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Rural Electrification:

Lessons learned from a New Deal Era Program

Team Leads: Dr. Jonathon Free, Dr. Victoria Plutshack, Dr. Robert Fetter

Team Managers: David Buch, Will Niver

Members: Franco Picone, Zhihao Han, Tri Truong

Background: The Great Depression and Rural Electrification

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• Early 1930s - U.S. is in the Great Depression; only 10% of rural farms electrified (1935)
• Federal government establishes Rural Electrification Administration (REA)
• Provided low-interest loans for farmers to set up local electric cooperatives.
• Ran the Electric Farm Equipment Roadshow from 1939 to 1941.

Did the Electric Farm Equipment Roadshow lead to local increases in rural electricity consumption?

Data Collection

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Using the workflow outlined above, we converted raw pdfs of the following reports to clean csv files.

• State-level Production of Electric Energy and Capacity (1940-1954)
• Directory of Electric and Gas Utilities (1940-1948)
• REA Annual Statistical Report (1941-1946)
• County-level US census data

Results

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Methods

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• Assignment of roadshow stop locations is not random
• Employed statistical “causal inference” methods to adjust for confounding in effect estimate
• Used covariate and propensity score matching techniques

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Borrower-Year Level Propensity Score Matching

• Refine analysis and produce technical write-up for journal publication.

Next Steps

Since treated time is different for each REA borrower, we can also match sample based on the year they start being treated to reveal the trajectory of roadshow effect in all subsequent years.

• Extend findings to explore present day applications of similar rural electrification strategies.

Yes, our covariate matched analysis indicated a yearly 64 (±54) kWh increase per residential customer, while our propensity score analysis indicated a 90 (±70) kWh increase.

Additional deliverables from the program include an interactive ShinyApp, pictured to the left, as well as a public GitHub repository of our data and analyses.