It means paying a lot of money for very
expensive electrical generation capacity, and then being able to reliably use only a fraction of it — while you also pay to build and run a whole redundant conventional power system as a backup.
As of January 2000, Australia had
an electrical generation capacity of 43 million kilowatts (or gigawatts).
The Makani turbine could also be deployed in deep offshore waters, which could lead to access to a renewable energy resource four times greater than the entire country's
electrical generation capacity.
Much of
our electrical generation capacity is actually beginning to age.