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An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.
With all the attention paid to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the 2020s might seem like the decade of home electrification — but nothing might ever rival the boom of the original Roaring Twenties. By 1929, 70% of all American homes had access to electricity, double the figure from the beginning of the decade – bringing home electrification from minority to majority.
Home electrification was so big back then, it even had a mascot: Reddy Kilowatt. Invented by a marketer at the Alabama Power Company in 1926, this cheery spokescharacter with a lightning-bolt body and a lightbulb nose was licensed to hundreds of utility companies throughout the greater part of the 20th century to promote electricity – and more specifically investor–owned utilities. Reddy was even used as a tool to link government-owned utilities to socialism or communism in years following World War II.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I first came across Reddy Kilowatt last year when a climate tech peer emailed me an image of him, probably from the 1950s, powering everything from a hot water heater to a record player with the headline “Your all Electric Home.”
National Museum of American History Archives Center
For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about that headline because I kept hearing people in the decarbonization movement say similar things (does Electrify Everything ring a bell?). Itching to learn more of the history of Reddy, I reached out to an expert.
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson is a professor at Seattle University who teaches and writes about animation. Her paper, Live Electrically with Reddy Kilowatt, Your Electrical Servant, explores the history of this “phenomenally successful and ubiquitous spokescharacter.”
I chatted with Dr. Moana Thompson over a video call from her office where a framed illustration of Reddy Kilowatt hung behind her. I went into the call thinking about positioning this article, “Is America ready for another Reddy?,” but by the end I learned he may be best left in the 1900s. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Mike Munsell
Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you ended up researching Reddy Kilowatt?
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson:
I'm a professor and chair of the film and media department at Seattle University, and Reddy Kilowatt was part of my research into animation that has been used in sponsored media — that is media used for non-traditional, non-entertainment purposes to do something else, like sell something, instruct you, persuade you. It forms a chapter in what will be a new book coming out in the next couple of years on animation and advertising. I think Reddy Kilowatt is a great example of how popular it was in the post-war period to use animated spokescharacters to sell products or ideas.
Munsell:
I’m curious: Are animated mascots less prevalent today than back in the post-war period?
Thompson:
My research doesn’t focus on the contemporary era, so I couldn't give you a precise example. But certainly, as late as the ‘70s, animation characters still were extensively used to promote products, not just cereal, and toys, but things like bubble bath and candy and, well into the ‘70s, alcohol as well.
There are lots of reasons for that, because certain types of animation were fairly cheap to produce, were appealing, often comedic, and attention grabbing. They were a great means to sell a product — also great to use for abstract or more complex processes, like, how do you make oil or petrol or gas? How do you convey a concept like capitalism? Animation, as opposed to live action, was often a more successful way to convey or target topics of that nature.
We have to anthropomorphize the things that are too abstract, too conceptual, or too inhuman to make them translatable into something that we can comprehend and relate to. Hence the Geico lizard or the Aflac duck.
Munsell
And that makes sense then for Reddy Kilowatt to advertise electricity back when it was new, right?
Thompson
Yes, it really emerged around the time electrification was in two thirds of American households — by 1930. And electrical utility companies needed to find an appealing way to sell their product and to encourage consumer consumption of things like appliances, which themselves were emerging — things like dishwashers and washing machines and hair dryers and so on. But also rural electrification, and electrification for business purposes and factories, and on farms.
[Reddy Kilowatt] emerged targeting a fairly affluent consumer, by, for example, turning electricity into a servant – an abstract servant that was personalized and anthropomorphized.
But it was also a way of rather cleverly justifying rate increases as well, which occurred a little later, by making Reddy Kilowatt literally a figure that earns wages and was regarded as an employee by many electrical utility companies. So it's a clever way to say to people, hey, everybody deserves a wage and Reddy Kilowatt deserves a wage and prices are going up, so we're going to put his wages up. And that's a fair thing.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
Munsell:
The Smithsonian has a huge collection of Reddy Kilowatt material. Did you get to go check that out?
Thompson:
Yes, I did. The archives are extensive. And so you can read all about how [Reddy Kilowatt creator] Ashton Collins promoted the product, and what the kinds of speeches that he gave to many other business companies and electrical utility companies in the 30s and 40s.
But he's part of a wider movement. There are other leading figures like Walt Disney and Walter Lantz, who were animation studio heads. Walter Lantz, of course, ran what he would pick the Walter Lantz studios that produced Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, and a number of other popular cartoons of the 40s. And Walt Disney, of course, we're all familiar with. But they all believed that the kinds of skills that animation studios were doing in the 1940s — by making cartoons to train troops to operate machinery or rifles, and by making propaganda to translate the values of the fight for democracy against fascism — they believed that those skills could be applied to the commercial market in the post-war period. And that animation was a key element of visual culture that could translate to a sometimes illiterate population or partially illiterate population.
