each day at its factory in Sioux City, Iowa. The machines sold for $44 or, better yet, $15 when purchased with a Zenith radio and a 6-volt battery.

A newspaper ad promised the DeLuxe would “END ALL Recharging Nuisance!” at a cost of “ONLY 50 CENTS A YEAR” to operate. Owning a Wincharger was considerably more convenient and cheaper than taking the battery to the filling station in town to be recharged every few days. Farmers soon discovered these batteries could also keep a lightbulb glowing while the family was gathered in the parlor to listen to The Jack Benny Program or Fibber McGee and Molly. They wanted more electric lights, and manufacturers responded by making bigger and bigger wind chargers.

Wincharger came out with a larger radio charger and then launched the 650-watt “Famous” model, followed by the 1,200-watt “Giant,” which boasted an output of “175,000 watt-hours per month.”

Another Iowa company, Parris-Dunn Corporation, made wind chargers ranging in size from 135 watts to 3,000 watts. Between 1934 and 1941, the company shipped 37,000 units to all 48 states and 93 foreign countries.

The “performance, quality, and dependability leader,” according to the wind-charger history buffs who maintain the information-packed website Windcharger.org, was the Jacobs Wind Electric Company out of Minneapolis. It was started in 1931 by two inventive brothers who grew up on a windy ranch in eastern Montana.

Their Model 45 (45 amps) sold for $290. A 50-ft. tower to mount the generator, propeller, and tail vane added $365 to the purchase, and a 440-amp-hour battery brought the total to $830.

Jacobs Wind Energy soon was making bigger models to compete with the rural market-leading Delco-Light Plant, which ran on gasoline. And at one point, they teamed up with Briggs and Stratton Corporation to make a combination diesel generator/wind charger that promised to cut fuel costs and noise when the wind was blowing and provide continuous power for lights and appliances when it was not.

Each of these companies hired top engineers and had patented technology. Wincharger was known for an air-brake governor that prevented damage when the wind exceeded 20 mph. Paris-Dunn’s gyroscopic governor tilted the propeller and generator up and away from the wind. Jacobs’ Master Mind control panel regulated battery charging so well that the company could offer an unconditional 10-year warranty on its batteries, as opposed to the industry standard of three years.

But none of this mechanical genius could stand up to the convenience and affordability of central-station power and the success that the federal Rural Electrification Administration had in making it available to farms, ranches, and small towns. Starting in the late 1930s, electric co-ops regularly lopped off county-size chunks of the wind-charger market, and this didn’t let up until the early 1950s.

Lagging sales forced Paris-Dunn to manufacture military training rifles during World War II and to close its doors in 1949. Wincharger limped along by starting a line of rotary inverters (DC to AC). When an epic flood ruined its factory in 1953, the company decided not to rebuild. Jacobs was gone three years later.

The post Flashbacks: The First Wind-Power Boom appeared first on RE Magazine.

Looking back all these years later, a headline in the May 1983 issue of RE Magazine seems quaint: “Computing in the Country.” Two other things that jump out are a photo of a lawyer working at a big, clunky PC and the use of the term “electronic mail.”

The article describes a personal computer as a “calculator, typewriter, television, and file cabinet rolled into one machine that fits on a desk top.”

The early days of surfing the internet are described this way: “A personal computer with a fairly inexpensive attachment called a ‘modem’ can, for a monthly fee, plug into one or more of the some 1,500 data bases now being marketed in this country. The person operating the computer simply picks up the telephone attached to the modem and dials the data base computer. Once the connection is made, the modem translates audio (telephone) signals into electronic (computer) signals.”

The article points out that sales of computers had been doubling every year since 1980. “Estimates of the number in use by the end of this century run as high as 80 million.” That turned out to be less than half right.

Rural medical clinics needed computers because it was becoming harder and harder to provide small-town doctors with the medical technologies their counterparts in the city had at their disposal. The demand was too low. Computers could bridge the gap and maybe even save some lives.

In early 1983, Trover Clinic in Madisonville, Ky., began e-mailing lab test results and X-ray images to its satellite clinics. For Dr. Herbert Chaney, who ran the clinic in Dawson Springs, the e-mails meant making an accurate diagnosis the same day instead of waiting for the courier that came only twice a week.

Charles Manley III, a lawyer in Grinnell, Iowa, used the legal website Westlaw every day. Before, he had to drive to a law library in Des Moines every time he didn’t know the answer to a client’s question—and charge them $200 just for the time he spent commuting on I-80.

Manley was willing to add quite a bit to his overhead for the convenience. He paid a whopping $20,000 for his “terminal” and printer and $450 a month for his Westlaw subscription. His rented modem cost $50 a month, and he paid $2 a minute for any time on Westlaw exceeding 180 minutes in the monthly billing period.

He saw these charges as a reasonable price to pay for having legal research at his fingertips. “Attorneys, no matter if they’re on Wall Street or in Grinnell, Iowa, just want to be productive and hold their fees down,” he said.

Farmers and ranchers were also buying computers in 1983. The editor of Farm Computer News estimated that one out of 20 had already done so and, within five years, that 5 percent would grow to 20 percent. They were using them to schedule irrigation, to create the cash-flow charts their bankers required, to monitor weather and commodity prices, and to participate in online banking pilot tests.

I.F. Dinkins, publisher of a similar monthly farm newsletter in Memphis, believed computers would revolutionize agriculture. “In the past,” he said, “new machines gave leverage to a farmer’s muscles, giving him the power to do some jobs faster and to cover more ground. The computer, though, gives a farmer leverage for his thinking, and that’s a lot more valuable.”

So what were electric co-ops doing with computers 34 years ago? The simple answer is a lot, because many were early adopters of new office technology. Co-ops had been using mainframe computers since the early 1960s, and now they were purchasing personal computers and programs for billing, payroll, and inventory.

