Cost of Energy Quotes

At the time, millions of Americans had no access to electrical power, especially in the rural areas. FDR and the New Deal changed that for millions of Americans with the Rural Electrification initiatives. Private electric utility corporations wanted the monopoly but did not want to sever everyone. The cost to electrify a densely populated area is much less on a per capita bases than for a rural area where it might take 25 miles of wire to serve 5 families as opposed to a city where the same 25 miles of wire might serve 5000 or even more families. The only solution of for the densely populated area to pay a little more and subsidize the rural areas home and farm electricity and require the utility corporations to serve everyone. That is essentially what happens today, and the subsidy not only comes from higher rates but also the general tax revenue of the Federal Government and many states. Before the New Deal, under Hoover there was no federal attempt to solve this problem. FDR’s administration, however come up with a number of ways, many of which are still in use today.

Actually there was an environmental cost and a fuel cost; at the time neither was recognized as wood and coal were so plentiful with no seeming negatives to their utilization.

Statement when Chile built the first large scale Solar Powered Electric Generating facility in one of its deserts. The cost of electricity was less than half of that of the then existing generation with carbon based fuels like oil or natural gas, It was a major breakthrough bacuase while solor power was always clean and infinte, it had been more expensive to generate than carbon based power sources. The consinuous improvement in the solar collecting techno;ogy, the large scale of the Chlean facility and the terrific desert location combined to not only make solor power less expsnsive, but much less expensive than fossil fuels.