I live in Scotland, and was living in Northern Germany before. We do have high penetration here: https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3029756/scottish-wind-po

I live in Scotland, and was living in Northern Germany before. We do have high penetration here: https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3029756/scottish-wind-power-enjoys-record-breaking-start-to-2018 https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3029756/scottish-wind-... And it works pretty well. The last power failure I can remember which was in any way related to wind energy was in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout (but wind energy was not the primary cause, the main cause was bad planning) What happens at large scale is that the fluctuations induced by variable wind speeds smooth out over larger regions. And having a large, interconnected grid is usually much cheaper than battery storage. What would also help is diversification. In Scotland, there was a fascinating project to generate electricity from wave power, the Pelamis wave power converter. It had working 500 kW installation but was scrapped then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYzocwUfpNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYzocwUfpNg Fortunately, some Chinese companies seem to have copied the design: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3832029/Chinese-wave-power-device-suspiciously-similar-Scottish-machine.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3832029/Chinese-wave... > If we were as risk-averse with those sources as we are with nuclear, they would be expensive too. A wind power plant blowing up will not cause half of Europe to be contaminated with huge costs to agriculture, like it happened in 1986. You must also not forgot the extreme health costs of uranium mining.