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Households were useful to utilities because their power needs matched up nicely with the corporate exigency of balancing the companies’ electrical loads. One economic historian wrote,

The household was recognized as a large and untapped market for electricity, capable of benefiting the electric companies in two ways. On a daily basis, household demands were steady and regular, which increased the total base load. On an hourly basis, the highest household demands came when industrial demands were lightest, which evened out fluctuations in consumption. Consequently, the electric supply companies encouraged the production and sale of household equipment.31

In the 1950s the utilities paired Reddy Kilowatt with a new marketing campaign by the big appliance manufacturers to “Live Better Electrically.” They hired famous actors like Ronald Reagan to promote a house in which everything was “at the Reddy.”32 Ads featuring the lightning bolt are embarrassingly strange, as Reddy, a near human, sings with the voice of a child: “I wash and dry your clothes / Play your radios / I can heat your coffee pot / I am always there / with lots of power to spare / because I’m Reddy Kilowatt.” Then, he would climb into a light socket and deliver his tag line, “Remember: Just Plug in. I’m Reddy!”33 Utility journals told their readers, “Sell or Die!” and “Sell—and Sell—and Sell.”34 Selling more electricity was not just good for business but also good for America in the long war against Communism: Electricity was, in the words of the Paley panel, a “resource for freedom.”

The end result was that Americans used more electricity than anyone else and with far less of a sense of the value of conserving it. Whereas small electrical appliances helped increase load, the big market was in home heating and cooling. This interest united utilities and the burgeoning large-scale home construction industry. “We all hope that air conditioning is going to be the next thing in homebuilding,” a leader of the National Association of Home Builders said in House and Home magazine, “but it won’t be unless a great deal of changes are made.”35

The changes that mattered were transformations in how homes were being built. The homes built in the 1950s were as close to antisolar homes as anyone can find. They were remarkable for their lack of attention to the climate of an area. Architects moaned about the loss of vernacular knowledge about the best ways to build houses in places as different as Georgia and Maine. One critic explicitly noted that Americans had “gone backward and unlearned things we used to know. We have built, in the South, little, low-ceilinged hotboxes without properly shaded roofs. We have built, in the North, houses with thin brick walls that are cold in winter and hot in summer.”36 Architects may not have known how to design a great solar home, but they did know it was a bad idea to build a house in Louisiana that was designed for Minnesota. Developers, though, were more concerned with following the trends that would sell homes.

So they built whatever homes they thought would sell and used energy input to replace architecture. The solar home’s sense of economy and using less went out the window. Perversely, the more energy one was willing to use, the more house one could get for the money. The homes of the time became like stripped-down models of cars sold as door busters. Only what consumers found themselves buying wasn’t just a cheap car with a big engine but rather an entire high-energy lifestyle.37

Perhaps there could have been consumer pushback on homebuilders who built houses that were wrong for an area and, therefore, expensive to heat and cool, but there was no equivalent to a “miles per gallon” sticker for homes. Some homeowners at Levittown, for example, never even saw the insides of their homes. They bought based on where the home was located within the development, not its thermal properties. 38 With long-term costs