Line work was also entering the Computer Age. Fred Lewis, the Rural Electrification Administration’s computer expert at that time, estimated that one-third of the more than 900 co-ops across the country were using programs that could break down a job order more accurately than a human could, producing a materials list in minutes.

The post Flashbacks: Rural America Enters the Computer Age appeared first on RE Magazine.

Old films can be just as critical a part of an electric cooperative’s history as original membership applications, photos, tools and legacy hardware. But making decades-old images come alive takes hard work and special skills.

“We have dozens of old films, audio tapes, and videotapes in various formats,” says Dennis Gainer, a digital producer at NRECA. “Many of these haven’t been seen or heard in years, or may have never been edited when they were first recorded.”

One that was used extensively was “By the People for the People,” the first film ever produced by NRECA. It debuted in 1955 and 16-mm prints were distributed to co-ops regularly through the late 1960s.

Gainer found a copy in an old filing cabinet at NRECA’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters in early 2017, so when Madison, South Dakota-based East River Electric Cooperative asked about a dub located in CEO Scott Moore’s office, he was familiar with it.

The NRECA copy was taken to media restoration company for possible restoration. After it was opened, examined for tears and splices and wound onto a new film core, Gainer viewed it with members of the company’s team for obvious signs of wear.

“The dyes had deteriorated and the images were red, blue, and purple,” Gainer recalls. “The sound warbled, and at times, the images fluttered.”

In less than two weeks it was scanned, the film’s colors were corrected and the optical audio track was equalized. The final product was a digital reproduction that could be shared electronically, downloaded, and copied to a hard drive or other media.

“We gave NRECA a high quality of the images produced more than 60 years ago,” says Lauren Meschter, a senior colorist at Henninger Media Services. “Film will outlast any medium out there, so people should never throw it away.”

He noted that operational viewing equipment is also getting rare.

“Films produced in the 1950s are deteriorating, so if they are historically or sentimentally important to your organization or your family they should be transferred to digital medium,” Meschter suggests. “If you are considering restoration, now is the time to do it.”

Return to “Flashbacks: ‘By the People, For the People'” to watch the film.

The post Saving Co-op History appeared first on RE Magazine.

Scott Moore was rummaging through old boxes in his office at FEM Electric Association when he came across several worn film canisters. They included old cartoons and other shorts that might have been shown at social events in a rural community a half-century ago.

But one title caught his eye: By the People for the People, a single-reel 16-mm print accompanied by a grainy set of instructions identifying it as NRECA’s first film.

“It hadn’t been used in about 40 or 50 years,” says Moore, CEO of the Ipswich, S.D.-based distribution co-op.

Turns out By the People for the People was produced around 1955, about a decade after NRECA was established. It highlighted the challenges electric cooperatives faced in their formative years and their rapid expansion after World War II.

“Sometimes private companies built lines—‘spite lines,’ they were called—parallel to already constructed farmer-owned lines,” the narrator says. But the 26-minute film stresses the faith farmers and ranchers had in cooperative organizers and their ability to get things done through collective action.

“Us farmers can do anything we set our minds to, if we do it together,” says a farmer identified as Bill in the film. “I make a motion that we start a cooperative, so we can borrow from the government and build our own electric lines.”

The movie, made by Film Productions of Minneapolis, was distributed to NRECA member cooperatives and their statewide associations for use at annual meetings and other member outreach events.

Included with each copy were instructions on how it should be presented and talking points designed to encourage group discussion and member engagement after viewing. The notes said electric co-ops served 14 million rural people, contributed significantly to local tax bases, provided employment, and helped increase agricultural production.

“The better equipped we are to inform the uninformed, the more likely we are to resist the attacks of those who would profit from our dissolution,” NRECA said in the notes.

Video | ‘By the People, For the People’

A Timely Message

The film’s release coincided with a difficult period for electric co-ops. The Eisenhower administration was questioning its importance to rural economic development, and although the goal of universal electric service had not been achieved, more than 90 percent of rural households had access to electricity by the mid-1950s.

“The film was an attempt to counteract widespread criticism of the government’s role in rural electrification,” says Ted Case, executive director of the Oregon Rural Electric Cooperative Association (statewide) and author of Power Plays, a history of electric cooperatives and their relationships with presidential administrations. “There was a lot of bashing of the Rural Electrification Administration [REA] and electric co-ops. Co-ops were called socialist, communist, and all of the negative code words associated with the Cold War era.”

According to Case, the film and its accompanying materials were designed to reinforce the image of electric cooperatives as organizations that were very American and made up of rural people who were spiritually and politically connected to their local communities.

“NRECA should take a lot of credit for mobilizing the view that co-ops were farmers, ranchers, and local leaders banding together to build and strengthen their communities,” Case says. “This was a period of tremendous growth in rural America, and we needed REA loans to continue to grow.”

Better Living

A secondary purpose of the film was to promote sales of appliances and equipment for local retailers and to reinforce the farm and ranch modernization made possible with electric power.

“You didn’t have to promote it a lot because people were anxious to get power, but you did have to let them know what was available,” says Manley Garber, who was first elected as a director of Manassas, Va.-based Prince William Electric Cooperative in 1950.

Garber, 92, remains a director of Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative, which succeeded Prince William Electric Cooperative following a 1983 merger with Leesburg, Va.’s Tri-County Electric Cooperative.

“We promoted lighting, water pumping, refrigeration, and washing machines through our newsletters and at our meetings,” Garber says.

To help mark NRECA’s 75th anniversary, By the People for the People has been fully restored and digitized and is being made available to NRECA member co-ops.

Despite its age, the short movie offers viewers insight into the past of the rural electrification program and reinforces what’s come to be known as “the cooperative difference.”

“I’m using it this June and will run it at our annual meeting,” says Moore, a 24-year employee of FEM Electric. Moore began as an apprentice lineman and served as line superintendent for 11 years before becoming CEO in 2006.

