What about more complex and expensive infrastructure required for balancing uneven electricity output?

The same as for the wood turbine.

It also matters before asking the question of batteries how much turbines it's going to take before the problem actually needs to be tackled

The problem doesn't arise immediately in the duck curve. It depends on how much of the energy mix of the place is composed of controllable sources alongside your wind and solar

I recall seeing that the need for batteries is tiny if you accept a 10% share of carbon emitting energy across the year - so all in all, another non-problem, or at least first you should focus on building the turbines to reach the problem, then think of whether or not it's worth getting batteries for the rest.

A bit more complex, but it doesn't have to be more expensive...

I think this is massively overblown, it was actually hard to manage a grid with baseload generation, since you still needed peaker plants for the morning and afternoon peaks and then had massive amounts of excess power overnight.

It's just that that's what people were used to, not that it's actually the best or easiest model for managing grids.

Highly variable sources bring some different challenges than the old status quo, but we also have much more sophisticated technology in the power space now anyway. And that new and sophisticated tech can produce new opportunities that outweigh the challenges if anything.

So I take arguments like yours with a massive grain of salt. How you put it is not really the case.

"Uneven electricity output"?

The variation on output is over a matter of hours (wind powerful enough to spin entire wind farms is not something that comes one second and is gone the next), and large grids with import and export capabilities are largely self-regulating.

Cost fluctuations in the electricity market regulate whether e.g., power storage sites will charge or dump power, whether district heating plants will source more heat from giant electric kettles, when EVs will start to charge, when private smart water heaters will preheat, when people decide to schedule washing machines and dishwasher, whether offline fossil fuel power plants will be fired up to sell as the rate becomes more lucrative or shut down as power becomes too cheap, whether any "idle" plants will throttle up or down, and whether windmills will engage brakes and turn away from the wind or release brakes and turn into it.

Power grids have also always had the ability to load shed by dropping customers off the grid, starting with factories that have special agreements, in case the combined local production and import is insufficient, and can detatch from neighboring grids and countries if there are import/export issues that could destabilize the grid.

The grid needs to change when supply or load conditions change significantly (e.g., every house in a city suddenly having an EV or heat pump, every house in a city suddenly having solar cells and supplying a ton of power, a power plant or wind farm being built somewhere power has not previously been routed), and can be optimized (e.g., power storage, smart load scheduling), but that is entirely orthogonal to windmills.

yes - RE Spain a month ago ..