Helen admits the "intermittency" of wind poses some technical challenges, as its share of electricity supply increases.
The project resolved the inherent intermittency problem by combining a wind farm with a hydraulic accumulation system.
On renewables, the seemingly eternal questions are cost - on just about everything bar hydro, geothermal and (increasingly) onshore wind - and intermittency.
In most other countries, wind is considered to be just one of many resources, and a problematic one as well, owing to its intermittency.
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Clean energy technologies like wind, solar, nuclear, and electric vehicles are more expensive than carbon-intensive alternatives and suffer from limited performance and intermittency problems.
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With increasing use of smart meters, which mitigate the problem of intermittency that plagues renewable forms of energy, demand for rooftop installations should grow strongly in these places.
These platforms are also increasingly capable of providing ancillary services to the local utility such as spinning reserve, load-following regulation, and intermittency management for wind and solar energy.
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To keep power flowing reliably, grid operators must smooth out supply and demand on a second-to-second basis (known as frequency regulation), an hourly basis (intermittency), and on a daily, weekly, and annual basis (meeting peak demand).
However, once built, these plants do not require fuel, although they will be tied to natural gas fuel costs as gas plants are generally used to buffer the intermittency of wind production, not included in this discussion.
Electric vehicles may play a key role as well, as high capacity batteries could ultimately serve to provide regulating capacity, absorbing or supply power back to the grid to flatten out some of the intermittency associated with windpower.
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Moreover, a strictly price-based comparison between clean and dirty energy ignores many of the other non-market barriers that must be solved for clean energy to adopted on a meaningful scale, such as regulatory and infrastructure hurdles, issues with intermittency, technology risk, and other barriers.
Costs not captured include electrical grid upgrade, connectivity of renewables and buffering of their intermittency by rapid cycling of fossil fuel plants as presently practiced in this country, and non-carbon-tax externalities such as pollution and health care costs associated with energy sources, especially for coal.
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