Just FYI

Look at prices of Nuclear generation vs Wind generation at http://www.esios.ree.es/web-publica/
France prices for power are mostly due to nuclear costs, prices in Spain and Portugal have a generous mix of renewables (wind, thermosolar and hidro), prices are auctioned on a hourly basis, so when wind blows prices in spain goes down (i've seen prices in the low €5 Mw)

Also look at wind generation anytime at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdemanda.ree.es%2Feolica.html it shows a variable generation rate but has a 33% average over installed power, it means we currently have 18 Gw installed power base on windmills, that sometimes generates 15 Gw and other times 1 Gw but in average it accounts as a 6 Gw. sustained generation . And Yes sometimes you need to use Gas generated power (as seen on https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdemanda.ree.es%2Fdemanda.html )

In general the system here WORKS REALLY FINE, and Spain is not a high wind area, but redundancy, and multilocation of windmills, helps us to keep a high usage ratio of the windmills.

Yes this redundancy is expensive, but also is nuclear power, from building to maintaining and to life long storage of radioactive waste, look at the prices for new nuclear plants and you will see prices up in the $8000 to $10000 for Kw http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html, and that's much more expensive (only in building costs) than windmills, that are in the $1200 Kw range for 2 Mw Models.

Not for everyone but google as a really clever solution http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

I don't like those big UPSs, they are expensive, a lot of unneeded HW and they barely work when you need them most (expensive, small discharge time, batteries losing charge capacity .. )

So for our own datacenter we keep the currently bought UPSs and added some laptops for really critical services, we virtualice a lot too (OpenVZ) and both technologies enables us to degrade services gracefully and still keep high uptimes, laptops are great, cheap, and batteries can last up to 2 hours. It's not a solution for everyone, but works if your platform can be adapted to the architecture.