The problem is that wind cannot be reliably used for any kind of power generation (except with some means of energy storage). You will still need to provide the exact same amount of peaking power plants whether or not you had any wind-based energy production. In effect this means that wind power will not decrease the amount of conventional power plants at all, and I am pretty sure that the amount of fuel savings they manage for fuel-consuming peaking power plants (by having them run less) during their operational life cycle will not be that much compared to the resources it takes to build the wind turbines and maintain them.

I'm sorry, I probably emphasized the wrong point in my original comment. The real issue is not overproduction, but rather not producing the power when it is needed. There always needs to be a backup system available that can provide at least as much power as the wind turbines are providing to the grid. That basically means either having other types of power plants available to balance the load, or storing the excess energy that the wind turbines generate, which can then be used to compensate for lack of wind later on.

The problem with having power plants as backups is that most types are not brought online fast enough if they are completely shut down. The best type of load-balancing as far as I understand is hydroelectric, because you can just turn turbines off or on as the demand changes. Unfortunately there are only so many rivers that can be harnessed for that purpose. Any other types of power plants need to be kept more or less online to be able to respond to quick changes in demand.

As far as energy storage is concerned, the amount of energy required to compensate for a lack of wind power for even a few days is extremely high. With current technology the amount of resources needed, energy density, and the efficiency of different solutions (hydrogen, pumping water to a reservoir, large batteries etc.) is not very promising. Any kind of intermittent power generation, be it solar, wind or tidal, requires this kind of backup system and until large-scale energy storage technology gets more mature, any kind of large-scale implementation of those power-generating methods is a waste of time, money and energy that would be better spent on other things.

Having said that, I'm just wondering what could be achieved if the money spent for implementation would go towards research instead.

Wind power is inherently unreliable and completely unfeasible as a large-scale power-generation method. I found the following an interesting read:

Hugh Sharman, – Why Wind Power ‘Works’ in Denmark
http://www.incoteco.com/upload/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf

The gist of it is that Denmark exports almost all of the wind energy they generate to neighbouring countries, because most of the time the power generated is in excess of the demand. Granted, that paper is several years old, but it still demonstrates the randomness of wind-based energy-generation pretty well.

Wind can never be used for base load energy generation without some kind of (expensive and impractical) energy-storing gimmicks, so instead of that how about just building a few comparatively cheap nuclear reactors and being set for decades? Perhaps at that point wind energy will be more feasible, but until then throwing money into implementing inferior energy-generation methods seems kind of silly.