Just because the bill is low doesn’t mean energy is affordable

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