“I’m a firm believer that the cooperative way is still the way to get things done in rural America,” Moore says. “The people before us risked a lot to get electricity. It’s one of the greatest stories ever.”

The post 'By the People For the People' appeared first on RE Magazine.

The area-coverage principle—the idea that electric co-ops, as democratic, not-for-profit businesses, should not limit their service to places where it’s easy to get a positive return on their investment—has motivated dozens of NRECA members to figure out ways to reach consumers living in some of the most sparsely populated and remote areas of the country.

It’s why Roseau Electric Cooperative decided, in 1973, to electrify the Northwest Angle, an isolated area on Minnesota’s border with Manitoba, Canada.

The Angle, as locals call it, is the only place where the continental United States sticks up above the 49th parallel—a bump on the international border resulting from a mapmaker’s error in 1783. Most of it is water, Lake of the Woods, popular with sport fishermen and bird watchers. The land part is accessible by boat or by car via windy back roads on the Manitoba side of the border. It’s an hour-and-a half drive north of the co-op’s headquarters in Roseau.

In the early ’70s, the 60 or so seasonal and year-round residents of the Angle began asking the co-op for help. They were tired of struggling with balky, noisy, expensive-to-operate home generators. General Manager Meredith Haslerud listened to them and then consulted with the Rural Electrification Administration in Washington and Roseau Electric’s power supplier, Minnkota Power Cooperative (G&T) in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

He saw three possible solutions: build a line from the nearest Manitoba Hydro substation; build a line from Minnkota Power’s delivery point in Warroad, Minnesota, near the international border; or build a small generating plant near the community of Angle Inlet.

The first two were soon rejected because construction and maintenance costs would be too high. But Minnkota Power agreed to build the plant even though it would be a money loser. According to the October 1973 issue of RE Magazine, Andy Freeman, the G&T’s legendary general manager, and his board of directors “viewed the situation not as a problem but as an opportunity to demonstrate clearly the area-coverage principle at work.”

The plant was close to completion that fall. Twin 115-kW diesel generators would soon be installed. With slight modifications, the powerhouse could accommodate up to three 500-kW units if demand grew.

“Great care has been taken to avoid damaging effects on the peaceful, unspoiled wilderness of the Angle Inlet area,” the article states. “Emission- control devices will minimize exhaust gases, and noise pollution will be cut by 900- pound mufflers to be installed on each engine.”

Roseau Electric’s distribution lines were mostly underground or underwater, generally following the Lake of the Woods shoreline. They would soon be extended to serve nearby Oak Island and Flag Island. On another front, the co-op was meeting with U.S. and Canadian authorities to see if it could serve a number of Native American homes on the Manitoba shore of the lake.

The co-op’s investment eventually approached $150,000, Minnkota’s $110,000. Only a portion of this was recovered over time, even though each consumer was required to pay $200 up front and commit to a monthly rate 2 cents higher per kilowatt-hour than the co-op’s basic farm rate. Even so, Angle consumers would spend “much less” on electricity than they did operating individual gasoline, propane, or diesel generators. And they’d have more power for household appliances and power tools as well as increased reliability.

For about six months in 1973, during construction of the Angle grid, three Roseau Electric linemen lived during the workweek at local hotel Peterson’s Camp (now called the Angle Outpost Resort). RE Magazine ran a photo of them being served a meal in the dining room. If it was hard being away from their families that long, they may have been consoled by the fact that some of the best muskie fishing anywhere was a short cast away, and on summer days, it was still light long after the workday ended.

The post Flashbacks: Figuring Out 'The Angle' appeared first on RE Magazine.

(Editor’s note: All quotes from Pauline Olson are transcribed as she wrote them.)

Telephone. Electricity. Television. Pauline Olson (1885–1969) saw each of these life-changing technologies come to her isolated North Dakota farm. She marked them in a diary she kept starting in 1926, a diary we can read today thanks to the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Pauline was a pretty 20-year-old with curly dark hair when she married John Jacob “Jake” Olson in 1905. Her parents were Norwegian immigrants, his Swedish. Together, they farmed in Bottineau County within hollering distance of the Canadian border. They raised four children and lived through two world wars and the Great Depression.

Electrification in 1949 stands out as the most exciting change she witnessed, but first things first.

When a rotary-dial phone replaced her hand-crank phone, Pauline was moved to recap what she had seen of rural telephony in a long entry on Oct. 18, 1954. “I shall here. Again write of another Episode, This time the Phone,” she begins.

Like other homesteaders, the Olsons had to “prove up” their land by farming it for five years and building a house. In 1909, they purchased a share in Farmers Telephone Co., which was probably a tiny mutual or co-op system. There were thousands of them across the country.

The system’s last day was bittersweet for Pauline: “… today Oct 18— I took the wire off & so the Last of Farmers line is writen off past. Now we expect to get our dial Phone in soon See a new Co. is now started as the old line went broke could not keep it up too many lazy line men who was payed good wages but never did fix any thing.

“Good Old Phone line that given much company & many Sad reports … many Sad things been told to me many more than Happy reports.”

At the end of the entry, she notes that the new phone was installed the next day. “The new episode starts Will I see the end of this,” Pauline, 69 at the time, wonders.

Four years later, she reported that the new phone company was bought out by Bell Telephone.

On Sept. 2, 1949, in uncharacteristically large capital letters, Pauline enthusiastically welcomed the arrival of central station electricity on a line built by North Central Electric Cooperative.

“REA. We at last got the High Line going … Off went 32 volt. On went 110. Took 12 years before it came. Pretty late in life to get this.”

A gasoline generator or a wind charger could have provided the 32 volts she refers to; both were common on Midwestern farms back then. World War II was the cause of the long delay.

People in North Dakota began talking about electrification in the late 1930s, and some co-ops had been incorporated by the time the U.S. entered the war in 1941. But construction came to a halt because copper wire and other materials used to build power lines were needed for the war effort. North Central Electric got moving again in 1945 and energized its first home the next year.

