cooperatives. Of the 6.3 million farms in the United States in January 1925, only 205,000 were receiving centralized electric services. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created by executive order as an independent federal bureau in 1935, authorized by the United States Congress in the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, and later in 1939, reorganized as a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. It was charged with administering loan programs for electrification and telephone service in rural areas. Between 1935 and 1939 – or the first 4½ years after REA's establishment, the number of farms using electric services more than doubled. The REA undertook to provide farms with inexpensive electric lighting and power. To implement those goals the administration made long-term, self-liquidating loans to state and local governments, to farmers' cooperatives, and to nonprofit organizations; no loans were made directly to consumers. In 1949 the REA was authorized to make loans for telephone improvements; in 1988, REA was permitted to give interest-free loans for job creation and rural electric systems. By the early 1970s about 98% of all farms in the United States had electric service, a demonstration of REA's success. In 1994 the administration was reorganized into the Rural Utilities Service by the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994 and the Department of Agriculture Reorganization Act of 1994. In September 2018, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would spend $398.5 million in infrastructure projects, by way of loans, that seek to improve electricity service in rural areas. The program is called the Electric Infrastructure Loan Program. Of the $398.5 million, $43 million will be to invest in smart grid technology. According to Smart Cities Dive, "The largest loan will send $68.5 million to back a solar farm run by NextEra Energy Resources in Arkansas, which could meet the needs of 21,000 homes." The loans will go to projects in 13 states: Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Asia China By 2015, 100 percent of Chinese people had access to electric power. In the early 1990s the countryside of China still suffered from extreme energy poverty; more than 40 percent of rural Chinese had no access to power or electric lighting at all, depending instead on kerosene lamps for lighting. In the early 1990s the average use of power in the countryside amounted to the equivalent of