The exact same thing we do when the Duane Arnold Energy Center refuels for a while. Refueling takes about a month and costs about $20,000,000 by the way.
My question had a serious point to it. You can't store the power a wind generator makes, and you can't count on it actually being windy, so you need a back up.
In Denmark they have an entire power plant running full time to back up when their wind generators don't work. This back up plant has to run all the time, thereby saving nothing in fossil fuel consumption. They might as well not have the wind turbines to maintain. They're a gigantic waste.
Having wind turbines going makes them feel good though.........
“This is hardly typical.”
and
“In Iowa we use about 48,000,000 mwh/year. We have 3,000 mw worth of windpower which produces over 7,000,000 mwh of electricity/year and we are building lots more. Do the math.”
OK, let’s turn to the experts. I found the qoute below from a paper on the internet from 2002 (follow link). Bottom line is, wind energy is a crime against the planet...
http://www.mnforsustain.org/windpower_schleede_costs_of_electricity.htm
The small amount of electricity produced by wind turbines, particularly due to their inherently low capacity factors. If all the thousands of windmills in the US as of the end of 2002 operated with a 25% capacity factor, they would produce less electricity (10,260,150,000 kilowatt-hours – kWh) than two 750-megawatt (MW) gas-fired combined cycle generating plants operating in base load with an 80% capacity factor (10,512,000,000).2 The windmills are scattered over thousands acres in 27 states (90% in CA, TX, IA, MN, WA and OR), while the gas-fired plants would take up only a few acres. Also, they are available when needed (i.e., dispatchable), not just when the wind blows.