Pauline noted that she and Jake had bought a Philco refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, and a cream separator ahead of the big day, spending close to $500. “The wiring cost us $316.98 on house and Barn,” she wrote.

Four years later (Nov. 16, 1953), she again was celebrating a new technology: “… And we have TV. Going for the first time real good, can’t think of any [thing] more entertaining then TV for us. So again we experience another wonderful thing in life.”

But Pauline still didn’t have indoor plumbing. That came in 1957. “Now after 50 years. I got water piped right into the house,” she wrote on June 13, a week later. “Could I have dreamt about this 50 years ago.”

Visit the North Dakota historical society website to read all of Pauline Olson’s diary.

The post Flashbacks: Electricity Comes to a North Dakota Farm appeared first on RE Magazine.

Most people know about the two big 19th century gold rushes: the one in California in 1849 and the one in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1896. Some people have also heard of the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, when 50,000 homesteaders lined up their horses and wagons on a frontier starting line for a chance to claim a 160-acre parcel of undeveloped farmland.

But few people know about the rush to stake claims on small hydroelectric sites that took place after Congress passed the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act of 1978 (PURPA). Writing in The New Yorker in February 1982, John McPhee called it “a generally invisible feverish rush for riches.”

It was big enough for NRECA to have sent a memorandum to all 900 electric co-ops in October 1980, urging them to file a site permit application on any potential project in their service territory. “Don’t delay! You could end up buying the power from it from someone else at a higher rate.”

Between January 1980 and June 1981, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) received 1,190 of these applications for projects of 25 MW or smaller, compared with 145 during the preceding five years. One Boston prospector alone was responsible for 82 applications in 23 states.

The CEO of a Virginia G&T heard the epithet “power pirate” for the first time when he was attending a conference in Springfield, Illinois, and received a phone call from his office informing him that a South Carolina energy company and its partners, two West Virginia towns, had filed permit applications on two sites the G&T was about to move on.

“At just about any good site out there today, you’ll find someone else looking at it too,” an official at Pacific Northwest Generating Company (G&T) said at the time.

PURPA guaranteed a market for power produced at small, independent power projects. Soon, 75 percent of FERC applications were coming from energy entrepreneurs.

Another reason for the feverish interest was that a small hydro plant, especially one at an existing dam, could be brought on-line in half the time it took for a coal or nuclear plant. Then there was the 11 percent tax credit for small hydro investment Congress had attached to the Crude Oil Windfall Tax Act in 1980.

Small hydro, unlike coal or nuclear, was the right scale for an individual power prospector. With nothing more than a tape measure and a free afternoon, he could begin investigating the feasibility of refurbishing an old dam and powerhouse.

That’s exactly what Bob Carroll, general manager of Broad River Electric Cooperative in Gaffney, South Carolina, began doing on weekends and holidays soon after PURPA went into effect. From eight sites he investigated, the co-op chose a 10-foot-high diversion dam on the shallow, slow-moving river that is the co-op’s namesake, a dam that hadn’t been used to generate electricity in a decade.

Broad River Electric won a $1 million demonstration grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and planned to rebuild the Cherokee Falls Dam and refit the powerhouse with an automated plant capable of generating 3.9 MW. To do so would cost $7 million, $5 million of which was expected to come from the Rural Electrification Administration.

Typical of many abandoned dams in the eastern U.S., the Cherokee Falls Dam dates back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when it powered an iron works. By the 1880s, three water wheels supplied mechanical power for spindles and looms in a cotton mill. An electric generator replaced the water wheels in 1927, and three textile companies depended on it for the next 42 years.

Carroll, an electrical engineer, was fascinated by the dam’s rich history and excited by the prospect of giving it a new life.

“I love small hydro,” he said. “I feel about it like I do the windmills in Holland. … If I could just push everybody out of the way”—referring to the long, frustrating licensing process—“I could have that thing wired up and running tomorrow.”

He was counting on the dam to produce wholesale power at 3 cents a kilowatt, 13 percent below the rate charged by Duke Power, the co-op’s main supplier. He expected that low price to hold steady at least through 1993, when Duke Power’s rate was projected to be 7 cents.

“And that looks great!” he said.

The post The Small-Hydro Rush of 1978: Battling the 'Power Pirates' appeared first on RE Magazine.

In the mid-1970s, President Jimmy Carter was making a big push for “alternative” energy sources that could lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil. One key question was, could wind turbines be scaled up enough to generate electricity for utilities?

At the time, the Apollo program was winding down, and some of the space agency’s engineers were underemployed. So the federal government appropriated tens of millions of dollars and authorized NASA to design five large turbines.

At 2,000 kilowatts, Mod 1 was the biggest of the five. Its two 100-footlong turbine blades gave it a wingspan slightly larger than a Boeing 747. Some pieces of the generator were bigger than a boxcar.

The Department of Energy, after studying 65 possible locations, in 1977 chose Howard’s Knob, a 4,400-foot mountain peak overlooking Boone, North Carolina, as the test site. The feds also chose the local electric co-op, Blue Ridge EMC, as the host utility. It was convenient that one of the co-op’s distribution lines passed within 100 feet of the site.

Blue Ridge EMC (now called Blue Ridge Energy) had never operated a power plant of any kind before, let alone a freakish-looking space-age wind machine that stood 150 feet high and weighed 325 tons. But the co-op’s leadership felt hosting it was the patriotic thing to do.

Mod 1 was dedicated on July 11, 1979, but by then, it had already become a tourist attraction. Downtown on King Street, Boone’s main drag, two enterprising young men had built an observation deck in a parking lot and installed a coin-operated viewer where, for 25 cents, you see close-up “The World’s Largest Windmill.”

