![]() In a reflection of its insurgent origins, the TVA was an exercise in what its originators referred to as “administration at the grassroots,” with administrators working closely with farmers and other locals to help craft plans for both power lines and economic development. Senator George William Norris, a progressive from Nebraska and longtime ally of organized labor, fought for the TVA against conservative Republicans who detested the idea of public power. Like most New Deal programs, the TVA didn’t emerge from the goodness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s heart. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created two years before the Rural Electric Administration (REA) in 1933, sought to correct that. For private utilities (the only game in town at the time) extending power lines to customers spread out over tens or hundreds of miles simply wasn’t worth the cost-especially considering that the vast majority of those potential customers happened to be poor. At the start of the Great Depression, some 90 percent of rural homes lacked electricity. Rural electrification was intended to accomplish one goal: to serve people neglected by the private sector. Understanding the RECs’ radical potential, however, means understanding their history. They might also help greens refocus fights onto pocketbook issues. If successful, reformed RECs could give progressives a much needed foothold in places the Democratic Party has long since abandoned. ![]() Crucially, it could also help extend our much heralded clean energy revolution beyond liberal enclaves like New York and California. Their work-combining a zeal for small-d democracy with one for bringing down emissions-could hold the key to making sure the transition away from fossil fuels includes some of the poorest places in the country on the ground floor. Member-owner reformers dotting the map of red and rural America are already waging fights over their cooperatives on two fronts: for basic representation and for energy efficiency. Servicing ratepayers whose top agenda may not be climate change, the push to integrate renewables into RECs’ energy mix nonetheless grounds the transition away from carbon-intensive fuels in something more material: energy bills. Nominally democratic, RECs have the ability to transform a sizable chunk of America’s energy sector-one of the highest-polluting parts of our economy. And they might just offer an opportunity to curb the right and the climate crisis alike. REC service areas encompass everything from isolated farm homes to mountain hollers to small cities, with the highest concentrations in the South, the Midwest, and the Great Plains. They also serve 93 percent of the country’s “persistent poverty counties,” 85 percent of which lie in non-metropolitan areas. Over 900 rural electric cooperatives (RECs)-owned and operated by their members-stretch through forty-seven states, serving 42 million ratepayers and 11 percent of the country’s demand for electricity. ![]() If there’s one thing poor, rural communities tend to have in common, it’s where they get their power-not political power, but actual electricity. They were prevented from doing so by a number of structural barriers-voting restrictions, second and third jobs, far-flung polling locations-as well as a lack of excitement about two parties they saw as having abandoned them.Įnter: twenty-first-century electric cooperatives, a perhaps unlikely player in the contest for power between progressives and conservatives in the heart of so-called Trump country in rural America. One glaring omission in the postmortem handwringing about the 2016 election is the fact that most poor people in America-of all races and genders-simply didn’t vote. Solar panels installed on a Pennsylvania farm, thanks to a USDA grant (U.S. Reforming them could bring energy democracy to the Heartland-and fight climate change in the process. ![]() Some 42 million Americans get their power from rural electric cooperatives. ![]()
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