Electricity did not come to the Whitmore area until 1937. Many farms did not connect to power until the nineteen-fifties. In 1999, there were homes in the Whitmore area that used solar power and generators as their only source of power.

Rika Coffelt was a child living in Round Mountain when they brought the power line down through northern California. She talked about when the power lines were installed:

That was quite an event. Huge power lines came through my folks' ranch in Round Mountain, but we didn't have power. They hired my mom and dad to clear off the brush and paid them well.

My brother and I decided that they [the power company] were going to clear the right of way, and a great number of pine trees had beautiful burrs with pine nuts in them.

They were burning the brush, and they threw these burrs on the fire. When those burrs were exposed to the heat, all of the pine nuts would come out just by hitting them with a mallet. My brother and I had a good twenty or thirty tobacco buckets full of pine nuts. We sat out there and ate them.

Martha Aldridge and her son Glenn connected to electricity on their ranch in 1948. They said:

We had carbide lights. The old tank's out there yet. When we had the carbide lights, you'd have it piped through your house. You'd turn a little valve and light a match to it. Carbide comes in little pellets. In this tank out here, you'd put carbide in the top. The pellets would go into the water and make a gas. Then when you'd use your lights in here [in the house], it would open up a little more, and let more pellets down, and cause more gas to form. It was automatic.

They [PG and E] were bringing power into the whole neighborhood. There was an old fellow that lived over here next to us, he decided, well, he thought PG and E should pay him for bringing in the power across his property. They had it all surveyed, at that time the school sat next to him, too. So the school was going to get power. No way were they going to pay him.