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Old 03-07-2013, 02:16 PM   #539 (permalink)
jamesqf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Arragonis View Post
More wind farm joy

Wind farms paid £10,000 a day to sit idle in blustery conditions | The Times

So I pay and get nothing back.

Madness.
So explain how this is fundamentally different from having peaker plants in the system, which may run only at infrequent times of high load, and so command a high price for their output? Why are customers paying for those plants when they're just sitting idle most of the time?

Or indeed, why hospitals, data centers, and suchlike should pay lots of money for backup generation in case of power failure. Back when I used to work for the local power company, their office building, which contained the system control room, had backup power from batteries and a diesel generator. You could, with equal justice, ask why the customers were paying for the cost of that seldom-used installation.