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“There has been a significant reduction in demand over four or five years, and we don’t see robust demand in the future.”

Wind farms are no longer engineering experiments or small pilot schemes. They have grown very large, to the point where they are of the same scale as gas- or coal-fired power stations.

Offshore wind has advantages beyond the presence of sea breezes. The seabed is relatively cheap real estate, and much larger wind farms can be built there than on land. The vast expanses available at sea allow economies of scale that may bring down costs.

The key to cutting costs, Mr. Hannibal said, is to simplify the installation process and turn manufacturing of turbines into a cookie-cutter industrial process. The latest turbines are made of just a few components that are relatively easy to anchor to the sea bottom.

Still, costs remain stubbornly high. Mr. Hannibal figures that the power to be produced by new German offshore wind projects will cost 130 to 140 euros, or $175 to $185, per megawatt hour, which is about triple the wholesale power price.

On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.

In the 1960s, as the consumer-product world we now live in was booming, the Harvard economist Raymond Vernon laid out his theory of the life cycle of these products,

Amana, for instance, introduced the first countertop microwave—the Radarange, made in Amana, Iowa—in 1967, priced at $495. Today you can buy a microwave at Walmart for $49 (the equivalent of a $7 price tag on a 1967 microwave)—and almost all the ones you’ll see there, a variety of brands and models, will have been shipped in from someplace where hourly wages have historically been measured in cents rather than dollars.

Even as recently as 2000, a typical Chinese factory worker made 52 cents an hour.

Gazprom, the huge Russian gas company, finds its traditional business model in trouble. Under the pressure of a market in which gas is being supplied from more places, Gazprom has had to renegotiate gas contracts with European countries, costing it $6 billion, Mr. Varro said.

“Gazprom is not against shale gas,” Mr. Stevens said, “it’s just against everyone else having it.”

As Europe becomes a more “contestable market” with more integrated pipelines, more liquefied natural gas and more shale gas, behavior will change. “If people can come in easily, the threat of coming in will make the monopolist behave differently,”

Yet educational attainment has slowed so much that the United States has lost its once-enormous global lead.

the biggest reason to think economic growth may translate more directly into wage gains is the turnabout in health costs. After years of rapid increases, they have slowed sharply in the last three years. Mr. Obama likes to give more credit to the 2010 health care law than most observers do, but he’s not wrong about the trend’s significance.

It’s also possible that the forces behind the great wage slowdown – from globalization to our often-sclerotic government to (at least for many workers) technological change – are still more powerful than the positive forces.

ED bulbs are also more durable, lasting 10 times as long as a fluorescent bulb and 100 times as long as an incandescent bulb.

In 2006 he was awarded the Millennium Technology Prize of one million euros (about $1.3 million) for inventing the first efficient blue-light laser, opening the way for things like Blu-ray players.

"There's no risk to Polish clients," PGNiG spokeswoman Dorota Gajewska said, but added that it was forced to suspend its so-called "reverse flow" transfers to Ukraine.

The move caused the Russian ruble to plunge to another record low against the dollar on Thursday.

"It also can be seen as a kind of response to EU sanctions, targeting the smaller EU members in Moscow's former sphere of influence, not its larger Western partner." "But it's a risky policy, as it further undermines Moscow's credibility in Western Europe. It's not the best idea: either you're a reliable supplier of gas or you're not," he said.

The third principle is that the ban on exports of dual-use technology, which applies to military and civilian products, will for now be limited to military end-users.