Just driven to Paris past dozens of wind farms which left me wondering why some are moving and some aren’t?
Why wouldn’t you want them all producing electricity all the time?

Can’t really store the electricity.

Sometimes it’s too windy.
Sometimes it’s not windy enough.
Sometime they’re broken.
Sometimes there’s no demand.

Gearbox life

They don’t turn if not enough wind. If too windy the blades feather and they idle to protect the gearing. They are routinely shut down for maintenance, often a full array rather than individual machines.

Saw the blades of one being transported on lorries on the m4 a few days ago, they look **** massive lying down

Gear boxes are shite, the huge farm they built on the Rye levels is plagued with gearbox issues.

I read this as why aren’t they turning left all the time and thought wtf are you on about. 😳

They need to let some of the wind through so people can fly kites in the next village.

You need the wind turbines turned on to get enough wind to fly the kites, Shirley?

We’ve nearly used up all the fossil fuels, let’s not use up all the wind too. The clouds will stop moving.

Depending on the wind direction, turbines behind others may be turned off to reduce wear from turbulence caused by the one in front. Wind farms will be designed to avoid this for the predominant wind directions as much as possible. Also there may be noise restrictions at certain times and wind directions.

Also as above, wind speed too high or low, maintenance, broken etc.

Was riding the blade trail at Afan and a Lorry came past us delivering one of the blades! It was bloomin huge! Kudos to the driver getting a load that big to the top of the mountain!

Constraint payments, getting paid not to work!

They can’t afford to run them all the time. Do you know how much it costs for the electricity to run one of those enormous fans? And sometimes we don’t need any more wind.

Current wind turbine technology is **** rubbish.

Electricity not needed, particularly in France where they have stacks of nuclear. Wind is only used as a top up. This is partly due as the price paid is very high versus other forms (due to subsidies) so it’s more of a “last resort” price wise. Even some bizarre ninsense where UK turbines have much smaller generating units inside than their physical dimensions of blades could support as subsidies are higher per unit for “smaller” turbines

@wiggles yes indeed, they used to manufacturer them on the IoW and transfer them over on special barges. Huge

A good friend of mine has just finished a project building a massive wind farm off the Dutch coast, very interesting engineering.

Because it saves electricity, stupid.

They don’t like spinning fast: