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According to my power bill, 87% of my electricity comes from hydro and 11% comes from nuclear.

Where do you live, Newhalem? (mostly kidding) But seriously, as far as I know, Microsoft gets power from Puget Sound Energy, and PSE says they get 31% from hydro:

https://www.pse.com/aboutpse/E...

Sadly 37% is coal. But 22% natural gas and 9% wind.

I did some Google searches and I found that you are correct: Washington just has a single coal plant, and it will shut down its coal burning by 2025. I believe it will burn natural gas after that; it already has a combined cycle gas turbine power unit, operating alongside the two coal power units. Since the two coal power units produce 1340 megaWatts and the combined cycle unit produces only 248 megaWatts, presumably they will be building more non-coal power units.

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/centralia/

But it's still possible to use coal power from out of state, as discussed here: https://www.opb.org/news/article/the-northwest-struggles-with-coal-generated-power-from-out-of-state/

Not everywhere, "honey". Where I live it starts off about the same for residential and low demand commercial, but is discounted as commercial demand rises.

Think of downing the boilers in the middle of a bad winter, timed to coincide with a snow storm to hamper emergency response.

OK, I'm thinking of it. I'm thinking of it for a week long outage.

Welcome to PSE service territory.

Ah, man, you got me! Here's one list of places which have LED bulb rebates, and even though you are surrounded by rebates, you live in an island without one (on that page, anyway). You'd have to fall back onto rebates available to the general public, or wait for your company to introduce a program.

That said we have also had some near/true extinctions of a number of salmon runs. Even with hatcheries, the genetic diversity of salmon is not what it should be.

But you are making a basic error in your logic here. Its not the salmon run that goes extinct or not. Its the species. The bad science promulgated by environmentalists; that habitat equals species has threatened the viability of a number of species (spotted owls and salmon) and eliminated a number of mitigation measures that could save them.

Hatcheries are excellent tools for enforcing genetic diversity. Its trivially easy to cross breed salmon populations in hatcheries and plant them in new habitats. And they ensure a viable stock of fish where dams or other development have restricted access to wild habitat. But environmentalists' response has been to attack the health and viability of bred salmon while simultaneously complaining that these (healthier) fish are displacing wild raised fish. That makes no sense. They can't have it both ways to suit the argument du jour (sicklier on the one hand, yet hardier when that claim suits them). And the claim (enforced by the courts as 'science') that hatchery salmon are of a different species than wild ones can only be supported by marking the former by clipping their adipose fins (which cripples them) before releasing them.

Yes, salmon are losing habitat. But that this was going to happen was understood when the first dams want up. So hatcheries were developed to mitigate the problem. Yes, the first fish ladders and hatcheries didn't do very well. But quite a bit has been learned about managing the resource properly and the fact that healthier hatchery stock is wiping out the sickly wild runs argues for that success.

Back when I worked for PSE we actually had an environmental group that attempted to plant some steelhead trout upstream of the Snoqualmie Falls power plant. The idea was to demonstrate the hazard that the turbines presented to fish passing through them. Yeah, right. The little fishies will get ground up. But the problem is: there are no migratory fish that could ever hope to return up a 270 foot waterfall. So power plant or not, that population would never have been viable. But they were hoping the public wouldn't notice that little fact.

I'm not sure quite what you are referring to.

Oil gets subsidized to a certain degree. But if you really want to see massive subsidies and protectionist, fucked-up tariffs and other governmental screwups at work, you need to look at the corn lobby. For the past five years, corn subsidies have been $37b; oil subsidies only $14b.

The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS), and regular sugar being way more expensive than it should be.

Plus, because corn is subsidized, all the farmers grow corn (which actually is a shit-poor source of energy once you calculate the net gain post-processing) instead of something better.

That's still small compared to the Oil Industry subsidies over the past decade, let alone since the '70s oil crisis. What Pickens bet the bulk of his plan on was not on the Wind Turbines, but the Natural Gas right of ways he thought he'd secure, in the same zones he was going to put up his Wind Turbines. The State of Texas didn't like his proposals and he was left dangling in the wind. Instead, in WA State, we are expanding Wind Power in the Columbia Gorge and Snake River valley.[Garfield County, WA] with Puget Sound Energy. PSE's projects produce > 430MW of Electricity and growing. It's available at http://www.pse.com/

Rebates are everywhere. Just look. From the first page:

• Columbus, OH
• Washington State
• Several New England Utilities
• California

In that list there's governments, utilities, and some organizations I'm not real sure about, but the point is that there's rebates all over the place. The one thing to note is that it's all handled locally instead of one big Federal government initiative. Just because the feds aren't doing it doesn't mean it's not getting done. Thank God for that.

- Tash

The BIG reason power companies want BPL is so that THEY can use it for reading your meter. They want to make your electric meter to be adressable and able to be read over the internet.

Since it is supposed to be most cost effective to produce electricity at a constant rate, rather than larger fluctuations, this was an attempt to do "traffic shaping".

Despite some initial misgivings about the unknowns, it has worked pretty well so far. Lots of folks (my family included) now make it a habit to delay starting the laundry or dishwasher until after 9pm to get the better rate.

I am not sure exactly which technology Puget Sound Energy is using to transmit the readings back to the home office. On each monthly bill, they have a bar graph indicating how much electricity was consumed in each of the rate periods.

-Steve