But imagine how hard it will be to do the environmental impact study to judge the effects of taking that much energy out of our wind currents.
I don't know what percentage of the total available wind power will be taken if we try to get all our energy from wind power, but certainly at SOME point draining energy from the wind would seriously change weather patterns.
When the windbreaks were built on the plains during the depression it was designed to "break up" the windflow and effect the dustbowl conditions. The amount of wind that appears in the lowest 50,000 feet of the the atmosphere is in the GIGA Terrawatt range where the worlds energy needs are in the several terawatt range. I think that the stat was extracting 3-5% of the wind energy would satisfy world needs and certainly not effect weather or rotation of the Earth.
I like Gerald O'Neil's, (founder of National Space Society with Werner von Braun), to build large solar arrays to collect solar energy in space and beam the energy to the Earth using microwave beams. NASA has proved the microwave transmission now we just need to mine the moon make the solar collectors and "Beam me down Scotty"