3 ms·

I have a hard time believing this. What does Green Mountain use when the wind dies? Do they have a grid storage solution?

• problems 10y ago
  They probably just trade it. Increase their supply so they can sell enough excess back to the grid to make up the cost later. You effectively get 100% wind, but in reality you might have got 80% wind, 20% gas and sold some wind back to the grid. It's a good interrim solution at least.
• cestith 10y ago
  As problems stated, there's probably a bit of arbitrage going on behind the scenes. However, Texas also has a well connected grid across the rather large state that is only weakly connected to other grids. There's a lot of wind in Texas and a lot of wind power. On an average day 12% of the entire state is powered by wind. Some days it's 40%. Sometimes wind produces so much energy that the spot price goes negative and wind farms are paid to disconnect so they don't overrun the transmission system.