Ric Locke;

Greg/Hugger,
No doubt you consider yourself reasonable. From here you sound like a hysterical panicked Luddite.

So, let’s say it went down half the time, which isn’t going to happen but just say.

If any wind turbine farm was “up” — producing power — half the time anywhere in the world, I can guarantee the owners would be holding news conferences. The availability fraction for a wind turbine is generally held to be thirty percent… in areas where the wind is particularly strong. When somebody in one of those 24,000 homes switches on a light, the control system at the power plant makes an infinitesimal adjustment to the fuel feed. The chance that a corresponding increase in wind will occur at just the right time is so tiny that you’d be far better off betting your whole salary on a single spin of a slot machine.
We have a lot of wind turbines here in Texas, and hardly a day goes by that a truck doesn’t pass my store carrying another one. And you know what? — those turbines turn all the time, making just enough power to stabilize them, and that power is thrown away (in heat!) in big resistors because it’s never available when it’s needed, only when the wind blows. You know why they’re there? Because there’s a subsidy, a big one. When money falls from the sky, Texans find their big hats useful. Power generation? It is to laugh. Add up the oil to make the fiberglass blades, the coal to make the steel for the tower and shafts, the natural gas to smelt the copper in the generators, the power to make the silicon in the electronics and the glass and carbon fibers, and and and, the chance that any wind turbine will produce enough net power to pay back the Diesel fuel to truck it to its site and erect it is zero.
As for batteries, your Wright Brothers analogy is crap. The Wright Brothers knew what their problems were: getting enough power from the primitive engines of the time, and control. They worked on those things, and solved them, at least partially — but none of the solutions they arrived at are still in use in aviation! Now, Google “electromotive series”. You will get a list. Pick two substances off it, and you have a battery. The farther apart the two substances are on the list, the better the battery as a power source. BUT (by a curious coincidence) the best candidates for battery electrodes are also highly reactive — for which read, explosive, corrosive, poisonous, or otherwise highly dangerous. Every scientist in the world knows that list exists and how to get access to it. And that’s all there is. Every possible battery in the world is on that list. “New elements” aren’t even credible comic-book material any more. Do you really suppose things haven’t been tried?
And even if you found the wonder battery, you’ve still got to make it, so what you need to do is go back to research: how much is available? The only battery material in the Universe that’s available in quantities large enough to make enough batteries to make a difference is lead. For everything else, you’re looking at anything from triple to a thousand times the current level of mining and refinement, mostly using chemicals that would make any sane EPA bureaucrat’s ears curl. Do you know why there aren’t any Tesla Roadsters on the road? Because the makers bought the entire production of the factory that made the batteries — and didn’t even get enough for all the prototypes!
Solar power is the next best thing to useless in Canada; your sun angle isn’t high enough. Wind power is a toy anywhere; it isn’t dependable, and it’s even more diffuse than solar. Both of them are boondoggles designed to separate you from your tax money and give power to the bureaucrats who “manage” the projects. People who tell you otherwise are lying, and the only thing the numbers they give you establish is that liars can figure.