One light bulb. That was what electrification brought to my grandmother Mag’s two-story farmhouse in Boydton, Virginia. No one wrote down the year the rural electric cooperative workers brought the wire to her house in the late 1940s.

Newspapers celebrated rural electrification for making people’s lives better: People could run refrigerators, water pumps, dishwashers and, in some places, air conditioning.

Mag’s family did not think one bulb in the first floor of their two-story house counted as history. Their lives barely changed after they got electricity.

Every day she hauled buckets of water from a stream for cooking and bathing: In her words, “them buckets were heavy.” Her father still inspected tobacco leaves by oil lamp in the barn just past the outhouse, and someone traveled into town once a week to buy ice for the icebox. Mag’s mother continued cooking on a woodstove where heat was cost-effective and human-powered. As my father says, “Chopping wood is free.”

With that one bulb, the farmhouse didn’t pay much for electricity. Around that time, some rural cooperative customers paid US$3.50 a month for 40 kilowatt hours of electricity – the equivalent today of around $80. Yet to me, that history of my grandmother’s single light bulb and low bill is more than a relic of early electrification. It’s a reminder that relatively low bills don’t mean energy is affordable. The family could not afford an electric line large enough to pump water until 1986, two years after my father graduated from college.

The mistake energy utilities make about low bills

At least six times a year my father travels to the farmhouse, fixing it up for modern life. I research energy affordability, so one of my contributions to the effort has been to look into programs to get an energy-efficient heating system and maybe some........

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