It crops up because people give these absurdly misleading cost estimates for adding incremental wind power to the grid. You can’t have wind power without spending money on an equivalent amount of reliable power, and no one wants to include those required costs in their estimates. This tends to dramatically understate the actual economics of wind.
There are plenty of studies of near-100% renewable energy grids and the electricity comes out similar to long-term wholesale trends (pre-Ukraine), even taking storage/transmission into account.
