Depends on what back-up you have got. In Sweden with 40% of electricity from hydro everything is handled by adjusting the flow in the dams. So barring exceptional circumstances (lots of nuclear down, cold winter, low water levels at the same time (which has happened too much lately)) the total amount of variation should be the important factor. And as I have presented elsewhere on ET, wind, hydro and nuclear in Sweden has about the same yearly variations.

I would like to see numbers from day-to-day variation for a country with decent amounts of wind and nuclear (and other types as well if possible) so that we could crunch the numbers once and for all.

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MW and MWh are two completely different issues.

The argument against wind is that it provides no standby MW - which is true as far as it goes - but the fact that nuke MWs can go down as well means that you need MW backup for these MWs as well.

Your argument is about MWh, and this one does not stand up to scrutiny. Wind provides MWh of the same value as other sources, and if it's not there, you won't burn more gas because of it - it's the other way round: when wind is there, you burn less gas (or require less draw on hydro resources).

The whole thing about putting wind into the system is that the hard question is not what to do when wind is not there (the answer being: we'll do what we did before there was wind), but what to do when there is wind (i.e. can you switch off the rest). And the ironic thing is that, under current market mechanism, the "other" producers cannot complain as wind does not need priority dispatch - it is actually the lowest marginal cost producer and will always be dispatched in priority to others even under current market rules. So others get dispatched less and make less money.

Then you get into arguments from utilities which say that they won't provide mid-load services as they are less profitable if there is too much wind, which is a systemic issue, i.e. a political one in that they are de facto complaining about the market system which used to favor them and no longer does...

They do not have my sympathy.

In other words: either you think on a systemic basis, in which case wind (which is cheaper on a long term basis) should be naturally integrated into the system, or you think on a market basis, and then the marginal producers should not be complain about being priced out on a marginal basis.

Wind power