Meet Robert Duvall on March 25th

As Honorary Chairs of PEC's Transmission Line Campaign, actor Robert Duvall and his wife Luciana will host an evening at Grandale Farm Restaurant in Neersville on March the 25th.

I worked with the Farm and other rural operations (horse training facilities, vineyards, B&B's, and restaurant/grower co-ops together with plain old farmers who grow thousands of acres of soy and corn) back in 2007 in getting out their message that the rural economics were strong out here.

As I've told readers here (and that page includes a link to the first piece) the lines are not needed, and are only connecting a 20-30 year old coal-fired plant to a customer base that cannot receive half of what is produced on the Ohio-WV line. The plant will now fire up twice the production to get half the power to NJ. All while New Jersey's power needs are actually being met by Solar and other renewables, and studies of their actual traditional power usage show that it's declining.

I'm also happy to report that I caught up with Del. Joe May and Del. Tom Rust at a recent event, and one passed on that the Commercial ability to feed into the grid was passed in this last Assembly Session. Many of you know that I've been a proponent of getting the companies who are more likely to invest in Solar Arrays on their sites to recieve the benefit of feeding it back into the grid...which until this Session -- was not an option under the law of the Commonwealth. Homeowners have had the ability since a win several years ago.

Hopefully, New Jersey and New York are already allowing companies to feed excess photo-voltaic electricity back into their local grids. I know the push from citizens is on, but I haven't heard how their State governing bodies have reacted.

Joe also led the fight to allow a public/private partnership that will capture the methane from landfills. This has two potential benefits. It will capture methane that's just escaping into the atmosphere right now unabated, and it will give us the ability to refine that into a methanol, or just plain old methane.. one used in treating vegetable oils that gives them durability to colder weather (ala deisel/true biodeisel) and the other being explored as a replacement to natural gas.

I met with some Supervisors at a recent Party, and although we still very much disagree that "climate change" is man-made (Where were we to cause it when it happened two mllion years ago??) ...
I do believe that our energy autonomy is necessary, in that right now, we are at the mercy of foriegn entities who do not have our best interest at heart. Better to have our own technologies and replacements in place , so we can dump the huge amounts of fuels we do import before it comes to that.

So, back to the babysteps...
RSVP by: March 24, 2009 at 12:00 pm and Come on out and meet Mr Duvall, and a whole bunch of other great people for the evening.