[usrusr]

How would solar be the same? That "reservoir" is emptying wether we hold silicon into the photon flow or not. Tides and wind aren't quite as far from just taking what is already disappearing, but even there: the natural drag of land and sea floor shapes is not only so many more orders of magnitude larger than anything we could ever build, there's also the nonlinearity of drag, if we slow down the natural flow a tiny little but the effect of natural drag will decrease accordingly and the total difference to natural flow will be much smaller than it would be if drag was linear to speed.