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At the end of 2007, China's installed base of wind power totaled just over 6 gigawatts (GW), making China the fifth largest producer of wind power, after Germany, the U.S., Spain and India. As a consequence of the rapid build-out of wind power projects in China, in April 2008 the National Development and Reform Commission revised its 11th Five Year Plan Period plan for wind power development from 5 GW to 10 GW by 2010.

If you care about reducing your emissions of greenhouse gases, then you might want to move to Honolulu, Los Angeles or Portland, Ore., according to a new study from The Brookings Institution. These three metropolises boast, respectively, the lowest three per capita levels of world warming pollution (read: carbon dioxide) in the nation's top 100 metro areas.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a solicitation for up to $10 billion in federal loan guarantees for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. This marks the second round of solicitations for DOE's Loan Guarantee Program, which encourages the commercial use of new or significantly improved energy technologies.

A very informative, quick-read guide on small wind systems is just a click away. This small reader is a great source of research if you would like to learn about wind and if it will work for you.

An idealized application for superconductors is to employ them in the transmission of commercial power to cities. However, due to the high cost and impracticality of cooling miles of superconducting wire to cryogenic temperatures, this has only happened with short "test runs". In May of 2001 some 150,000 residents of Copenhagen, Denmark, began receiving their electricity through HTS (high-temperature superconducting) material. That cable was only 30 meters long, but proved adequate for testing purposes. In the summer of 2001 Pirelli completed installation of three 400-foot HTS cables for Detroit Edison at the Frisbie Substation capable of delivering 100 million watts of power. This marked the first time commercial power has been delivered to customers of a US power utility through superconducting wire. Intermagnetics General has announced that its IGC-SuperPower subsidiary has joined with BOC and Sumitomo Electric in a $26 million project to install an underground, HTS power cable in Albany, New York, in Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation's power grid. Sumitomo Electric's DI-BSCCO cable was employed in the first in-grid power cable demonstration project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and New York Energy Research & Development Authority. After connecting to the grid successfully on July 2006, the DI-BSCCO cable has been supplying the power to approximately 70,000 households without any problems. The long-term test will be completed in the 2007-2008 timeframe.

Cascading failures are an emergent phenomenon of a network, rather than the independent and coincidental failures of its individual components. Although it is true that many banks in the U.S. and Europe simultaneously overinvested in mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) to their peril, positive feedbacks in the global economic system amplified those errors. Bank regulators and macroeconomic policymakers have focused too much attention on the individual nodes of the network (that is, on each bank, and each national economy) without proper regard for the system-wide amplification.

The Hewitt family uses around 2.75 kilowatt-hours of electricity each day — less than 10 percent of the U.S. average. All of their power derives from the system shown here.