One of the drawbacks to wind turbines is that while they may provide a lot of energy at times, they can never be counted on to provide energy in a pinch, a characteristic called “capacity.”
As a result, if a larger proportion of windmills are deployed on the power grid, the system will also need a lot of conventional generation that will sit idle for most of the hours in a year, providing value only by being available for when the wind stops. Read full story here