This doctoral dissertation improvement grant is jointly supported by the Science, Technology, and Society program and the Geography and Spatial Sciences program.
In eastern North Carolina, some towns charge electricity rates nearly double those in nearby towns. These differences result from the patchwork of electricity providers that serve the region. These electric utilities can be grouped into three ownership types: investor owned, municipally owned, and cooperatively owned. The proposed research seeks to understand how and why this patchwork of electric utilities and varying prices emerged. It is guided by two interlocking hypotheses. First, electric utilities were compelled to overcome a series of obstacles, including difficulty obtaining capital investment for infrastructure; a necessity to increase revenues from electricity sales; and ongoing attempts to stave off the devaluation of fixed assets. Second, the developing electric utilities both shaped, and were shaped by, local and regional social, economic and political geographies. As electric utilities began operating in eastern North Carolina, varying alliances and configurations worked to undermine the interests of African Americans and the working classes.
Intellectual merit
This research employs geographic approaches to research electric utilities, including archival research, GIS mapping, and interviews with key informants, to consider how the ownership and financing models of the different electric utilities developed in relation to the ideologies of the Progressive Era and Jim Crow segregation. It also considers electricity's development in the American South, a region previously unexamined by historians of electricity.
Broader Impacts
This project provides insights into how electricity infrastructures are developed, and how they influence the development of the cities they power. This will inform current debates over the relations between the industry, the state, and infrastructure, and in eastern North Carolina will inform ongoing debates over electricity prices. Project outputs include a geodatabase of historic power plant information, and an interactive online mapping tool that allows users to explore the development of electricity in several North Carolina towns.
Many towns in eastern North Carolina face a number of challenges common to the rural South, including high rates of poverty and diminishing employment opportunities. However, some residents of this region also confront a unique hardship—electricity prices that are vastly higher than those of surrounding areas. This dissertation research examined the origins of pricing inequalities in the electricity market of eastern North Carolina—namely how such inequalities developed and their role in the production of racial and economic disparities in the South. This dissertation examined the evolving relations between federal and state agencies, corporations, and electric utilities, and asks why these interactions produced varying social outcomes across different places and spatial settings. Twelve months of archival research focused on the origins and subsequent development of electric utilities in eastern North Carolina, and examined how electricity as a material technology interacted with geographies of race and class, as well as the need to meet a certain return on investment. This approach enabled a rethinking of several concepts that are rarely examined by scholars of electric utilities, most notably the monopoly service territory, which I argue served as a spatial fix to profitability problems in the industry. Further, examining the way that electric utilities developed in North Carolina during the 20th century brings to the forefront the at times contradictory relationships among systems of electricity provision, Jim Crow segregation, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal. Such a focus highlights the important role that the control of electricity provision played in shaping racial inequalities that continue to persist in the region. With most urban areas were electrified in the 1930s, the research also traced the electricity distribution lines as they moved out of cities through rural electrification programs, a shift that highlights the state as a multi-scalar and variegated actor that both aided and impeded electrification efforts by various institutional and corporate entities. Ultimately, I argue that the historical geography of electricity is a critical factor that must be considered in order to adequately understand and address the issues of inequality and poverty that continue to persist in the region.
