(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.

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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.

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