Wind and solar is actually pretty easy to throttle back in principle; wind turbines need to have braking capabilities anyway in order to handle high winds, and

Wind and solar is actually pretty easy to throttle back in principle; wind turbines need to have braking capabilities anyway in order to handle high winds, and you can literally just stop drawing current from solar panels whenever you like. The reason this doesn't happen in practice is mainly one of policy: we want to use wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, so they have priority when selling to the grid and non-renewables either have to shut down or pay penalties for not being able to do so fast enough in the form of negative energy pricing. This pushes up the cost of non-renewable generation which has to be made up for by charging more for it when it's needed, driving up the overall cost of electricity for consumers. (This is why Germany has both negative electricity prices at the wholesale level and some of the highest consumer electricity pricing in the world.) EDF were talking about possibly needing to change this in France in the future, since otherwise their heavily nuclear-based power grid couldn't cope with the increased levels of highly variable renewable power they're predicting. The nuclear plants just can't adjust their output power fast enough or deep enough.