So here's the thing from my bill.  I use the green system here in Mass.  I'm going to apologize right now for how high the KWh is right now, but our air con was on the fritz for a bit with the filter clogged and so it was running much more than normal.  Our consumption should hopefully go down soon, but anyways, you can see that it shows I'm getting 70% from hydro and 30% from wind.

They would be generating less electricity, though. Because the electricity that Badger (and everyone else who has signed up for green electricity) is using comes from renewable sources. The energy companies are not going to generate more electricity than is required because they are selling it. If people are not buying that energy, they would be throwing money down the toilet. The excess Badger may have to pay for would be generated from non-renewable sources but if Badger sticks to her limit, then those sources are not required, so the electricity is not generated.

Electricity companies generate as little as possible at any time because it costs them to generate it. They are not going to continue to generate electricity when there is no demand for it because they wouldn't get paid for it. And that is the free market at work.

Lucky Canadians, living in a first world country and all.

I don't know if Portland gets any electricity from wind farms.  PGE just depends on the hydro plant at Bonneville Dam.  That's where we've always gotten our power from.  We USED to have a nuke plant, but they shut it down and then imploded the old cooling tower.

The St. Mary's river is no slouch; it's where Lake Superior drains into Lake Huron. That's a lot of water, and the river currently powers two separate cities, plus extra sent to the rest of the grid.

I'd have a lot less problems with nuclear power if we had a way of dealing with spent nuclear rods other then "throw them in a hole in the ground for a really long time and hope nothing bad happens". Seems as shortsighted as fossil fuel, but over a much longer scale.

AN HOUR!

FOR WE ARE IN AMERICA AND MUST CONSUME ALLLLLL.

*Assimilated*

Step 1: load spend rods into a rocket.
Step 2: aim the rocket in the general direction of the Sun.
Step 3: launch.

Sol: the solar system's most impressive trash incinerator.

Besides what Kyle already pointed out about safety, I should also add that something like, what, 96% of a spent fuel rod is still perfectly good uranium? Reprocessing is a really good idea, once energy is expensive enough to make it economical to do so. You don't want to throw away that waste: you'll regret it once all the richest uranium deposits have been mined out.

As for aiming at the Sun, it's actually easier to launch a payload to infinity than it is to hit the Sun. Because of the free boost you get from Earth's orbital velocity, you're already more than halfway there.