what happens when politicians run the grid and not engineers....

it is, chaos happens. here, we have many, many wind turbines and the 
government's agenda is to shut down all lignite power plants, even the 
brand new, 560 MW, ptolemaida V. They are using them as peak load power 
plants, which is a very inefficient way to use a lignite (thus coal) 
power plant, because they were designed to be used as base load plants, 
thus to run for 1 1/2 years continuously, 24/7. They need 7 1/2 hours 
from the time the boilesr starts to heat up, until the unit synchronises 
and the circuit breaker closes. In the beginning it needs LOTS of diesel 
oil to pre-warm the boiler until it's hot enough to burn lignite and 
produce enough super heated steam to run the turbine. Now they use it 
4-5 hours a week which is VERY inefficient. It is due to over-generating 
of (supposed) clean electricity by wind turbines and photovoltaics, if 
it exceeds on-the-fly demand the frequency of the grid rises with risks 
of damage to equipment and, even blackout. So they'll have to stabilize 
the grid by shutting down conventional units, when that happens. Lignite 
or (God forbid) nuclear don't provide that flexibility, so they have 
exchanged them with gas turbine units, that run on natural gas, which 
can be shut down and fired up again at will. at their best they're 
combined cycle, with the majority being open cycle, unfortunately. The 
natural gas, of course, comes from Russia. The same situation is all 
over Europe.