In practice, Altamont Pass is still one of the largest concentrations of wind turbines in the world, with a capacity of 576 megawatts, producing about 125MW on average and 1.1 terawatt-hours yearly.
As long as it reduces the need to ramp up fossil fuel plants, it's a win.
Ironic you put it that way, since it actually increases the need to ramp up and down dispatchable generation. Average is literally a smoothing function. If you look at an hourly output graph of wind farms it's often hopelessly spiky.
IMO VRE farms should be required to use energy storage to establish some semblance of control of their output. Instead of being allowed to simply dump whatever energy happens to show up and making it everyone else's problem. It would reduce emissions too since gas peakers emit less in steady state.
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In practice, Altamont Pass is still one of the largest concentrations of wind turbines in the world, with a capacity of 576 megawatts, producing about 125MW on average and 1.1 terawatt-hours yearly.
As long as it reduces the need to ramp up fossil fuel plants, it's a win.
Ironic you put it that way, since it actually increases the need to ramp up and down dispatchable generation. Average is literally a smoothing function. If you look at an hourly output graph of wind farms it's often hopelessly spiky.
IMO VRE farms should be required to use energy storage to establish some semblance of control of their output. Instead of being allowed to simply dump whatever energy happens to show up and making it everyone else's problem. It would reduce emissions too since gas peakers emit less in steady state.