If you look at the Netherlands, for example, you'll see that the way they've always used wind power is for pumping water (draining the polders). And there it doesn't much matter what the instantaneous amount of wind power available is, or even if the windmills are stagnant for a while. All that matters is that over a long period of time you end up with around the same amount of average power produced, and that's what wind power is good at. Potentially it would make sense to use wind turbines for powering specific sorts of activities that didn't rely on low latency of power production and could be automated (perhaps water desalination, for example). But using it as base power is a far more troublesome prospect than using solar.
Do you have a reference you could link me to?
Also, any reason to think this can't be solved by pumped-storage hydroelectricity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
The world uses ~2,000 GW and has ~100 GW of PSH capacity. Scaling up by a factor of 20 would be expensive because the low hanging fruit has been taken, but it really doesn't seem that bad if it means our base generators are half (or less) as expensive. See, for example, this take in Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=here-is-the...
Hell, even storing it in batteries isn't that expensive:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-23/duke-completes-bigg...
($44 million for 36 MW, which is added to the typical costs of wind turbines of ~$2 million per MW.)
Without more info, I really don't think it's clear cut.