Innovative co-ops find new ways to tackle operational challenges and improve economies of scale. Roughly 70 years ago, engineers at the federal Rural Electrification Administration (REA)—predecessor agency to the Rural Utilities Service—figured outways to build power lines across the countryside for approximately 825 dollar per mile—thousands less than industry leaders believed possible. To do so, REA engineers took advantage of new high-strength wire that reduced the number of poles needed fromabout 30 to 18 per mile, deployed single-phase lines that didn't use crossarms, promoted system-wide planning rather than moving ahead one pole at a time, and modeled construction after assembly lines.
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