Whatever the shortcomings of windpower may be, wind turbines don’t provide baseline power. Being far more easily started and stopped than steam boilers, they are used for peak delivery.
They can be, but the other important piece to the puzzle is what we call in the grid management business dispatch-ability. That is, being able to deliver the juice where and when you need it. Wind generation is essentially non-dispatchable. You either have it or you don't. That means you may have it when you don't really need it or want to use it, or you may not have it when you need it.
And, BTW (as Rush would say), the latter point is why you have the greenies agitating for laws requiring that grid operators get some fraction of their supply from "green sources". That means, to meet that requirement, if your "green source" happens to be online, you HAVE to use it to meet your quota, even though you may not want to use it, for whatever reasons (technical, economic, whatever). Mandates and subsidies from the government (naturally) are the only way a lot of these schemes will have any penetration into the competitive market.
“Being far more easily started and stopped than steam boilers, they are used for peak delivery.”
Well... I guess as long as the peak happens to coincide with the wind.
Sure.
But our ability to produce and transmit baseline power is becoming more limited when compared to increasing requirements. The enviro-wackos are offering ONLY wind or solar as solutions for this looming capacity gap.
We could build more coal plants, but, well ....
We could build more nuclear plants, but, well ...
We could build more hydro-electric dams, but well ...
And, wind isn’t that easily started if there’s no wind.
What if there’s no sun, either?
In certain areas, you get a higher reliability of wind and solar, but these are never going to supply any reliable quantities of power, even at peak.
They’re using wind and solar as a de facto replacement for baseline generation. They can’t be that stupid, so there must be another goal.