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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but it's also clear that rural electrification was a huge error. People should live in clusters of at least a handful of structures where it's practical and affordable to provision electric lines (and telecommunications), or they should be off the grid altogether. What we built in the 20th century was the worst possible thing: mile after mile of transmission and distribution equipment serving dispersed houses in forests. This should never have been built and we should not perpetuate it with subsidies: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.4638277,-120.656418,3a,75y,3...

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This has to be the most confidently incorrect take I’ve ever read here.

The Rural Electrification Act not only brought power to rural areas, but also jobs to Americans when they were most needed, and countless follow-on benefits: increased farm productivity, longer lifespans and higher quality of life, etc.

It’s also not that subsidized compared to many other industries; the entire point of co-ops is purchasing something in bulk, with no one taking the profits. They get loans, yes, but the default rate on them is absurdly low.

And on that point, electric co-ops consistently produce reliable power at a lower cost than privately-owned utilities. I’ve experienced both, in multiple areas of the country, and by far co-ops beat everyone else.

This doesn’t even touch on the fact that the infrastructure enabled by the REA is also the only reason high speed internet ever made it to rural areas. Fiber everywhere should absolutely be a goal.

> This has to be the most confidently incorrect take I’ve ever read here.

It’s funnier if we alter it a little, is it more or less true this way?

>> It's also clear that rural voting was a huge error. People should live in clusters of at least a handful of structures where it's practical and affordable to provision government (and telecommunications), or they should be off the grid altogether. What we built in the 20th century was the worst possible thing: dispersed houses. This should never have been built and we should not perpetuate it with subsidies.

I don’t see how voting works as an analogy. Suburbs would be more apt. I live in one, but I’ll be the first to admit that there’s no defensible reason to do so beyond “I want to.” They’re typically a net negative for counties in terms of tax revenue, they perpetuate car-first infrastructure, they contribute to high housing costs, and they don’t produce anything of value, like rural areas can (farms, land preservation).

Well, people have to live somewhere, and that place will not generate a lot of revenue.

US suburbs have problems due to single-use areas and forced low density. But you will aleays have some area that don't pay a lot of taxes.

Its hilarious city folks think rural power is subsidized.

I recently extended a line about 1000 feet. For this, I paid $13000 -- primary transmission, poles, anchors, electricians, transformers, all at full rates. And it was a required donation, as in the power coop owns everything and it goes on public easement on to the next guy when they extend from mine. When they finished, I worked myself silly digging secondary transmission to where I was used on the property.

It is the other way around, rural people shoulder the costs of massive mileage of the grid extension that aid intercity networking. The costs are privatized but the benefits are socialized.

The cost of installing that stuff is way more than 13k

Then they committed fraud.

I’m not sure you read that correctly. You paid far less than the total cost of installing that infrastructure.

The articles of my coop require someone extending a line to pay the full unsubsidized costs before installation.

If I underpaid the coop defrauded the other members by charging them instead.

On the flip side, practically everything else about rural areas is subsidized. Most crops have price floors. Dairy is massively subsidized. Rural school districts siphon funding from cities.

Much / all of this is arguably necessary for national security viz. food production, but I dislike when people in red states (not saying you’ve done this, just making a tangential point) make comments like, “let’s see how long the city lasts if we stop exporting food.” Uhhh how long do you think you’d last without practically every aspect of your life being subsidized?

We need both groups in the country, and we need to support each other as each needs, but part of that dynamic being healthy means acknowledging that we’re receiving help.

You guys are talking about a totally different "rural" than I was. Look, food in 2025 comes from gigantic horizontal factories and there is no way to avoid that. A food-producing region of California looks like [1]. An exclave of Libertarian weirdos LARPing as the Unabomber looks like [2]. It is the latter that is problematic in terms of provision of infrastructure.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4301203,-122.0649005,3a,60y,...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.3962909,-120.5056754,3a,75y,...

Aren’t you making the case for the OP? That it cost so much to extend a line for a thousand feet… how about the thousands of miles of lines it takes to service rural users?

The same is true for all infrastructure in that it gets less expensive per user as density increases. The cost to hook up an apartment building to the grid is a few houses in a suburb but services 10x the people at the same revenue per person. The cost to service a single home in a rural area might wipe the revenue out from a dozen apartments.

Frankly, I’m sick of subsidizing the rural welfare crowd. Let them pay the market price for their roads and utilities if they want to cosplay as Galt gulchers.

Yes we have no public roads either for miles. Privately maintained easements instead. I built mine first with just an axe and shovels, later with a backhoe. Sewer is private septic. Water we had to dig a private well. The electric coop is paid for by users at full cost by their own extensions.

This works amazing as taxes and subsidies are basically zero. You pay for what you use.

That basically describes my area. There are 3 streets (2 connect, the 3rd doesn't). There are 11 houses on my (dead end) street and maybe 25 on the other two streets.

