Aztec Solar Power, a solar applications manufacturer based in King of Prussia, is planning to open a local plant, to Springettbury Township a company official said Monday.
The plant will create 100 jobs.
inyork.com/ydr
March 2009 Archives
The foal bucked on its spidery legs in a hay-lined stall as its mother and a cat named Gomez looked on.
"That's Mister Bulletproof," said Fran Langrall, the owner.
The 3-day-old colt was lucky to be alive. The mother -- a 14-year-old thoroughbred named Trisha Banner -- was shot in December on the Langrall's Codorus Township farm.
Continue reading VIDEO Foal Survives Shooting.
Thirty years ago today, on March 29, 1979, Sheryll Ewell gave birth to a baby girl at York Hospital while newscasters warned of impending danger from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.
A partial meltdown had occurred the day before in Unit 2 of the plant, which sits in the middle of the Susquehanna River between Dauphin and York counties.
Continue reading VIDEO 30th Anniversary of Three Mile Island.
Hail and winds in York County occurred when a belt of thunderstorms moving in from the southwest collided with a warm front that had settled over the area.
York County 911 reported that the Springettsbury and Hellam areas were apparently hit hardest. Immediately after the storm, emergency responders handled multiple incidents of transformer and wire fires, rushing water flooding roadways, downed trees and debris blocking roadways.
Jay McGinnis' inconspicuous house near New Park, Pa. is an experiment of alternative energy.
The windmills produce compressed air and electricity. The innovative air compressing wind mill stores the air throughout the farm using underground lines that act as a reservoir taking on air when the wind blows.
The solar panels on the garage heat water. The solar panels on the workshop generate electricity that is sold back to Adams Electric Cooperative Inc. Instead of using expensive batteries, McGinnis sells the solar electricity back to Adams Electric during times of peak sun (and demand in Summer) and supplements the farms' electricity when the sun isn't shining.
The hopper at right holds corn burned in the outdoor furnace that pipes hot water back to the living spaces. The wood that also feeds his boiler is grown on his property.
The 3-cylinder 2005 Honda Insight has consumed an average of 55 mpg over it's service life. The vehicles hybrid system recovers energy from braking and supplements it's tiny gasoline engine with an electric motor and batteries. The shape of the car, fender skirts and other design features of the quirky 1999-2005 Insight was capable of squeezing out 124 mpg by one hypermiling competition.
McGinnis believes that our fossil fueled world is in big trouble and we all need to do anything to use less.
McGinnis' business, The Woolen Mill Fan Company, creates reproductions of water motor fans. The parts cast in Central Pennsylvania by an Amish foundry bears the unusual mark of something produced in the United States.
York Country Day students build a container that will protect an egg after it falls ten feet during the All-School Engineering Project. Each group was given 25 wrapped plastic drinking straws and six-feet of masking tape.
The exercise teaches that a given project often has limited resources.
Leroy "Buck" Mortorff describes the importance of using virgin oak barrels for Chardonnay wine during a tour Sunday of the Four Springs Winery in Seven Valleys, Pa. The barrels made from Pennsylvania oak are then used to make red wines.
The hardwood comes from old woodlands in the western part of the state. Mortorff said that if the trees that make the barrels are grown on landfill the taste is unpredictable.
Long before food production became monopolized and globalized, a farmer could do a bit of everything and get by. If it was a bad year for wheat, maybe milk prices would be up or the pigs would get a good price at market.
Today, a farmer must compete with huge retail outlets commanding a price for their goods fed by consumers who grab the reward of low price and quickly wheel away what they think is a cheap deal.
A concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, the type of farm that has drawn heated concerns from environmentalists and instilled fear in neighbors is the evolution of this market. The farmer, or corporation, sees a way of minimizing costs by specializing and creating a "machine" that churns out huge quantities of a product.
It can be a risky operation for the farmer and neighbors surrounding the operation.
Loans are often needed to fund such an operation and if the market is down for one specific product than the lack of farming diversity shines through.
Concentrating thousands of any creature in a small space creates a problem of removing waste that will generally overtax the local environment because limiting the impact would exceed the profit of the operation.
It's easy to pick sides in this argument of farmer verses homeowner, verses local and federal government, but the solution to this problem lies in consumers understanding and caring about the impact of their purchasing decisions.
Continue reading VIDEO Concentrating food production, squeezing resources.
First lady Michelle Obama helped break ground on a new White House organic "kitchen garden" Friday. It will be the first working garden at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a so-called "victory garden" at the height of World War II. cnn.com
Victory gardens spang up during WWII as a way for people to help with the work effort, reduce the demand on the food supply and most importantly bond with a common experience.
