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Also not mentioned is the amount of power generated by a fossil fuel source that is required to get it spinning and to keep it spinning.
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This is all engineering, no need to fret over it.....
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Actually you leave the plants running even when the wind blows. There is not enough time to start from shut down to generation if a brown out occurs.
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Gas would be the easiest second and most portable due to less water requirements.
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Here are two dirty secrets of the IWT industry (and it’s the same for the solar industry).....

As everyone knows, there has to be backup power that can seamlessly pick up the slack when the wind is not blowing (or the sun not shining). The backup power supply of choice for the backup could be anything with the proviso that that the backup has to react quickly. For this reason, the primary choice of backup is natural gas fired generators.... essentially, what is needed are gas powered generators that can go from zero to 100 mph in say 20 minutes. Gas generators can be designed with open loop gas turbines or combined cycle.... the beauty of open loop is that it can meet that ‘zero to 100 mph in 20 minutes’ requirement whereas a combined cycle design might take 2 hours.... and that is too long. On this basis, open loop becomes the more practical choice. Here’s the problem (and it’s a biggie).... open loop is in the 40% efficiency range while combined cycle is in the 60% efficiency range. Bottom line is that in order to accommodate the supply of wind and solar power, inefficient gas generation must be used.

Here’s the obvious question..... If only combined cycle gas turbines were used, would the improvement in efficiency over open loop in conjunction with all the standby energy requirements not totally negate any power that IWTs provide? I have not examined that question in detail but have on a cursory level and I think the answer is easily “yes”.... in other words from a big picture perspective, wind and solar aren’t just figuratively useless they are literally useless.

Here’s a second dirty secret. One other serious negative issue with wind and solar is this..... due to the much increased cyclical operation that the gas plants are going through as they try to pick up the slack when wind and solar are cycling (which of course is constantly occurring), these plants require much more maintenance (and will have much lower life) as a result of thermal and mechanical fatigue of the components. There is going to be a future heavy and ongoing cost for dealing with gas plant maintenance....

The issue with wind and solar is that it assumes that electricity as a resource can be driven by ‘supply’ instead of ‘demand’.... and that only really works if there is electrical storage. Most of us don’t want to be watching tv or doing our laundry and accept the fact that we have to curtail activities because the wind stopped blowing or it went cloudy. Storage on a mass scale actually does exist.... Denmark makes all kind of wind power and when the wind is really blowing, they generate it to an excess. At that point, the link to Sweden kicks in and Sweden is more than happy to take it off their hands. What do they do with it? They use hydroelectric pumps to move water up to an elevated lake and then they can use that water at their convenience to generate power by reversing the direction whenever they like. Denmark is often held up as this wonderful model because of all their wind.... you should ask the average clued in Dane what she/he thinks about that. Well, Sweden likes it quite a bit.....

Thank you for your reply to those who are of the same ilk as the person who retorts that errant dead birds should learn to fly somewhere else. Ignorance persists because fact interferes with hope and fantasy, because understanding facts is too hard, complicated or there is just not enough gray matter present to think long or hard enough to understand and become informed.

Too hard is also the reason full cycle economics are incomplete and have too many wishful simplifying assumptions. So long as you can create a case to sell the answer that someone wants, why bother with digging deeper or with pesky facts? You can still tell the truth when you don’t tell all you know, you know? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

If this madness persists the money will be in spinning reserve and open cycle peaking plants. The madness requires at least double capacity without batteries. Massive batteries and those will also be expensive. The nut of it all is that this fantasy of renewable power costs more, a lot more and is less reliable. Distributed anything in smaller proportions is less reliable and more costly.

Years ago, when natural gas was even cheaper than it is now I did a project to look at cavern storage near the city gate. Utilities will pay just about any price, and pass it on to the customer, to prevent gas shortage in a city. I see spinning reserve and back-up to “renewables” the same way as city gate storage. You can’t have the sheeple freezing in the dark or pilot lights flickering out then the gas coming back on and houses going boom!

Too hard and not able to understand are the reasons why, if we had honest and able leaders, the public don’t need a say in some things. They just are not able to grasp all of the big things necessary to make a sound decision. It is the same reason we used to let Generals and Admirals run wars and not manage them by popular vote or opinion any more than absolutely necessary.