To keep energy bills manageable, people often set heating and cooling temperatures to uncomfortable levels. Olga Dobrovolska/Moment via Getty ImagesOne 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…
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