Other reasons aside windmills aren’t reliable sources of energy or cost efficient. I have driven by the vast forest of windmills in southwestern Minnesota along Highway 23 on days when not one of the hundreds of windmills that stretch to the horizon were turning and on other days when only a handful were in operation. I have also seen very windy days when the windmills are idled because wind velocities beyond a certain point stress the massive rotors to the breaking point and they need to be shut down. The demand for electricity continues whether the winds blow or not.
Yep. Texas is, by design, completely off of the US's grid - I guess so that if Obama is successful in instituting HorrorbamaCare & nationalizing those last remaining parts of the American private economy he hasn't already stolen we can beat a hasty exit from the Union without much interruption to our daily lives,lol).
But the state has become very wind-dependent over the last few years for power & has narrowly averted rolling blackout events a couple of times when the winds died down suddenly at windfarms in West TX. So now we're having to build all these $$$ newfangled backup generating plants powered by natural gas (fossil fuel!) to be able to kick in when winds collapse (usually, but as we saw in 2008, not always at night).
Heaven knows I'm no energy expert, but, as a lowly consumer, it surely seems to me that wind power is turning out to be neither as cheap nor as green as all the shills for the self-enriching racketeers in the Big Green Lobby told us it would be. By the time we get all the kinks worked out (if ever), all those ridiculously delicate $$$ turbines we were told would save us so much in the long term will have had to have been replaced many times over. God only knows what the ever-escalating eventual $/KW tab will average by the time all is said & done.
(I sure wish Envirwackolifornia would have been the state to serve as the guinea pigs on Wind Power - but as usual, the sanctimonious dolts at the Statehouse in Sacramento never put their money where their green mouths are, at least not where it counts.)