Comment Re:Actually... (Score 1) 681
Not quite. If you've paid a lot of money for a clean energy generator, you don't have the luxury of just using whenever you happen to need it. It's too expensive. You need that baby to be working flat out, 24/7, 265 days a year - otherwise it's just not cost-competitive with the centralised power plants that DO work all the time.
It's even worse with intermittent sources like wind. As soon as the wind blows, you need to be selling/using that electricity 100% to make it pay. "Make hay while the sun shines", etc.
If you don't need the electricity around the clock, you need to be able to sell it to people who do. And to do that, you need a very good transmission system that gets the power right to whoever happens to need it any time of day or night (you can't store this stuff, remember?) The net effect is a big increase on demand on the grid, usually right in the places where the infrastructure is weakest - at the tail-end of the grid. This is what the article is trying to explain.
