Can Americans run their own distributed power plants? Yes… it’s happened before.
Distributed power generation is a hot topic today. Businesses and consumers want to produce their own power, and become less dependent on an increasingly fragile and expensive grid. But can microgrids and distributed generation really scale? Or is this an unrealistic fantasy?
Turns out, it’s happened before. In the 1920s, millions of American businesses and consumers took energy self-sufficiency into their own hands, buying and installing their own electric plants and microgrids. This is a story I had no idea about until recently. But what they did back then with just lead-acid batteries, gas generators, wind turbines and primitive electronics is pretty amazing.
The microgrid is born.
In 1916, most major U.S. cities were already electrified. But half the country’s 100 million people lived in rural areas, far from any grids or power stations. They needed electricity; they wanted to stop using kerosene lamps at night, stop hand-pumping water, and stop using animal labor to power their farm equipment. They wanted radios, washing machines, and refrigeration.
So when Charles Kettering launched a 32-volt, 850-watt ‘electric plant’ called Delco Light for farmers in 1916, tens of thousands of farmers rushed out to buy them. Other businesses, schools and churches started buying them too.
By 1930, there were over a million microgrid-style electric plants from Kettering’s Delco and other brands (Kohler, Westinghouse, Willys, Fairbanks-Morse, etc.) providing off-grid rural power in the U.S. Plus many DIY versions built from catalogs like Farm Light and Power.
The system components.
The Delco Light microgrid, for example, consisted of a gasoline powered generator, lead-acid batteries, a switchboard, and many accessories. The battery bank was the heart of the system, and could be charged by both the generator and third-party wind turbines. When the battery charge fell below a certain level, the generator would automatically kick in to top it up.
The batteries.
Here’s a close-up of the glass-enclosed lead-acid battery cells, which typically had an eighty-amp-hour capacity. A bank of sixteen of them could hold and discharge somewhere between two and four kilowatt hours of 32 volt power, depending on the discharge time. For all the tech specs, see this excellent original documentation.
The generators.
Delco produced dozens of gasoline generator models, starting in 1916 with its most popular, the Model 850 (which also ran on kerosene). This 1.5 horsepower, 850 watt, 32 volt generator sold 21,000 units its first year in production. In 1918, the company introduced a 2500-watt generator for larger users. By 1921 sales across Delco’s 25 generator models surpassed 135,000 units.
The wind turbines.
By the early 1930s, there were many wind turbines you could plug into your Delco Light microgrid, from brands like Jacobs Wind Electric Co., Wincharger Corp., Wind Power Light Co., Perkins Corp., and Parris-Dunn Corp. Initially these provided one kilowatt of power, but capacities rose from there. Delco themselves introduced a streamlined wind turbine in 1938.
The accessories and appliances.
A crucial component of the Delco microgrid system was the ‘power stand’: a one-half horsepower electric motor and pulley system which plugged in to the microgrid to provide mechanical power for equipment like feed-cutters, grindstones, horse clippers, cream separators, and sausage grinders.
Delco also offered electric vacuum cleaners, irons, and washing machines which worked with the microgrid. And of course, electrified water pumps – a killer app.
The sales and support ecosystem.
Delco’s microgrids were sold and serviced by a local dealer network with trained personnel (see them in action in this three-part silent 1918 video on YouTube). They’d install and help maintain the entire system for you.
Farmers had to see the system to believe it, so the salespeople would typically show up at a farm just after dusk with a truck-mounted demonstration system. They’d show the farmer how it could power lights for the barnyard and a water pump, and then make the whole family coffee from an electric coffee pot.
Scaling and economics.
How big could these microgrid power plants get? Here’s a partial diagram from a farm that had eleven buildings connected, and which was the focus of this fact-filled master’s thesis by a Virginia Polytechnic student in 1929:
The student captured extensive financial and operational data for the microgrid. He also analyzed the fixed and variable costs both for specific applications and across the whole system. His conclusion: the bigger the loads you used it to power (especially refrigeration), the cheaper it got on a per-kilowatt-hour basis, and the more economic sense it made.
The competition.
The Delco Light system was so popular it spawned dozens of competitors. Some like this one competed by offering bigger battery banks, so the generator wouldn’t have to run at night:
Others competed on cost:
The great microgrid die-off.
These early microgrids had some issues: they were expensive, the generator fuel and lead acid batteries were dangerous and toxic, they required maintenance, and the technology was constantly changing.
But their benefits were so compelling that they thrived until the government’s rural electrification push in the 1930s finally killed them off. The federal government provided loans to newly-formed (often farmer-owned) electric cooperatives to build rural grids from scratch, since the urban utilities had no interest in doing it.
Once connected, farmers scrapped their microgrids. The battery and wind turbine manufacturers were decimated, having suddenly became irrelevant. The generator makers did just fine, pivoting to sell their products to the military and other customers.
Charles Kettering, who developed the Delco Light microgrid (initially as a Christmas present for his mom in 1913), became one of the most revered inventors in the automobile industry, having developed or been heavily involved in the development of the first electric starting motors and battery ignition systems for cars, freon refrigerant for refrigerators and air conditioning systems, the first practical colored paints for mass-produced cars, lightweight two-stroke diesel engines, and leaded gasoline, which enabled higher compression gas engines (and unfortunately decades of accompanying toxic pollution).
Kettering’s company Delco, founded in 1909 as Dayton Engineering Labs, was sold to General Motors in 1918 and went on to become known for its car radios and batteries.
Epilogue: At the forefront of distributed generation, again.
The Delco Light brand – and the memory of the value its microgrids provided to American farms – lived on in rural areas for decades.
And although the ‘farm power plant’ era lasted only a couple of decades, the desire for local energy self-sufficiency arguably never went away. Some of the most aggressive adopters of modern microgrid and distributed energy technologies, ironically, are rural electric cooperatives themselves – the very entities which killed off Delco Light and its peers.
Farms too are again deploying microgrids and distributed power. From California’s Taylor Farms with their giant multi-megawatt cord-cutting project, to the many farms going off grid in Australia, to vertical farms, to all the farms experimenting with agrivoltaics… a mass movement is underway.
If we could scale microgrids and distributed generation to millions back in the 1920s, we can do it 100x bigger today. The technology is better. The economics are better. People need more electricity than ever. And they want to take control of their energy destiny… just like all those Delco Light buyers did.