The optimum wind speed for Mod 1 was 25.5 miles per hour. Below 11 mph, the heavy blades wouldn’t turn; above 35 mph, the turning might damage vital mechanisms. Mod 1 would generate enough power for 300 to 500 homes at a cost between 6 cents and 12 cents a kilowatt-hour. (Blue Ridge EMC purchased wholesale power for 1.8 cents and distributed it for 3.4 cents.)

A series of problems soon made it apparent that those power projections were not going to pan out.

The wind didn’t blow as hard and as steadily the first winter (1979–1980) as the monitoring station on Howard’s Knob had led the NASA engineers to believe it would. Icing of the blades also cut into generation time.

Ten Blue Ridge EMC consumers living near the wind machine called the co-op to complain about noise, and 35 called to say their television reception suffered when the blades were turning, according to a 1982 NASA report. The noise—a “thumping” to some ears; a “whooshing” to others—was eliminated by replacing Mod 1’s 2-MW generator with a 1.5-MW unit. The TV complaints slowed after a decision was made to shut down Mod 1 every evening during prime time.

Then, on Jan. 20, 1981, Mod 1 suffered a fatal blow when 22 bolts in the drive train fractured, and the new Reagan administration declined to pay the $500,000 for repairs.

Watauga County officials hoped the feds would bequeath Mod 1 to the park they had created around the base of the tower. Instead, Mod 1 was offered to Blue Ridge EMC and then other utilities to no avail. It was too expensive to operate and didn’t operate very often anyway.

The General Services Administration ultimately sold the $6 million wind machine at auction for $51,600 to a North Carolina company that wanted the generator for a small hydro plant. That company, in turn, donated the 100-foot tower to Georgia Tech University.

Mod 1 was a failure. NASA knew it. Blue Ridge EMC knew it. People in town knew it because the turbine blades were usually still. The Asheville Citizen-Times reported that Mod 1 ran for only 330 hours out of a possible 29,112 and generated only 75,000 kilowatt-hours out of a possible 43,668,000.

Still, the engineers and scientists at NASA and elsewhere who were researching wind power in the 1970s and 1980s learned valuable lessons about turbine performance and grid integration that moved the technology down the road toward the utility-scale success it enjoys today.

As one of these scientists told a reporter from the daily newspaper in nearby Hickory, North Carolina, “It was not the kind of failure that makes us worry about whether wind turbines are going to work.”

The post The Story of Mod 1 appeared first on RE Magazine.

At precisely 3:00 in the afternoon on Oct. 10, 1963, lightbulbs blinked on in Montana’s Yaak River Valley. Belatedly, central-station power—distributed by Northern Lights Inc., a co-op based across the state line in Sandpoint, Idaho—had arrived in this remote, heavily forested area 20 miles south of the Canadian border.

The lights came on when a switch was thrown at a new Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) substation near the small town of Troy, Montana.

“You are now in the position to leapfrog decades to become full partners in the 20th century,” the regional power supplier’s Russell Holt told the dozen or so locals gathered for the dedication ceremony.

Northern Lights had built 21 miles of line to serve some 30 families, a U.S. Forest Service station, a one-room school, and a sawmill. Twenty-seven more miles of line were built the next year, reaching another 47 Yaak River Valley homes.

For the 17 year-round workers (up to 60 in the summer) and their families at the Forest Service station in Sylvanite, electrification created a “new normal.” Before, they had to wait until 5 p.m., when the station’s diesel generator came on for five hours, to use appliances and power tools.

Buster Bray had spent $180 a month on diesel fuel to generate electricity for his grocery store, gas station, and bar in Yaak, a hamlet 31 miles from the main highway. He hoped to cut that cost in half.

It all started in 1961, when a Yaak resident approached the co-op about getting service in the valley. But it didn’t pencil out. The cost of cutting a 40-foot right-of-way through dense forest was too high.

Then General Manager Bill Nordeen and his staff thought of an alternative: share the General Telephone Company’s right-of-way by putting a crossarm on every pole. Power supply would come from BPA.

Negotiations with the telephone company and BPA went smoothly. A new substation design that had just been developed by a BPA engineer was perfect for the project. Soon, Northern Lights crews were stringing wire.

People in the valley wanted the comforts that would come with electricity, but they also wanted to boost their local economy.

“The extension of electric service into the Yaak River Valley will stimulate lumber and mineral production as well as tourism,” Nordeen said at the time.

Two businessmen who saw this promise were Bruce Leighty, owner of the sawmill, and rancher/farmer David Winn. Leighty employed 25 men in the mill and 25 in the woods, but he couldn’t keep them employed year-round while paying $8,000 to $9,000 annually for diesel to run four generators. Anticipating electricity, he added a 300-horsepower planer to his operation.

Winn, for his part, planned to double production at his 193-acre farm by installing an electric irrigation system. He’d lived too long in “grandfather’s time,” he said. “Now we can join the rest of the country in the 20th century.”

At the time, Northern Lights served some 4,000 consumers in Idaho, Montana, and Washington. Today it’s close to 19,000.

Information for this article came from “The Lights Go On in Yaak River Valley,” from the January 1963 issue of RE Magazine.

The post Flashbacks: 'Full Partners in the 20th Century' appeared first on RE Magazine.

Future President Lyndon B. Johnson’s top priority as a freshman member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1937 was getting $5 million from Washington to build the Mansfield Dam near Austin, Texas.

Mansfield was one of six dams being built by the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), a new state agency dependent on federal loans and grants to move forward. The dams had been sold to Congress as flood control projects, according to Ray Lee, a Johnson speechwriter quoted in The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson by Ronnie Dugger. But public power advocates like Johnson were focused on something else.

Turbines at the dams could generate “electricity to replace the kerosene lamp,” Johnson said. Rural electric cooperatives could be set up to distribute the kilowatts to farms and ranches in his Hill Country district.

“He had been raised by the light of lanterns and cooked for on a wood-burning stove,” Dugger wrote. “He had seen his mother scrubbing clothes in a washtub. He knew the insides of outhouses.”