A group here in my own town, Emigsville, was busy today tilling their plot for planting. The group effort of weeding and watering hopes to yield some home grown produce.
In the same way Victory Gardens helped to promote a community bond for the war effort, community gardens today help promote a feeling of self-sufficiency and control of what they are eating for consumers by an increasingly globalized, monopolized food supply.
Want organic food? Don't put chemicals on your garden. How simple.
"These contracts were all put together before I was at AIG," said Liddy, 63. "I would not have done these contracts this way. And this whole arrangement, if it existed, would have looked a whole lot different. So I really do take offense, sir, at the use of --"
"Well, offense was intended," said Representative Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat. "So you take it rightfully, sir."
Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), a member of the House panel questioning Liddy, drilled down to the question of moral corporate citizenship that has eluded Libby when she asked him, "If the taxpayers hadn't loaned AIG any money, would the executives who received the bonuses have received them?"
Replied Liddy: "Probably not. . . . I think the company would have spiraled into bankruptcy. . . . the basic contracts would have been voided."
With Liddy insisting these past days that AIG contracts were sacred, Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Ill.) took a shot at Liddy, the former CEO of Northbrook-based Allstate, reminding him he decreed contract changes with employees while he was at Allstate.
"I did do that," Liddy conceded.
Source: Chicago Sun Times and Reuters
Liddy is in the strange position of earning $1 for the current title of the most vilified CEO. There has to be a hidden bonus somewhere.
The greenmesh path to peace:
1. Look up at the sky and marvel at the expanse and potential of nothing.
2. Laugh at greedy people. Your anger is fuel for their power and their future is their own hell.
3. Realize that health, friends and peace will get you further in your retirement than a 401-K
4. Change is tomorrow's new adventure that would have been missed with security.
5. Be grateful that you have never become a corporate executive who has aspired to the thinking that privilege is a right that must be expanded while disregarding the cost to others.
The New Church, or, formally, the General Church of the New Jerusalem is a Christian based faith follows the teachings that Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century, Swedish scientist and theologian.
Followers -- often called Swedenborgians -- have just six congregations in Pennsylvania, including their mother church in Bryn Athyn outside Philadelphia where the church maintains headquarters and a theological school.
Diana Shanko kneels next to a sign her neighbor put out about a year ago. Six homes on Sage Hill Drive in York Township are missing part of their backyards, where a sediment pond sits. The developer and home builder each say it is the other's responsibility to fill in the remainder of the backyards.
OPEC agreed to maintain current production quotas, concerned that a fourth cut since September risked increasing energy costs during the worst global economy in six decades. bloomburg.com
It's interesting because these countries rely on a certain value of oil to fuel economies heavily tied to oil revenue. Common sense says to take a hit now because a global depression will slow your own recovery.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., AIG is serving up a round of fresh taxpayer bonuses for executives who helped create the toxic investments that helped cause the financial mess because their contracts must! be honored. washingtonpost.com
It is the crux of the private verses socialized medicine argument.
Sean Brame, age 13, a quadrilateral amputee from septic shock, sat beneath a huge poster from the 1990's in Sen. Arlen Spector's office - "Bill Clinton's Liberal, Big, Government, Health Care Plan". The boy listened to what the aid of the republican senator had to say and then began speaking from his own perspective.
Brame said that if kids have arms and legs they can reach their dreams, get jobs, pay taxes and be productive; their artificial limbs are an investment in the future and keep people off of tax funded welfare.
If private health insurance was responsible for the people who fall though the cracks instead of taxpayers who also must contribute to the profit of health insurance companies, there would be lobbyists in Washington to help promote health programs that promote fully productive people.
Perhaps if the total cost of ever consolidating drug company monopolies, and health care networks were the sole responsibility of private health insurance instead of passing along to consumers and their tax dollars the cost for everything not covered there would be a motivation to reduce costs.
It hit me in that room sitting on the floor with a kid who was fighting for his future beneath a poster probably erected before he was born that the fear of socialized medicine should probably be directed more at the leaching of taxpayer funded social services currently taking place by private insurers.
How incredibly ineffective is a health care system that can never take into account the whole picture of health care when it has no economic interest or responsibility to help those most in need.
AT&T to add 15,000 alternative-fuel vehicles
In the York area, these vehicles would help service cell phone sites and the miles of fiber optics making up AT&T's massive telecom network.
- Largest U.S. corporate commitment to Compressed Natural Gas vehicles to date.
- Saves 49 million gallons of gasoline
- Reduces carbon emissions by 211,000 metric tons
- Removes the emissions fo 38,600 traditional passenger vehicles for a year
Source: AT&T
One of the primary benefactors of this expenditure will be Ford and other companies who choose to innovate.