So Ashton Collins is not alone there. He's part of a broader movement in the film industry and in the animation industry, to understand the unique power of animation to communicate and to sell and persuade.
Munsell
Did you find anything in your research particularly surprising?
Thompson
In addition to extensive print materials in the Smithsonian, you see dozens and dozens of objects that featured Reddy Kilowatt. His image is on everything from stickers to comic books to toys, and other giveaways for kids to little marionettes, and robots, which were used in trade shows and trade fairs. [Author’s note: eBay has an extensive Reddy Kilowatt collection]
It was used in the 1939 World's Fair, for example, to communicate and to encourage the public to interact with Reddy Kilowatt as if it was a real figure. I was quite taken with this – it's really an early form of animatronics. They were using an avatar, a spokescharacter, who was fairly ubiquitous in the American home, on people's electricity bills, and combining it with a large three dimensional object with a record player attached and somebody who operated the speaking, to interact with kids at fairs and to communicate basic ideas. So that was really exciting in a way because it shows how ahead of its time Ashton Collins was at understanding interactivity.
Mike Munsell
I was thinking about copyright and trademark law and the public domain. Reddy Kilowatt was, in his original form, created in 1926. We're coming up on that 100 year mark. Is there a chance he enters the public domain?
Dr. Moana Thompson
I'm not sure about that. Because you can renew copyright. Which of course Disney did repeatedly before it finally had to succumb to the end of copyright. And Reddy is also a trademark as opposed to a copyrighted image. So he has not just appeared in what is public access now, some of his films and TV commercials, but he's also a trademark figure that has a continuing commercial currency. And Ashton Collins was absolutely rigorous at paying attention to trademark law. He sued other companies that had similar characters, like Willie Wired Head.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I suspect that Xcel Energy [who now owns the rights to Reddy Kilowatt] is going to be very strict in policing its trademarks. Because if this product has value as a commodity of nostalgia for a certain generation, or multiple generations, or even if it has a new function in Xcel’s future corporate identity, he's going to have value.
Munsell
I guess your research sort of doesn't get quite into the present day, but for my understanding Reddy Kilowatt is not really used much today. It was used by a utility in Barbados and an Ecuadorian soccer club more recently, but from your understanding do you know why he stopped being used?
Thompson
Well, I'm not sure that he stopped being used. I have seen the return of Reddy Kilowatt as a consumer figure and as a licensed product that appears on T-shirts and stickers. Amazon has been selling quite a lot of Reddy Kilowatt products. So it's possible that Xcel Energy that owns the trademark sees the value of the product for a new market, which is the nostalgic market, where you can sell a cartoon character itself.
Munsell: I do think that with the emergence of heat pumps, and induction stoves, there is a push toward home electrification and moving away from fossil fuels in your home. I wonder if that’s an opportunity for a reemergence of Reddy?
Thompson
Yeah, it could be an opportunity for them to repurpose the trademark.
Munsell
Is there anything else you wanted to add about your research into Reddy?
Thompson
I thought it was interesting, the blend that Reddy Kilowatt had of both the impersonal and the personal. On the one hand, we've mostly been talking about it as this cute cartoony character of appeal and personality. But on the other hand, he represents an abstract concept, which is almost robotic. He was literally a robot as part of his marketing. This concept of the kilowatt as one and a half horsepower was part of this wider discursive emergence in the ‘20s that electricity was both a servant, as an anthropomorphized figure, and an abstraction that is there at the flick of a switch.
And in their marketing, they used imagery that of course would never be used today. The association of kilowatt as both a “coolie” – which was the specific language used – and a slave.
So this kind of racist imagery is interesting because it gets to the roots of this idea of the dehumanized, depersonalized aspects of Reddy Kilowatt – that electricity represented by using this imagery, and they had little pictures of kilowatt, which were described as a slave or a “coolie” to explain that, basically, this was free labor and unlimited labor. So obviously addressed to an implicitly white consumer. [The idea that] racial imagery of course affected all kinds of aspects of American advertising is well known to scholars in this field and often played on imagery of blackness or whiteness, in the case of soap advertising, for example, but Reddy Kilowatt in particular is this machinic identity.
And who knows, maybe that'll come back again in the future, because machines are so much more part of our lives now, as compared to 1926 or the mid century with computers and artificial intelligence.
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Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.