*** At the company's control center, a team of highly specialized engineers watch a large screen that displays exactly how much electricity various power plants are currently feeding into the grid and coordinate changes among 1,500 facilities to prevent the system from collapsing.
In 2006, when wind farms were few and far between, coal, gas and nuclear power plants produced just the amount of energy needed in eastern Germany at the time,....
The system was relatively stable. One average, engineers took action to stabilize the eastern German grid roughly 80 times a year.
Today, as the amount of electricity generated by the region's 8,000 wind turbines rises and falls by the hour, engineers have to intervene every second day to maintain network stability.
