Oct. 5, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: Our representative, Ben Cline, recently stated that solar energy was unreliable and that renewed emphasis should be placed on fossil fuels including “clean” coal. I couldn’t disagree more.
I spent my first 12 years on a 165-acre farmstead. Like most farms in the 1950s, we provided for ourselves and sold our excess. We milked 10-12 cows, had chickens, pigs, beef cattle and sheep. We had a huge garden, a 50-tree orchard, and extensive grape arbors. The farm had two large barns, a two-story pig house, chicken house, and spring house.
Then they built an electric power plant and bought up all the farms and strip-mined the land for the coal to power it. Most of the energy generated was used to provide light and heat. Whatever may have been manufactured using it has long ago ended up in a landfill. The plant has been shut down. So a viable farmstead which could provide a good living for a family perpetually with good stewardship was sacrificed to meet short-term energy needs.
Largely in response to this, I have been dedicated to energy conservation all of my adult life. I have been totally “off the grid” for 15 years. My energy needs are provided by solar power with batteries to store the energy I need when the sun isn’t shining. I have an electric lawnmower, weed-eater and chainsaw charged by my solar system.
I have not paid an electric bill in 15 years. My system is more reliable than the surrounding electrical grid which is vulnerable to bad weather.
It doesn’t make sense to operate a coal-fired power plant to generate electricity, and run it through hundreds of miles of wires to power my TV or light a light bulb. I’m generating my own.
BILL BLATTER Rockbridge County
