Even if just a portion of their electricity comes from wind power, someone somewhere is having to make up for this calm, an adjustment that still, in most cases, involves firing up some other massive power-making machine. It’s not impossible, but it’s a struggle: it’s hard to do well, harder to do fast, and almost impossible to do cleanly. America’s backup power plants are the oldest and dirtiest in the fleet. They should have been decommissioned and torn down decades ago. Instead we use them as a last-ditch resource when power supplies fall short. We use them a lot.
