Ya can't depend on 'green energy'.

LOS ANGELES -- The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the California grid.

On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades -- or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1 percent of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

In just half an hour, a thousand megawatts of electricity -- the output of a nuclear reactor -- can disappear and threaten stability of the grid.

To avoid that calamity, fossil fuel plants have to be ready to generate electricity in mere seconds. That requires turbines to be hot and spinning, but not producing

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/politics/201212160055

And the customers have to pay for that "hot and spinning" ...... plus the "spinning" of the wind turbine blades ....... even when they are not "spinning".