system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
“If you remove enough wind energy you will impact the environment.”

I just came across this argument on a forum where people were arguing about the pros and contras of nuclear energy. It went like this:

>There's no "miracle" energy yet that doesn't come with rather big issues.

>What's the big issue with wind power?

>There isn't a problem now in relation to wind turbines. In the next 100 years this situation may look very different. If you remove enough wind energy you will impact the environment, but I do not know what the impact will be.

Other (valid) cons of wind turbines were mentioned, but this one seems **completely** absurd to me. Could the earth possibly run out of wind? I figure that wind energy ultimately comes from the sun, and as long as the sun shines we are not going to run out of wind, no matter how many energy we generate from it.
What does askscience think about this?
gpt
If you had a large enough wind farm you could decrease surface wind speeds in much the same way a forest of equal size might decrease wind speed, except a turbine farm is probably more porous with respect to wind, and probably would affect surface wind speeds less than a comparable forest.

Just because the turbines generate energy from the wind doesn't mean they absorb more energy than a stationary object of the same size.

I suppose the issue comes up if you put the wind farm in an area where there have not previously been forests, like grasslands, but I'd guess that even here the majority of the problems would be on a local, rather than regional scale, and would probably not relate to weather so much as the establishment/recruitment success of plants.