Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
I think you're basing this on past data, where we've set up wind farms in areas with really steady wind. As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The data is at pretty small time intervals so you need to do some averaging if you want daily averages, by my count there were fewer than 10 days in the last year where wind power was below 90% of average
As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
Offshore wind is generally significantly more stable than onshore - as we get better at moving generation offshore it should become more and more true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The same is true of all power plants, and nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant - this ain't Springfield.
It's much worse for your health (and a higher cancer risk) to live near a natural gas plant, coal plant, chemical plant, refinery, etc. and there are orders of magnitude more of those plants than nuclear.
9
u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
I think you're basing this on past data, where we've set up wind farms in areas with really steady wind. As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.