Every 10MW windmill needs 10MW of backup, as they all fail to generate power at the same time when the wind dies (or gets too strong). It's extremely unlikely that all coal and nukes fail at once, so you only need to have a 1-5 ratio or so of backup to frontline power.
You cannot honestly compare infrequent major outages of coal/nuke with the frequent no-wind outages of windmills. The honest comparison to a pipe break at a nuke plant, would be a tornado blowing down the windmills. And that's likely to become a common occurrence since the windmills are being built in the tornado region from Texas to the Dakotas.
There simply is nothing in the operation of coal and nuke plants that matches the vagaries of the windmill. Coal and nuke plants run at high use levels (e.g. 90%), not the 9% of windmills.
That 9 percent of windmill reliability figure is based on a very specific set of circumstances at a future date and time.
The purpose of the article you posted was not to enlighten us but to illustrate that the predjudices of the auther against wind power are correct, that wind is not reliable. To do that, the author had to go thru some deep and specific mathematical contortions carefully chosen to make wind look bad. You can do that with any energy source.
I can guarantee you that at some point in the next hundred years all power generating equipment will fail sometime,
Does that make them all unreliable?
In fact the real experience figure of wind power up time is much higher than 9 percent, and grid operators are finding wind power to be a good part of an operating mix as they can use the advantages and work around the disadvantages. They of course do the same thing with nuclear and coal and solar.
You can take wind, coal, nuclear, any kind of power and find a weak point somewhere. This is why it is so important to not put all our eggs in one basket.
Remember, if you have a nuclear plant on line, you have to have a second nuclear plant or equivelant coal plants idling along staffed and ready to take over if the nuclear operating plant suffers a catastrophic shutdown. It takes 1/60 of one second for a computer to take a nuclear plant off line in an emergency. Getting an idle nuclear or coal plant on line takes a whole crew and must take several hours.
If you have a wind farm with a hundred windmills, you might need to keep 4 or 5 in reserve for catastrophic emergency backup. getting an idle windmill on line takes one button and a few seconds.
So not everything is so simple after all.
I covered all this is and more in my post, perhaps you didnt read it all.
Everything Luke says is CORRECT, larry. That is explicit in the reliability figures for wind of 9% during PEAK LOAD.
Coal, Oil, Gas, Nuclear have nearly random breakdown statistics. Correct, when they do break down it involves greater capacity, but when an area of 100 windmills is all windless (often) that is the equivalent.
The only real figures that need to be used for comparison are the 9% versus the 90% or so for other forms of power.
You are comparing the absolute worst case scenario of wind power with best case and hoped for perfect operation of coal and nuclear plants.
Try matching the good points of wind with the good points of coal and nuclear and watch how well they work together on a grid and you will learn something.
You can take wind power down for maintenance of one or two windmills at a time. The other fifty or a hundred windmills can still be producing. Take a coal or nuclear plant down for 2 or 3 or 4 months for maintenance and re-certification and see how much electricity it is producing. just because they do not break down often does not mean they do not break down.
Any grid with a nuclear plant or any coal plants on line still needs one nuclear plant or an equivelent nunmber of coal plants on standby because catastrophic failures do happen.
Bottom line is windmills do work and have been proven over and over to work and work well as a portion of a grid power mix.