If it were impossible it wouldn’t have happened
Your tax dollars at work.
They still make money from the federal wind subsidies.
Stock up while you can!
And that means that even if wind operators give the power away or offer the system money to take it, they still receive a tax credit equal to $23 per megawatt-hour. Those tax credits have a monetary value — either to the wind-farm owner or to a third party that might want to buy them.
As a result, in periods of slack overall demand and high wind production, it makes all the economic sense in the world for wind-farm owners to offer to sell lots of power into the system at negative prices.
We use to pay people not to grow wheat. Now we pay people to produce unneeded electricity at a loss. Sheesh.
Of course this “problem” could be solved by a massive energy storage system.
Take my watts, please.
I have a brilliant idea, lets spend gazillions of dollars on batteries to store that few hours of juice! We’ll make a fortune scamming the government.
Millions and millions of dollars on wind turbines that don’t add squat to the grid. A much better use would have been a new nuke or coal fired plant to generate when you need it and not on when the wind blows.
The only wind that blows is that of the blow hard in the White House.
I want to thank all the FR posters who joined in my quest for information on how the Texas electrical system functions.
I knew that FReepers would be knowledgeable about this (as usual) and have learned more in a few minutes/posts than if I had spent lots of time searching Google, etc.
In our case, the parts are more knowledgeable and informative than the whole (i.e. an article or two).
This is great!