Because of this clustering - I live in a pretty rural area - but have natural gas and cable internet (only one option, so not that awesome).

But, I also have a well and a septic system. And I'm very thankful. As I was moving back to the US after 2 decades in a city, I did a winter with no high speed internet (used a mofi router with a SIM card as Starlink was overprescribed in the area) and propane for heat. It was a small house but heating with propane is crazy expensive.

Who cares about the way things should be when it comes to utilities. There’s no feasible way you’re going to cut power to rural communities and people. Deal with it.

That's what the article is about.

Interesting perspective. I guess even in very rural areas it would have pushed people to build villages. On the other hand people already were living far apart and lack of electricity meant they had to do massively more work. LBJ's biography has a section on this, explaining that life on west texas farms was incredibly hard without electricity (and as congressman LBJ worked very hard to expand that to rural people).

It sort of has. Lots of people you think of as living in fairly rural locations are still in small towns rather than the middle of nowhere.

Eh, but we should not leave people without basics of civilization. Yes, it’s a subsidy, but benefits outweigh hoarding of wealth.

But we wouldn't have been "leaving" anyone. All this garbage was built in the 1970s because we incentivized it with subsidized roads and utilities. If we hadn't established those subsidies, all of these people would have lived in the established towns of Jackson or Ione, upon which they are totally dependent anyway.

> all of these people would have lived in the established towns

And I assume your food would be conjured magically?

None of the people in the area to which I referred are undertaking anything productive. Food comes from farms, like always.

Which are in rural areas. Which means the lines have to go there. Which means they pass less rural area to get there.

Rural areas aren't just a farm all by itself. Farmers need schools, stores, supplies, workers, you know, rural areas.

As well, when we electrified our nations, most people lived on farms. At the start of the 20th, as an example, most Canadians lived in rural areas. The reverse is now true.

This conversation is absurd. Hydro Quebec runs power lines through areas far more rural than California, through weather more severe and wide ranging, over greater distances, with more wild land, and just as much danger of fire. It does so at the cheapest rates, shows a profit, maintaining its lines and clearing vegetation.

PG&E is a pathetic company, and if people look outside of California, you can see how cheap rural electrification is

Really, cities cost more to electrify. Burying lines is mega expensive, stringing power lines on poles os quiet cost effective. You can easily run miles of lines, for the cost of a crew digging up a street and repaving.

Lastly, rural people pay for hookups. Each house often pays thousands per pole.

Out of context Canadians are ... out of context. We are discussing utilities in California. California and Quebec could not be more different in terms of climate and fire risk. I can't wait for you to justify the claim that fire risk is the same in California and Quebec. Every place in Quebec can generally expect precipitation every other day on average and the normal number of consecutive dry days in California every year would shatter the same record in Quebec.

Quebec is 4x as large as California, has far more forested land, and is often very dry in late summer.

It also has massive snowstorms, ice storms, which bring down vegetation, and ranges from -40F up to 100F yearly, depending.

We can nitpick on specifics, but by no means is California more rural, or more forested. Quebec is also far less populous, and has a far more hostile environment.

Hydro Quebec does well, because vegetation is cleared, maintenance is performed, and corners aren't cut.

Unlike PG&E.

> Quebec is also far less populous

Isn't this my point? It is practical to punch transmission lines through any place. It is much more difficult, risky, and costly to maintain a fractal distribution network to individual customers in certain places due to geography and climate. If you parachute randomly into Quebec you'd be walking for a month before you met anyone. Same is not true in California.

Not really.

Less populous can also mean more rural, and that was my point.

You talk about houses in the middle of no-where, and Quebec has that in spades. And it's not expensive, it doesn't cost, it's revenue generating, and not part of the problem.

If Quebec can do it, generate massive profits, and have mega-low rates, and do rural far better than California, then "rural" isn't the issue.

https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/wildfire

https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/maps/fw?type=fdr&year=2024&mon...

Don’t make shit up. Quebec fire risk is much, much lower than California. Both companies have to maintain vegetation around the lines. HQ’s risk of vegetation outages is outages for some customers on a feeder. California’s is the state burns down. It’s just not remotely the same.

I’m willing to believe HQ does it better but the challenges ahead of them are wayyyy different

Hydro Quebec‘s territory is nowhere near as vulnerable to forest fires as California’s.

Re: Quebec hydro, I can’t think of an example of a crown corp or asset (see 407) being sold in Canada that has benefited the public with better quality at a lower price in the end. Privatization drives the need for shareholder profit to extract value more than efficiency so gains aren’t passed on. People contort themselves to think this isn’t the case… but the track record for power, automotive insurance, cellular service says otherwise… The only good argument I’ve ever seen of outside of pretending efficiency leads back to consumers is hidden externalities being covered by the government which is fair toy stability of a public service, averaging out costs for really isolated areas, and decent jobs with pensions is worth something too.

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