When Microgrids Ruled America
Can millions of 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, on farms, 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, etc.) providing off-grid rural power in the U.S. Plus many DIY versions built from components ordered from catalogs like Farm Light and Power.
The system.
The Delco Light system 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 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.