The company will initially buy the trucks from Ford and have them converted by other firms to run on natural gas. It also plans to push for 40 new natural-gas fueling stations to be built in the states where it operates.
AT&T said it planned to replace 7,100 passenger cars over the next decade with hybrids or other advanced-technology vehicles, depending on when such technology becomes available.
Ford has said it would double its hybrid production this year, with the Fusion and Milan sedans joining the Escape and Mariner SUVs in its hybrid lineup.
Atlantic New Jersey's motto is ""Always turned on."
The 13,321 photovoltaic panels will produce an average of 26 percent of the convention center's energy.
"We estimate that we are going to save $4.4 million over the 20 years of the contract [with the solar provider]," said Jeff Vasser, president of the Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority.
Piaggio Group Americas, the maker of the Piaggio and Vespa brands of motor scooters will be marketing a plug-in hybrid scooter.
The three-wheel scooter can travel 40 miles on just the battery, and get up to 141 miles per gallon overall, which would make it one of the most fuel efficient vehicles ever made.
Members of the York YMCA Junior Girls Volleyball program train in the pool.
Darla Pennewill, head coach of the 15 & under team, said such workouts are meant to increase a player's strength and endurance. If water exercises are done frequently, an athlete can add 6 inches to their vertical jump.
Fred Lorenz, who lives in a typical suburban home, has dreamed of living in a cave house and getting milk from his own goat.
He is inspired when he sees laundry hanging outside, remarking that " it would have been free" instead of using a dryer.
Today he is bringing home chickens.
No one wants to touch the sacred "free market" concept that is no longer free in the face of a world controlled by aging monopolies.
Corporations like profit and consumers like cheap goods. We are all locked in step pending a tipping point.
There was worry about "Made in America" stipulations built into the new stimulus package. It was said that it would touch off "trade wars". How can we have a trade war if we make nothing. When was the last time other than food, that you saw "Made in U.S.A." on anything you purchased.
The current stimulus package is just continuing the cycle of large corporations borrowing wealth from the future of taxpayers. If anything, it's consolidating the banks and corporations into BIGGER ones that will need BIGGER stimulus as they hold us hostage with fear of failure.
It all has a feeling of paying off Frankie more every month so he doesn't come into your Deli on Avenue Q in Brooklyn to break your knuckles after he has already broken your nose.
What will have to happen as the course continues is that the standard of living in the U.S. will have to erode to a point where salaries can compete with China and then the transportation costs will exceed the benefit. That process hardly makes an economy grow.
So we borrow from our future and we continue to accept white collar crime that continues without meaningful prosecution. There is no deterrent in a society where capitalizing yourself is above all else. The stock market is proof that people don't trust investing in such a system.
Maybe it's time to look the depression in the eye, reset the free market, and hope the next generation of American business leaders born from poverty can rule the world with a sustainable moral order.
Penn State-York students model for fun, build confidence.
The Nittany Catwalk Models, a group of college students interested in fashion, modeling, dance and strutting their stuff on stage. They perform at college and community events, mixing dance and modeling poses with stylish duds and high-energy music in themed performances.
Continue reading VIDEO Penn State Catwalk models.
Toyota has officially reported that the 2010 Toyota Prius will get 50mpg in combined use.
Some of the tricks Toyota is using to squeeze some more miles include an electric engine coolant pump, a lighter transaxle, and a new exhaust gas recirculation system.
The engine is actually larger than the older model allowing it to get better mileage on the highway because a larger engine can translate into more torque and lower engine speeds with less fuel needed.
First Presbyterian Church of York has rebuilt it's Moeller organ. The new version of the organ is part virtual instrument and part traditional pipe organ. The cost of rebuilding the instrument was about 25% less than rebuilding the instrument entirely of pipes.
"It's a seamless blend," said Spark, director of music ministries at the church.
The old version had an electro-pneumatic console, crumbling, leather-lined wind reservoirs and aging mechanisms that often failed. Water from a leaky roof had damaged the swell organ, and the tin and lead pipes needed cleaning or replacing.
The new version transforms keystrokes into digital signals that may actuate a valve, create a digital sound or combine mechanical and virtual. Speakers strategically placed with the pipes gives the listener the geography of sound that comes with a traditional organ.
Continue reading VIDEO Hybrid organ.
The three words come together during a visit to Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.
The fact that humans are restricted makes it a great protected habitat for wood ducks, owls, deer and other creatures native to Pennsylvania.
Employees with Exelon, the company which owns the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island and the other men were part of a contingent of about 11 volunteers installing bird boxes. They find an owl surprise.
Continue reading VIDEO TMI bird sanctuary.