Johnson didn’t need to read the Department of Agriculture report documenting that, in 1935, only one farm in 10 had electric utility service. He had lived the statistic.

The power companies refused to serve rural areas, claiming they couldn’t make a profit. That’s why people living even a mile or two outside of Austin didn’t have electricity.

Power company executives stood up at gatherings of business leaders and condemned electric co-ops as socialistic. To them, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was an infuriating example of government sticking its nose where it didn’t belong.

Texas Power & Light Company sued to stop all six Colorado River dams from being built. According to Dugger, the utility also went after House Majority Leader Sam Rayburn, Johnson’s political mentor and a fellow Texan. They painted him with the socialist brush for his bullish support of the dams, the REA, and co-ops.

Rayburn liked to tell the story of the Texas Power & Light Company president who asked a local banker how much it would take to defeat Rayburn in the next election. When the banker told the man it couldn’t be done, “he said they had the money to do anything.”

Robert Montgomery, a progressive economist at the University of Texas who had Johnson’s ear, argued that the power companies, like the railroads, the sulfur industry, and the oil refineries, were owned by Eastern financiers. Texas was “their largest foreign colony.” Worse, the power companies were milking rural consumers through unfair electric rates.

In Washington, Johnson worked closely with Rayburn to get the $5 million appropriation passed. Rayburn tucked the appropriation into a Works Progress Administration (the largest New Deal agency) funding bill, and it passed relatively easily. He saw it as a teaching moment for 28-year-old Johnson about “keeping your mouth shut on the floor” and letting the leadership work its magic. (Johnson, Dugger wrote, had prepared a long oration defending the Mansfield Dam, but before he knew it, the appropriation was two pages back and not a word had been uttered against it.)

All six dams were eventually built. Johnson persuaded the LCRA to supply electricity to the Hill Country and helped form two electric co-ops to distribute it: Pedernales Electric in Johnson City (his hometown) and Lower Colorado River Electric (later renamed Bluebonnet Electric) in Giddings.

The power companies never forgave him. “They hated me for these dams,” Johnson once told Dugger in an interview. “They called me a communist.”

Most information for this story comes from The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson by Ronnie Dugger (1982, W.W. & Norton Company). Dugger was the founding editor (1954) of the crusading Texas Observer.

The post Flashbacks: 'They Called Me a Communist' appeared first on RE Magazine.

Most electric co-ops have preserved an anecdote or two about their early years. Farmers’ Electric Cooperative’s (FEC) best one took place on April Fool’s Day in 1940.

That was the day, a gray Monday, the Chillicothe, Missouri-based distribution system made its first connection to the U.M. Babbs residence east of town.

Mrs. Babbs couldn’t believe what the lineman who knocked on her door was telling her.

“I thought it was an April Fool’s joke,” she recalled years later. “I chased him off with a broom!”

This was 13 months after FEC obtained a loan of $505,000 from the Rural Electrification Administration (REA)—and after a lot of hard organizing work. A co-op history credits “the energetic cooperative employees who traveled the miles and miles of dirt and gravel roads signing up new members.”

It also recognizes the University of Missouri county extension agents who understood “that electricity in the rural areas would make work and life easier” and that the REA program, with its close guidance on engineering, legal matters, administration, power supply, and load building, not to mention low- interest financing, was an opportunity not to be missed.

The extension agents worked alongside the 12 farmers who incorporated FEC on Sept. 2, 1938. One of them, Ernest C. Wood, later became the co-op’s first general manager.

FEC’s first office was in Hamilton, in the next county west (Caldwell). The co-op paid $15 a month to rent two rooms on the second floor of a bank. In December 1938, Wood, a contract engineer and a stenographer, moved in.

They relocated to Chillicothe the next June because, in negotiating a wholesale power contract with the municipal utility, the city offered a lower rate if FEC took up residence downtown.

“The entire office, including equipment and paperwork, was moved to Chillicothe in the back of a single pickup truck,” FEC’s history notes.

Construction of the first distribution lines began that summer. By the following summer, the fledgling utility had built 478 miles of line and was selling electricity to 792 rural members.

Its first wholesale power bill was $34.43 for 2,700 kilowatts, but these payments climbed quickly as the load grew, to $124.95 and then $191.25.

FEC continued to build lines in rural areas where there were at least two farms per mile.

“There were a number of areas that didn’t qualify because there simply were not enough people living in those areas,” according to W.L. Altheide, who succeeded Wood in 1967 and managed the co-op for the next 15 years. “We had people using names off tombstones in some areas so they could get enough signatures to have electricity delivered to their farms.”

FEC grew steadily until the U.S. entered World War II in 1942 and copper conductor became scarce. At one point, FEC had 100 miles of poles in the ground but no wire to string them together.

The War Production Board did allow small purchases of copper conductor based on agricultural units per mile of line. According to FEC’s history, one milk cow or 10 beef cattle was one unit. Hogs and chickens also counted towards units, but row crops did not.

“If a farmer didn’t have enough units to qualify for electricity, he would borrow some livestock from his neighbors to meet whatever the requirements were at the time,” Altheide recalled. “They would drive herds all over to get the units they needed. That’s how much they wanted electricity!”

After the war, with copper and other line construction materials readily available, FEC “experienced an amazing growth period,” according to the former general manager. “We couldn’t keep up with the requests for electricity.

That growth kept up into the 1950s before leveling off around 1960. Then came several purchases of service territory, including a farmer-owned line on the western edge of Chillicothe and small utility in Linn County. Today, Farmers Electric Cooperative serves more than 13,000 meters in Linn and eight other North Missouri counties.

The post Flashbacks: No Kidding. You've got Lights! appeared first on RE Magazine.

Before Ted Koppel featured it on Nightline; before the Phil Donahue interviews; and before the national magazine coverage, Rajneeshpuram was known as “Muddy Ranch” or “The Big Muddy.”

