Price = where supply and demand cross. If there's no wind, supply goes down, so with constant demand prices will go up! That's disregarding second-order effects (e.g. other providers marking up their prices to make bigger profits, or the wind-power provider increasing its prices in the future to make up for the lost income and provide a nice return on investment).
But will that prediction enable you to scale demand? With increasing hardware lifecycles, it might one day be economic for a global like Google to overprovision datacenters enough to be able to shift compute load to wherever intermittent energy is available. Requests can be routed over much longer distances than energy. But I suspect that Moore's law just isn't dead enough yet to make it economical to keep large datacenters offline just to wait for locally favorable energy prices. And on this scale, economical is a pretty good first approximation of ecological.
Wind power is already cheaper than coal, at least in Australia, even when you ignore the cost of building the coal plant (it's been way cheaper for a long time if you factor in the initial construction cost), and solar will soon reach the same crossover point.
Yes, of course, but a futures contract definitely adds cost, is my point.
Google is in effect doing the same thing as 'buying a future' and it's unreasonable for him to make the argument that this is 'inherently a better thing about green'.
I could buy a futures contract for Oil today and would it be fair for me to say 'Oil is has more stability in prices'?
The difference is you know the supply of wind. It fluctuates with the weather, but on average you know if you have X windmills you'll have Y joules, the risk in future contracts is a lot smaller, and priced accordingly. The oil supply is a lot more complicated, and the risk priced into future contracts is priced accordingly.
But Oil shouldn't fluctuate too-too far between $50 and $120 a barrel. And that's just the raw costs. With all other components, which costs will be more fixed, the actual end price of fuel should not change more than 40% in either direction, max.
I'd argue that the greatly varying costs of wind installations, aggregate availability, huge one: supply and demand for electricity overall, specifically for renewable electricity - regulator changes, improvements in technology - definitely create a situation wherein the 'end cost' of renewable electricity is somewhere in the range of the variability for fuel produced by other means.
Wind farms are almost always constructed with Power Purchase Agreements where utilities agree to buy 100% of the output from the installation at a specific price. These prices in Texas / Oklahoma / Iowa are usually under $0.03/kWh.
There are a lot of people selling and buying oil, thus changing the price every second. But there's no person looking at the wind and wager at what the "wind price" would be! You can never change your price if you wrote it in the CONTRACT, Google would be stupid if they don't cover it in the contract and let their Wind Farm builder change the price, because it makes zero sense.
