It's nothing like that at all. Denmark, as one example, gets 20% of their electricity from wind energy, and growing. Do you mean to suggest that if they shut off all their wind farms it would have no impact on conventional base load capacity factor or fuel consumption?
In anything in this world we can find times and places where particular events come together which often seem as if these small, tiny, events could be expanded to the entire activity. For example, all batters in the MLB should hit home runs on every pitch. They don’t. It’s an anomaly. All cars should be as fast as Ferrari's and as cheap as bicycles.
Let look at tiny special unique Denmark, and the actual facts.
It is true windpower in Denmark accounts for 20% of Danish electrical production.
However, Denmark does not ‘get’ 20% of it’s electricity form wind power. The windpower electricity is all exported to Sweden and Germany. It is not used because...it is unreliable. So when the Danes get some juice, it is exported, unused and at a economic loss to Sweden where it is used to pump water up into damns, in a way a battery bank. In Germany, it is dumped into the German power grid because Germany is so large, so electrical consuming that the half of Danish wind power it gets isn’t hardly notable. In a phrase, it is dumped, again at a loss to the Danes into the German grid.
The Danes get their electricty like the rest of us, by powerplants. That is what they keep and use. So to be more accurate, the 20% generated in Denmark is folded into the Danish/Swedish/German grid where that amount looks large in little Denmark but is tiny in Sweden and Germany. I am not sure, but I am guessing like under 1 percent.
All this is done at a loss.
Also, Denmark is the most perfect place in the world to put turbines. Again a unique environment.
And the Danes themselves do not use this electricity. It is too costly, too unreliable so they pay the Swedes and Germans to take the electricity that they ‘dump’ into their electrical generation schemes.
The Danes donot and can not use windpower in a modern economy. Neither can we. We can build it. We can do it, but we will have to pay to dump it. So, what is the point of this other than feeling good and burning money?
More here. http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/sharman-winddenmark.pdf