We don’t really think about it anymore when we walk into a room, we just flick a switch and the lights come on. But for the first 50 years of North Omaha’s development, that didn’t happen! [Adam’s note: Growing up in North O, sometimes that didn’t happen at my house either, but that was for other reasons.] Today, electrical power flows steadily throughout the community and powers homes, businesses, churches and a lot more. This is a history of electricity in North Omaha.

Lighting the Dark in Early North Omaha

Kerosene lamps, candles, oil lanterns, and stinky gas or propane lit up North O a long time before flip switches and power outlets were everywhere. Before electricity came in widely in the 1890s, our community was totally in the dark once the sun went down. That’s except for some areas of the Near North Side, North 33rd and Parker, and Florence, where they had gas street lamps that glowed until midnight.

The first electricity in Omaha was strung in 1860 with the electric telegraph. Almost 20 years later, in 1879, the first electric lights were demonstrated by a touring exhibition. Omaha started playing with electric street lights in the early 1880s when small companies like the Omaha Thomson-Houston Electric Light Company opened. They ran noisy dynamos and strung messy wires along dirt streets throughout the city.

Stores and hotels in downtown began installing small lights, and electricity was first distributed to some houses in 1883. The first electric streetlights in Omaha were brought in by the Northwestern Electric Light Company in 1883, when they installed 20 streetlights downtown, and north of Dodge Street at North 11th and Capitol, California, Burt, and Izard. That year, the company told the city council “The net difference in the cost to the city between twenty arc lamps and one hundred twenty gas lamps would give ten times the light of the gas lamps.” They were basically saying that even if the line-item cost to operate twenty electric arc lamps ends up roughly equal to (or only slightly different from) what you currently pay the gas company to fuel, maintain, and light 120 gas posts, you will come out way ahead because the public will get ten times more illumination per taxpayer dollar spent.

These early companies didn’t care much about regular working-class neighborhoods, and soon mostly ran wires to wealthy downtown businesses, big hotels, and mansions along North 16th Street and Florence Boulevard. The upscale Kountze Place and Bemis Park neighborhoods had some of the first electrical street lamps in North Omaha, while the rest of our community was left with dim gas lamps on wooden poles at best. Florence actually had its first citywide electricity following streetlight installation in 1903, which then led to the houses and buildings in the year afterward. Provided by the Omaha Electric Light & Power Company, the company was boosted as having “an inexhaustible fund of power.” The original electric streetlights in Florence were on Main Street (N. 30th) at State, Jefferson, Clay, and Fillmore. The first additional one was installed at Main and Willit Streets.

A young entrepreneur named John E. Reagan (1867-1943) started the first business called the Omaha Electric Light and Power Company in 1885. Building a small generating plant downtown, he powered the Near North Side south of Paul Street. But running a standalone electric plant in the late 1880s was really hard, and Reagan sold off off the company’s holdings in 1889.

Then came the streetcars. When horse-drawn streetcars were swapped out for electric trolleys in the late 1880s, overhead cables were hung up across North 24th Street, Ames Avenue, and North 30th Street. For the first time. By 1890, electric power was flowing right through the middle of North Omaha’s neighborhoods.

It took more than 30 years for electricity to flow from telegraph machines into North Omaha’s houses, but it got there eventually!

The Big Power Fight

As electricity became big business there were shady deals, buyouts, and utility mergers. In the 1890s and early 1900s, small independent businesses were gobbled up by large companies. The big fish in town was the second company called the Omaha Electric Light and Power Company, led by big money men like Gurdon W. Wattles (1855-1932). Wattles also ran the streetcar system, meaning he controlled both public transit and the flow of the power that ran it. Streetcars on Ames Avenue, North 24th, North 16th, on Cuming Street, in Florence, and all around the community hummed with power. The Belt Line Railway corridor filled up with mills, bakeries, and factories running heavy electric machinery. Everyone wanted juice!

People wanted power for their homes and businesses, but they had to be able to afford it. Wattles and his business partners had a tight private monopoly that let them keep prices high. The white supremacists and classists behind the company also refused to run power into parts of North Omaha that they thought were unprofitable, including low income Black neighborhoods along North 24th, and pockets of Italians, Scandinavians, Hungarians, and other “undesirable” Europeans living in Near North Side. Despite the town around it swelling with potential customers, Wattles only ran power to the East Omaha Factory District and not the workers’ houses there.

Eventually when they did expand, the electric company built neighborhood stations to help distribute power. In the early 1900s, high-voltage electricity could not travel very far without losing strength, and power had to be piped from downtown power plants and then “stepped down” to small neighborhood sites. In 1907, the company built a small brick transformer house near North 30th and Larimore for this job, and around the same time, work began on smaller neighborhood hubs across the community.

It was 1916 when Florence began realizing the power of the Florence Water Works as an electric generator, and that added to their confidence. However, it wasn’t enough to keep the city from being annexed by Omaha the next year. Their power started coming from Omaha’s sources and stays that way today.

The Nebraska Power Company and Monopolies

By World War I, power in Omaha wasn’t just local anymore. Instead big companies from Wall Street bought up city utilities all over the country, including in Omaha. Established in 1903, the Omaha Electric Light and Power Company was reorganized into the Nebraska Power Company (NPC) in 1917. The NPC was a pawn in big national corporate plans. Controlled by the Electric Bond and Share Company (EBASCO), it was tied directly to General Electric. These corporate giants used holding companies to water down their stock and take millions of dollars out of local communities, and to fight public ownership of utilities.

