These are pretty convincing posts. Thanks for the details. I had no idea Wind Energy was a total waste of money. Does anybody see any value in wind gens?
Well, the first one merely echos what I noted above, that baseline plant (coal or nuke) has a lot of inertia, and doesn't respond to changing loads quickly.
The second is less sound; there are many wind plants across the globe that do good service, and do reduce conventional fuel consumption, and generate electricity reliably and cost effectively.
The word again is inertia, and geographic distribution.
If you have 20% wind power generation, humming along nicely, and the wind drops down quite significantly, then the prime power input to the grid will reduce, and thus the frequency will drop as the generation plant slows down, right up to the point where you hit the frequency excursion limit, and then the grid drops to pieces with a cascading blackout.
In many countries (USA included) the grid can't tolerate much of a frequency excursion, so its all rather fragile, and thus you cant have a lot of interruptable generation.
Here in New Zealand we allow our grid to go a long way over or under frequency in emergency situations (4%) and we also have extensive customer load control, so we can drop load quickly if required. Thus if the wind stops blowing here we can accommodate it.
Distribution is the other thing; you want your wind generation all over the place, not just in one place, so that you don't have the whole wind contribution just disappear.
Wind is far from a perfect source of energy for electrical generation, but it can and does work, as part of a balanced portfolio of generation prime movers. If you can burn coal for electricity, it is a cheap way to generate power, and on paper, for the USA, should be so for the next few centuries at the present rate of consumption. On the other hand, if the global warmingists are indeed correct, then continuing to burn coal at this rate (globally) is "not sustainable".