Spread over 64,000 acres in eastern Oregon’s rural Wasco and Jefferson counties, the vast, hilly range was purchased in the fall of 1980 by the Chidvilas Rajneesh Meditation Center for $5.75 million and registered as a “Cooperative Corporation.”

Wasco Electric Cooperative, 92 miles from the ranch in The Dalles, provided electric service to the campus. The resident of record was a guru known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a controversial Indian spiritual leader who led the commune and is the subject of the popular Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country.

When I started as the Oregon Rural Electric Cooperative Association manager in the summer of 1985, the now well-known events at Rajneeshpuram were almost over. But in 1981, they were just getting started.

The residents of nearby Antelope, population 40, thought Muddy Ranch an odd location for the Rajneesh to settle. Ma Anand Sheela, the cult leader’s tough-talking personal secretary and chief of staff featured prominently in the Netflix series, picked the remote and rural location to ensure that “peoples’ neuroses did not bother Bhagwan’s vision or his work.”

When Rajneesh arrived at the ranch in summer 1981—fleeing India amid accusations of smuggling and tax evasion—scores of followers, known as sannyasins or Rajneeshees, had already begun building a compound. Soon after that, more followers poured in, and the ranch population grew into the thousands. The compound was then made an incorporated town that included Antelope and was renamed Rajneeshpuram, puram being a common suffix for cities in India. Rand McNally listed the town in its 1982 maps.

As Rajneeshpuram grew, so did its electricity needs. Wasco Electric had earlier served Muddy Ranch, which consisted of a few out buildings and an irrigation system. The infrastructure needed to serve the expanding compound, however, was substantial.

Many co-op members, particularly those in Antelope, had grown suspicious of the group, whose practices included a highly libertine lifestyle within the compound and an increasingly confrontational manner outside it. The growing dissent among residents around Rajneeshpuram meant many neighbors were ill-inclined to allow their property to be used for co-op rights-of-way to serve the compound.

Wasco Electric Co-op board member Art McGreer, his son Kelly, and Kelly’s wife, Rosemary, were among the most vocal opponents. Kelly, who would later be elected to the co-op board, eventually consented to the right-of-way after being threatened with a lawsuit by the group.

As it turned out, the suspicions of the McGreers, who were also prominently featured in the Netflix show, were well-placed. Years later, documents recovered from the ranch showed a plan by cult members to poison Rosemary for her outspoken opposition.

Art Thomsen, then the co-op manager, was required to extend service under state law and the “obligation to serve” requirements of the Rural Electrification Administration. Thomsen opted to require Rajneesh to pay upfront the cost of extending 7 miles of 69-kV line, a new substation, and 40 miles of distribution line. Jeff Davis, then the co-op line-staking tech and now the co-op’s CEO, pegged the cost of the new facilities at $1 million to $1.5 million.

Mistrust of the group extended to the electric bill as well. Neal Harth, a co-op director at the time, recalled that Thomsen would personally go to the ranch each month to collect payment, which, at its height, exceeded $750,000. The Rajneeshpuram load eventually grew to 2 MW, easily the co-op’s largest commercial account.

Davis and Dan Van Vactor, the co-op’s attorney at the time, say co-op relations with the group were generally cordial, and co-op personnel had full access to the ranch, including a yard for inventory. Others visiting the ranch weren’t as fortunate. They were either denied entrance or tracked by Rajneeshpuram police carrying rifles. Some who displeased Ma Anand Sheela would return to find their car tires slashed.

Looking back, Van Vactor suggests that the decision to require upfront payment on the service infrastructure costs likely kept Wasco Electric out of bankruptcy when the Rajneeshpuram dissolved in 1985, owing some $9.8 million to various creditors.

Before the group’s demise, members, who felt local officials were working to thwart the expansion of the compound, would be accused of everything from immigration fraud to bioterrorism for spreading salmonella at salad bars in The Dalles. Sheela eventually pleaded guilty to attempted murder and assault for her role in the bioterror attacks. She was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison and paroled after 29 months.

In 1985, Rajneesh attempted to flee to Barbados to escape illegal immigration charges. He was captured, found guilty, and sent back to India.

Without the Bhagwan, the ranch fell apart. An auction was held to pay creditors. Items included 93 Rolls Royces, A-frame guest houses, and thousands of tents used in celebrations.

In 1991, Montana-based billionaire Dennis Washington purchased Rajneeshpuram for $3.5 million and donated it to Young Life, the Christian youth ministry. Kelly and Rosemary McGreer still farm several hundred acres in Antelope.

Kelly’s final comment in Wild Wild Country: “I’m looking forward to when I never have to think about this again.”

Mark Glaess is a former general manager of both the Oregon Rural Electric Association and the Minnesota Rural Electric Association. He started his career as legislative director for the Nebraska Rural Electric Association.

The post Wild Co-op Country appeared first on RE Magazine.

Those lonesome, sun-seared expanses of the West that are so inviting to today’s solar developers were once known as “power deserts,” but for a different reason than you might think. These were the remote, sparsely populated places not served by central-station power—the dark spots on the Rural Electrification Administration’s (REA) map of the U.S.

So when Ely, Nevada-based Mt. Wheeler Power energized its brand-new distribution system in the fall of 1972, REA Administrator Dave Hamil proudly declared that “the last great power desert in the continental United States” had been conquered.

The co-op’s service territory was huge: 16,000 square miles east and west of the Nevada-Utah border, an area larger than Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined. And with only 1,161 farms and ranches along 1,100 miles of distribution line in the least populated district, consumer density was far below the REA average of 3.7 consumers per mile of line.

“You battled distance, terrain, climate, and low consumer density to provide yourselves and your neighbors with dependable central-station electric power,” Hamil said at the energization ceremony. “You faced these problems, worked together, merged your strengths, and made a dream a reality.”