Despite the corporate greed at the top, the NPC had a big job to do on the ground as they worked to electrify every block in North Omaha. When modern appliances started coming out in the 1920s, suddenly houses across North Omaha got electric iceboxes, radios, toasters, and vacuum cleaners.

Here are two utility buildings in North Omaha, one located near N. 29th and Erskine and the other by N. 56th and Lake. They were built to blend into the residential areas around them.

To keep up with demand, NPC built more substations right in the middle of quiet residential neighborhoods. People didn’t want ugly steel towers and noisy machinery next to their front porches, though so the NPC built subtle, non-obvious substations as small brick buildings disguised to look like everyday houses. They had shingles, front porches, and neat trim. But behind the fake front door, heavy transformers buzzed day and night. Some of these brick bungalows are still tucked into neighborhoods right now, including at places like North 29th and Erskine and North 56th and Lake.

The Long Fight for Public Power

Nebraskans got mad at the electrical companies getting rich off them. When the Wall Street crash in 1929 happened, people saw bad rotten the giant utility holding companies were. Across the state regular people including workers, farmers, and politicians like U.S. Senator George W. Norris (1861-1944) wanted the government to treat electricity was a basic human right, not a get-rich-quick scheme for rich people to get richer.

Norris led a nationwide movement for public power. Together with senators from across the country, the government built giant public hydroelectric dams out in western Nebraska to generate cheap water power. But in Omaha, the Nebraska Power Company really wanted to keep its monopoly. For over a decade, NPC spent huge sums of money on lobby campaigns, dirty tricks, front groups, and scare tactics to convince people that public power was dangerous socialism. That battle tore through Omaha politics all through the 1930s and 1940s.

While white-collar executives in downtown offices fought to keep their profits, everyday families in North Omaha just wanted lower electric bills and fair service. Finally, the public won. State lawmakers passed bills creating public power districts, and in December 1946, the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) bought out the Nebraska Power Company for over forty million dollars. Nebraska became the only state in country where every single electric utility is publicly owned by the people.

The Rise of OPPD in North O

Once OPPD took over in 1946, the grid in North Omaha changed fast. The old, small neighborhood transformer houses were slowly phased out because new technology allowed power to travel longer distances safely.

Postwar Omaha was booming. New subdivisions were popping up near 72nd Street, and the city needed a ton of new electricity. In 1954, OPPD fired up the first unit of the North Omaha Station, a massive coal-fired plant built right along the Missouri River near Florence. Over the next decade, OPPD added four more units, turning the North Omaha Station into a huge industrial landmark with soaring smoke stacks and giant coal piles.

It wasn’t always sunshine either. When the system failed, major blackouts struck North O specifically every decade or so, including a days-long event in 1922, a community-wide outage lasting more than 48 hours in 1935, and another major interruption in 1949. For decades, the North Omaha Station churned out electricity for the entire city. But that power came at a terrible cost for North Omaha. Smoke, soot, and toxic coal dust blew straight across Florence, Saratoga, and neighboring communities. North Omaha bore the brunt of the pollution, dealing with high rates of asthma, heart disease, and lung problems so the rest of the city could have cheap power.

North O Electricity Today

Since the 1970s, community activists in North Omaha started advocating for healthier power for the area. In the early 2000s, community members, neighborhood leaders and environmental advocates in North Omaha teamed up. They call attention to the environmental injustice in North Omaha was forced to live next to the dirty coal plant, while wealthier suburban neighborhoods in west Omaha enjoy clean air and green lawns.

Their pressure forced OPPD to say they’d do something, and in the 2010s they began shifting toward cleaner energy. They stopped burning coal in the older units at the North Omaha Station and converted them to natural gas, cutting back air pollution. OPPD committed to a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, planning to fully shut down coal operations at the site. However, they’ve totally backed away from that now with encouragement from the current Washington situation.

From muddy streets lit by dim gas flames to corporate Wall Street battles, and from stealth neighborhood substations to modern rooftop solar panels, the story of power in North Omaha has always been about community resilience, fairness, and the fight for light.

A Tour of North Omaha’s Electrical History

• OPPD North Omaha Station, 7401 North 11th Street: Built in 1954, this is a massive riverfront power plant that’s slowly shifting from coal to clean fuels.
• Former Nebraska Power Company Substation, 2400 North 29th Street: Built around 1920, this substation was built disguised as a private residence. It has been repurposed and is storage.
• Current MUD Substation, 5602 Lake Street: Built in a cottage style, this transformer station still stands behind a decorative wall in the Country Club Historic District.
• Former Larimore Transformer Station, North 30th and Larimore Avenue: Built in 1907, this brick transformer building still stands today and has been repurposed.
• OPPD Substation, 6608 Western Avenue: Built in the 1950s, this is a brick utility distribution hub that’s still standing but has been converted into a private residence.
• OPPD Triangle Substation, 801 North 72nd Street: This was an enclosed brick distribution station built in the 1950s. As of 2026, it stands empty.
• 19th and Izard Substation: The was an enclosed brick distribution station built before 1921 and was removed.
• Benson Substation: The was an enclosed brick distribution station built before 1921 and was removed.
• 40th and Maple Substation: Built in 1950, this station was removed.

You Might Like…

• A History of the OPPD North Omaha Station
• A History of the Florence Water Works and Minne Lusa Pumping Station in North Omaha
• A History of North Omaha’s Adams Park (including the Bedford Pumping Station)

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