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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.

Wind Capital Group (WCG), one of America’s fastest-growing independent developers of wind energy, announced today that it has sold its 200 megawatt Buffalo Creek Wind Farm in Franklin County, Iowa, to Interstate Power and Light Co

The Bretton Woods 2 system – where China and then the oil-exporters provided (subsidized) financing to the US to sustain their exports – will come close to ending, at least temporarily. If the US and Europe are not importing much, the rest of the world won’t be exporting much.

And rather than ending with a whimper, Bretton Woods 2 may end with a bang. In some sense Bretton Woods 2 has been on life support for a while now. China’s recent export growth has depended far more on Europe than on the US. US demand for non-oil imports peaked in 2006. One irony of the past year is that the US was borrowing far more from China that it was buying from China. Campaign rhetoric that the US was paying for Saudi oil with funds borrowed from China isn’t far off – though it leaves out the fact that the US also borrows from Saudi Arabia to pay for Venezuelan, Mexican and Nigerian oil.

If Bretton Woods 2 ends in 2009 – if US demand for imports falls sharply in the last part of 2008 and early 2009, bringing the US trade deficit down – it won’t have ended in the way Nouriel and I outlined back in late 2004 and early 2005. We postulated that foreign demand for US debt would dry up – pushing up US Treasury rates and delivering a nasty shock to a housing-centric economy. As Brad DeLong notes, it didn’t quite play out that way. The US and European banking system collapsed before the balance of financial terror collapsed. Dr. DeLong writes: All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression. The end result of this crisis though could be rather similar: a sharp contraction in credit, a fall in US economic activity, a fall in US imports and a fall in the amount of foreign financing the US needs.* The US government is (possibly) trying to offset the fall in private demand by borrowing more and spending more — but as of now there is realistic risk that the fall in private activity will trump the fiscal stimulus.

File this one under if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. A group of commercial fishermen wants to get in on the rush to build offshore wind farms to generate electricity. It’s an interesting about face for the fishing industry, which has traditionally fought offshore industrialization – other than their own floating seafood factories, that is. The effort is attracting attention in New Jersey, where the state is looking to provide grants for a pilot offshore wind farm.

We just wrote about the new LED streelights in Ann Arbor. Now we find these self-contained streetlights that generate 100% of their power from the sun and the wind. During the day, solar power is stored in a battery at the base of the light pole. At night, they illuminate while continuing to generate power via a small vertical-axis wind turbine. The streetlights, dubbed “seagulls”, were spotted in Tokyo outside the Panasonic Center by Hyperexperience. Here’s a video clip of the wind turbine in action: