It's like the writer doesn't know that windmills can be stopped. In fact, they have builtin brakes which autoengage and stops the mill when the wind becomes too powerful.
And in the long term, why is Europe not building more Pumped-storage hydroelectric power plants, which would solve the issue? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...)
Northern Germany probably doesn't have a single such plant but Northern Germany also doesn't have a single mountain, hill or anything higher than a tree as far as the eye can see.
You will find those plants in Southern Germany and Austria but then again they do actually have places to put them.
Besides stopping the windmills or installing plants is not the problem. The problem is that the German grid can't deal with the energy produced in Germany and uses neighboring grids that are not designed to handle that much load.
Most of them will come with bs excuses for why only oil is the solution and everything else doesn't work.
There is no such thing as "too much energy produced" for a start. As you said, they can brake the blades, or just disconnect the generators, easy.
Storage and variation of power are real problems, but they can be dealt with.
>Wind farms in West Texas earlier this year were paying utilities to use their electricity on particularly gusty days because they can still earn $22 a megawatt-hour in federal tax credits
As long as their neighbours let them, it's vastly cheaper for Germany to keep this going than to speed up the upgrades of their own transmission capacity.
I'm not exactly sure about the electrical machinery, but if that is sophisticated enough, it can be used in high accuracy fashion to control the generation so that the electeicity is produced in high quality.
You can think of the wind plant working as a giant flywheel. If there is a sudden gust, the spin speed increases and the extra speed is gradually harvested as energy. No sudden spikes. In theory the plants could be used to improve the frequency quality even more by also acting as motors.
If there is a real wind powef power electrical engineer around, feel free to chime in.