There is so much wind in some places in the United States right now that on particularly blustery days, the local balancing authority—charged with making sure the amount of electricity going into the grid and the amount being drawn from it are exactly the same—has to pay some of the wind farms to shut down their turbines and also pay large industrial concerns to take and use more power than they actually need. In Texas, one blustery September day in 2015, the price per megawatt-hour of electricity dropped to negative 64¢. The utilities were actually paying their customers to use power.
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