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No, that was something the German greens picked up as propaganda. Wind is just incredibly intermittent. Where I live it will go still for a week at a time. It survives because of massive per-mhw subsidies that pay a flat rate even if nobody wants to buy the power produced (currently $27.5/MWh, but only for union-built projects, thank you "inflation reduction act" lol).
Btw, that green "biomass" line on the first chart is literally wood chips imported from the US and Canada. Nobody ever talks about this but I find it hilarious.
In a lot of places the meh wind areas do see a slight increase during winter, but the best ones come from summer diurnal winds blowing through passes.. So a propagandist can quote the 16mph figure to give a low price, then quote the winter increase to excuse variability.
Similar trick with quoting on-shore costs together with off-shore production.
In both Europe and the US, wind stops producing at all during those cold still days in winter, when heating demand is at peak.
Hilariously in Washington wind also vanishes during heat waves, because the ocean air is no longer cold & high pressure enough to flow up the Columbia gorge to the low pressure interior. So all wind energy does is get paid to make energy when nobody wants it and screw up energy markets with "you must buy renewables first" mandates.
Fascinating. Is off-shore wind any better? Furthermore, is it plausible, or even feasible, to get around renewable energy intermittency by using hydrogen or other means of chemical energy storage? If, as you say. wind energy produces energy when it isn't needed, it seems potentially lucrative to buy that low price energy, transform it into a chemical, then sell high when the wind isn't blowing. This would also mitigate the energy efficiency blow you eat when converting to chemical energy, because you'd be using cheap excess energy in the first place.
Plausible? Sure. Feasible? Not really. It's one of those things that is technically do able, but so inefficient it begs the question of why other than ideology.
All 'we'll store on green energy when it's on for use when it stops' schemes fundamentally require (a) excess capacity when the weather is 'on' (or else there is nothing to store), and (b) so much excess capacity that the energy-ecology 'savings' of the green production aren't outweighed by the energy/ecological costs of the energy storage infrastructure.
Consider your chemical storage premise. Your wind power / solar power / whatever power has to be so much savings that it can not only cover the utility of the off-cycle power load, but also the ecological costs of the storage system. If this is chemical, this means all the ecological costs of producing the chemicals, moving the chemicals on-site, storing the chemicals, utilizing the chemicals, dealing with the chemical byproducts, and all the human personnel / infrastructure upkeep associated with running the site.
And if this does pan out... it's useful for precisely one geographic location, and all the green energy infrastructure inputs (rare earths, etc.) that could have been used elsewhere, aren't, because you're building over-capacity for the storage system.
By contrast, you could just... have a single power planet capable of meeting baseload power, and then let the same green-material inputs be used elswhere.
And this doesn't get into the questions like 'how can I get the most efficient use of my limited green tech input materials.'
There is far more energy demand than there is green energy supply, and in any combination of 'clean' and 'dirty' fuels, your ecological maximization isn't 'how do I get a specific city green,' but 'how do I minimize the total amount of dirty outputs.' It turns out, this is often best done by... targeting the least efficient dirty-fuel economies first, not the most.
As a general rule, bigger / more capital-intense generator plants are more efficient per volume of fossil fuel than smaller / cheaper engines. XYZ gallons of fuel in a generator plan will produce more energy, and at less greenhouse gas, than XYZ gallons of fuel distributed to cars. Since electric power grid charged vehicles are still getting their power from the generator plant regardless, you'd rather fuel-generators / battery cars than battery-generators / fuel cars.
Now consider that your chemical-storage thought is really just an awkward battery, and the feasibility should be clearer. Could it be done? Sure. Would it be better for the environment than not? Probably not, given that the 'not' isn't 'nothing is done' but the alternatives that could be done.
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