Mt. Wheeler Power was 14 years in the making, counting from the day in 1959 when Wayne Gonder invited several neighbors to meet at his ranch in Garrison, Utah, an hour-and-a-half drive east of Ely. He also invited an employee of Garkane Electric Cooperative in southern Utah, an electrical engineer from Salt Lake City, and two REA field men.

By all accounts, it was a productive meeting, but the next steps took months and years.

In October 1963, the founders filed incorporation papers in Carson City with the Nevada secretary of state. Ten days later, they elected a board of directors at a meeting in Ely, and each of these nine men took home a stack of membership applications to distribute in their far-flung communities. After 225 signed applications were collected, the board hired an electrical engineer, Clare Olsen, to begin mapping and designing a distribution system.

It was soon apparent that irrigation pumps, not homes, schools, and rural businesses, would be the co-op’s bread and butter—80 percent of its annual revenue. But when REA crunched the numbers, it concluded that irrigation rates would have to be set higher than ranchers were willing to pay in order to service a 35-year loan with a 2 percent interest rate. Mt. Wheeler Power needed to find more consumers.

Luckily, about this time (1966–1967), the board learned that Ely Power & Light Company, a small family-owned utility, was looking for a buyer. Its 3,358 customers and 196 miles of line could be the hub from which Mt. Wheeler Power reached out across long north-south valleys of the power desert.

REA encouraged the purchase. With Ely Power & Light in the fold, Mt. Wheeler Power could set reasonable rates. The revenue would allow the co-op to pay off its debt while maintaining lines and substations and putting aside small margins.

Hamil rewarded this sound business plan with a $15.1 million loan, the federal agency’s largest to date. It enabled Mt. Wheeler Power to not only buy Ely Power & Light, but also to build 223 miles of 138-kV transmission line, 113 miles of 69-kV line, and those 1,100 miles of new distribution line.

Gonder, who became the board president, had chased the co-op dream for 14 years and seen it come true. He hoped the comfort and convenience of central-station power would “encourage our young people to stay here and farm and ranch.”

Olsen, who had been hired to manage the new co-op, talked about “the dawning of a new day when electric power will be key to economic development and prosperity for the people we serve.”

The post Flashbacks: Taming the Last 'Power Desert' appeared first on RE Magazine.

Before Touchstone Energy® Cooperatives, which turned 20 this year, there was “Tell the Nation the Truth,” a national advertising program run by NRECA that was better known by its explosive nickname “TNT.” It made its mark with newspaper and magazine ads, radio spots, and a 27-minute movie called “The Quiet Revolution,” narrated by Hollywood actor Burgess Meredith.

Like its successor, TNT was supported by voluntary contributions from local co-ops. The first print ad ran in early 1961 and the last in the early 2000s. The art for the 1961 ad was “Lone Dot,” a striking painting of nighttime in an electrified mountain village, the only one for miles around. It made its debut as a full-page ad in Life magazine, one of the most popular news weeklies of that time.

One in a series, the ad was the big-ticket item in the media component of NRECA’s yearlong Silver Jubilee Celebration of 25 years of government-sponsored rural electrification. The Chicago Federated Advertising Club honored the series with its award for “best corporate image.” That summer, the NRECA board of directors decided national advertising should be an every-year thing, and TNT was born. The board stipulated that it be self-sustaining like the Silver Jubilee, funded with voluntary co-op contributions of 10 cents per meter. Of the nearly 900 co-ops in 47 states, 663 had contributed to the Silver Jubilee, and the board was counting on a similar level of participation.

“So, shortly you will be asked again to contribute to our continuing effort to create friendly understanding among our fellow citizens and help tell city neighbors that rural electrification is good for all Americans,” read an editorial in RE Magazine.

In another issue of RE, TNT Manager Terry Gunn laid out the program components: national magazine advertising, small ads for co-ops to place in local newspapers, public relations materials to share with local print, radio, and television outlets, and billboard ads.

“Nationally circulated magazines provide the most economical and effective way to reach the largest possible number of fellow citizens,” Gunn wrote, and The Atlantic and Harper’s Magazine fit that bill better than Life. Even though they weren’t often seen on newsstands in small towns, “they reach a highly influential audience in need of the facts about rural electrification.”

A high percentage of their readers, Gunn continued, “are government leaders, or prominent in the fields of education, business, and the professions.”

These were the “opinion leaders” that Olson and others involved in TNT saw as their target audience.

The early years of TNT were about selling rural electrification as something that was good for the country and showing that “America’s rural electric systems,” the co-ops, were the good guys in the utility industry. Then in the early 1970s, with energy shortages causing economic panic in the U.S. and Europe, the program led with ads titled, “Are We Waiting for the Lights to Go Out?” and “The Case for a Nationwide Power Network.”

Before the end of that decade, TNT had moved on to overregulation, with a 1979 ad proclaiming that in just six years, government red tape had boosted the cost of building a coal-fired power plant from $150 per kilowatt to $900. “Who pays?” the ad asked. “The consumer.”

Go forward another 14 years, and TNT was buying space in major publications for ads carrying the theme, “How the Country Gets Things Done.” The one that appeared the first week of May 1993 told how the local co-op in Cherokee, Oklahoma, had helped raise $25,000 to get a restaurant up and running after the only other sit-down restaurant in town closed its doors. The tagline was “Small potatoes? Not for folks in Cherokee.”

Earlier that spring, TNT had strayed off this theme to defend co-ops after a media attack on the Rural Electrification Administration as an obsolete New Deal holdover. The ad asserted that “America’s economy counts on rural America” for food and raw materials. “FDR and the New Deal were right as rain. The REA is a good deal, for rural America, for all of America.”

For more than 40 years, TNT cultivated a national identity for “America’s rural electric systems” and, in a later wording, “America’s Consumer-Owned Rural Electric Co-ops.” It’s the broad shoulders on which the “America’s electric cooperatives” brand now stands.

The post Flashbacks: 'Tell the Nation the Truth' appeared first on RE Magazine.