• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 773 0

load. That means they end up sinking major money into building plants that might run only a small percentage of the time. Less dramatically, power plants work best when they can run consistently, so it’s not ideal to run a plant to meet demand during the day and then switch it off at night. If you’re a utility manager, you want the load to be as consistent and as close and safely possible to capacity throughout the day and the year.25 The most picturesque example of this phenomenon comes from the early days of electricity. Back then, electric trolleys formed the dominant load, so companies built amusement parks at the ends of their lines to suck up nighttime load and also generate some extra traffic and revenue. This “load balancing” brought us Coney Island. By 1901 more than half of trolley companies operated at least one park with rollercoasters or underground tours or other rides. Historian David Nye has called them “a machine of illusions, the logical counterpart of the new industrial factory.”26

Then, in the middle of the century more and more electric appliances that fit nicely into the grow-and-build strategy came onto the market: bigger, better refrigerators, televisions, washers, dryers, and curling irons. The modern idea of convenience was rounding into form. You name it, there was a new plug-in gadget being produced for the swelling ranks of the middle class.

In the classic story of energy in America, it’s the amazing convenience and overall excellence of these products that drove electricity consumption. Demand growth averaged 6 or even 7 percent a year in the middle of the century, and at some regional utilities, growth was even faster, reaching the double digits.27 Housewives just loved all their labor-saving devices! “The story of electrical progress is the record of the emancipation of womanhood—it has brought new golden hours of leisure to women and better living to millions of homes,” General Electric proclaimed in 1936.28

And utilities were only too happy to provide the energy for this better world.

The story that historians have painted in recent years, however, is more complicated. Although items like electric irons and better refrigerators were undoubtedly useful and helped eliminate some of the drudgery from housework, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan has convincingly shown that the more mechanized and electrified housewives actually did more housework than their less high-tech counterparts. How did that happen? From the 1920s onward the social standards for housekeeping transformed, driven by heavy advertising and marketing by home appliance manufacturers, who often also manufactured electrical equipment for utilities. For American housewives, social changes meant purchasing more products and doing more work. Cowan wrote,

Not surprisingly, the changes that occurred were precisely the ones that would gladden the hearts and fatten the purses of the advertisers; fewer household servants meant a greater demand for labor and timesaving devices; more household tasks for women meant more and more specialized products that they would need to buy; more guilt and embarrassment about their failure to succeed at their work meant a greater likelihood that they would buy the products that were intended to minimize that failure.29

The transformation of household servants into electrical appliances was formalized when the Alabama Power Company created Reddy Kilowatt, an anthropomorphized lightning bolt with a lightbulb for a head and light sockets for ears, after which some three hundred companies utilized the image for their corporate spokesperson. He was the friendly face of private utilities’ marketing campaigns from the middle of the 1920s into the 1960s, urging Americans to use more energy, thus enabling the companies to execute their grow-and-build strategies. “The most important elements that determine our loads are not those that happen, but those that we project—that we invent—in the broad sense of the term ‘invention,’” head of American Electric power legend Phillip Sporn told his peers in 1964.