How the Grid was built (and why Energy companies are hustling us into paying for their Smart Grid)

Spending up to a million dollars a year through the 1920s, NELA secretly funded news agencies, sponsored research, held conferences, endowed scholarship funds, organized letterwriting campaigns, and even encouraged the rewriting of school textbooks. In 1925, for example, the chairman of the NELA PR committee, M. S. Sloan, of the Brooklyn Edison Company, addressed a group of employees at an internal meeting: “Schoolbooks in wide use all over the country have recently been analyzed. Many of them contain startling misstatements about public utilities. The pupil studying such material, hearing it discussed in the classroom, starts life with a warped and biased point of view regarding public utilities, and . . . is only too likely to remain unsympathetic and antagonistic through all future years.”

This must be what happened to me.

As another example, in Illinois, a release was regularly sent to the nine hundred newspapers in the state, about 150 of them dailies. Speakers’ bulletins were issued to employees, containing “ample material to any intelligent person for sound talks on each subject.”
NELA also acted as a booking agency for its propagandists. According to an internal memo, “A bureau is operated to find engagements, before clubs, civic associations and so on. More than 800 Illinois high schools are regularly furnished informative literature for classroom theme work, and debating society use.”
In the slump of the thirties, with sales of everything else falling, electrification of homes and businesses continued to grow. There are echoes of this now, with the multi-corporation propaganda campaigns promoting the creation of a smart grid in the middle of the worst economic downturn in twenty years.
In 1935 (the only year for which I could f nd figures), lightbulbs were still by far the biggest power user in the domestic setting. Of the 20 million households wired to the grid by then, 13.5 million used electricity for lighting and small appliances, such as radios, while only 5 million had a refrigerator, and about 1.5 million had electric stoves.
Since the early stages of the grid, GE had been working hard to increase their sales of products other than lightbulbs. Merely running a few lights per household did not require the huge central generators that GE was building, nor did it require the elaborate power grid that was being planned. Things could have proceeded very differently. Just as today the smart grid is hardly inevitable and not necessarily in the consumers’ interests, back then the grid was not the only logical conclusion and not the best solution for the market. “It could have been a much less centralized system, even balkanized,” David Nye told me. If the opposition had been better organized, or the pro-electricity lobby had not been so well funded, or if a man named Bruce Fairchild Barton had not come along when he did, the grid might never have formed.