Speed up mass electrifiction

Not sure if this is ASB but what would you need to bring forward mass electrification for industry and homes by say 50 years and what effect would that have?
 
Not sure if this is ASB but what would you need to bring forward mass electrification for industry and homes by say 50 years and what effect would that have?

depends on where, and how.

My Grandad got telephone back in the 20s or 30s, if I remember correctly.

Electricity (and therefore things like running water and indoor plumbing) didn't arrive until the '60s. I have vague memories of running out to the outhouse as a small child.

Getting more areas under a 'Rural Electrification' scheme using co-ops and/or government intervention, could easily have pushed that back a handful of decades - soon after the telephone, for instance. Beyond that? It's tough.

The very first central power stations were in the early 1880s, and you're not going to push THAT back much without changing all of science, especially physics, development, which would have rather more effects than just electrification.

OTOH, generation stations are expensive, and so is stringing wire.

Telephones can have lots of cheap centrals in small towns, electricity, no so much.

Also, farms really can use telephones - to contact neighbours, call for help, etc., etc., especially in the winter when people are otherwise pretty shut in. Electricity is largely an expensive way of doing what oil lamps etc already do.

wiki said:
Most recent progress in electrification took place between the 1950s and 1980s. Vast gains were seen in the 1970s and 1980s - from 49 percent of the world's population in 1970 to 76 percent in 1990.[69][70] Recent gains have been more modest - by the early 2010s 81 to 83 percent of the world's population had access to electricity.[71]

So... 50 years? Ouch. That means getting electricity out to rural North American farms in WWI when power stations were just really starting to ramp up. OR it means moving the BIG surge world wide back to 1920-1940.



WIthout a REALLY early PoD, I just don't see this at all.
 
You need to settle the AC/DC issue sooner, as well as "invent" AC & long range transmission earlier. Absent AC and long distance transmission, electrification is much more local (and expensive) as you need more power plants. The other issue is a perceived need by folks out of the urban/suburban areas, after all if you don't want a "product"...

Electric companies need to be substantial investments in power plants and transmission lines, absent a sufficient customer base/demand not happening. A lot of rural electrification (TVA in the USA for example) was done with significant levels of government subsidy or outright ownership. At least in the USA, you have had a similar situation with broadband coverage for rural areas as costs for providing the service via fiberoptic cable would not be recoverable easily.

The other issue for earlier electrification is that the science and engineering for electrical generation, transmission, and usage (like electric lights) only came in towards the end of the 1800's.
 

Congressman

Banned
Have Rockerfellor and Carnegie start their monopolies earlier, like during the Civil War. They funded the electric boom
 
You need to settle the AC/DC issue sooner, as well as "invent" AC & long range transmission earlier. Absent AC and long distance transmission, electrification is much more local (and expensive) as you need more power plants. The other issue is a perceived need by folks out of the urban/suburban areas, after all if you don't want a "product"...

Electric companies need to be substantial investments in power plants and transmission lines, absent a sufficient customer base/demand not happening. A lot of rural electrification (TVA in the USA for example) was done with significant levels of government subsidy or outright ownership. At least in the USA, you have had a similar situation with broadband coverage for rural areas as costs for providing the service via fiberoptic cable would not be recoverable easily.

The other issue for earlier electrification is that the science and engineering for electrical generation, transmission, and usage (like electric lights) only came in towards the end of the 1800's.

This necause without the development and invention of three phase power you will need to place a power station every couple miles other wise it will get nowhere.
 
The other possibility that springs to mind is at least some western railroads electrifying aggressively. Selling power is a pretty obvious sideline if you're doing this, and was pretty standard practice for interurban and streetcar firms that weren't actually power companies first and railroads seconds.
 
OTOH, generation stations are expensive, and so is stringing wire.
In the west of the USA, apparently, the earliest telephone networks were locally-owned ones that used the existing barbed-wire fences to carry their signals. All as 'party line' networks rather than privately person-to-person, of course, and so [in a limited way] slightly like an earlier precursor of the internet...

(Source: an article in New Scientist magazine, sometime in 2014.)
 
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