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Guido Bergmann/Bundesregierung-Pool via Getty Images<br /><br />Russia is the world's second most powerful country, according to US News and World Report, while Germany has risen to fourth.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><ul><li><strong>US News and World Report ranks nations for a yearly "Best Countries" study.</strong></li><li><strong>It includes a global power list - a list of the world's most powerful countries based on their alliances, influence and whether the country is a leader.</strong></li><li><strong>The US stays in first place this year, but other countries have changed positions amid rising instability.</strong></li></ul>The US remains the world's most powerful country while others have seen their positions fall amid rising instability according to this year's global power rankings.<br /><br />The rankings, <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/power-rankings">published by US News and World Report</a>, look at how the influence of a <keyword id="6365627" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="nation">nation</keyword>, as well as its political, economic, and military power.<br /><br />They come as part of the media organization's <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries">annual "Best Countries" study</a>, which evaluated 80 countries based on responses from 21,000 people. <br /><br />Scroll down to see the <keyword id="8383846" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="25-most-powerful">25 most powerful</keyword> nations, according to this year's rankings.<br /><br />

The 25 most powerful nations on earth

RANKED: The 25 most powerful nations on earth

Sooner than later, there are few things that would inevitably change for <keyword id="3658" type="COUNTRY" weightage="20" keywordseo="India">India</keyword>. For starters, it will no longer be known as third world country. The multicultural nation will embark on a journey to claim its ‘developed’ nation status from that of the ‘developing’ country. The economic growth, as per the experts, will reach a balanced state despite the aggression we see in the markets.<br />
<br />
The political scenario in the country has changed since the last seven months. There has been a change in the mood of the nation, in those political parties which claimed leadership till now, and even in ideologies that led them.<br />
<br /> Today, in the changed situation, when the nation gazes at its tomorrow, things look brighter than they were before for various reasons. Now, will India be a ‘<keyword id="1091203" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="super-power">super power</keyword>’ is a question that seeks an appropriate answer. But, we need to define the borders for this term—‘super power’.<br />
What makes a country a superpower per se?<br />
<br />
Is it the economic prowess? Is it the presence of human resources in abundance? Is it the modern outlook that a country possesses as a nation? Or is it the self-sufficiency? Food security or nuclear power and defense forces? What is the main thing that comes around to frame the answer?<br />
<br />
Or, is it a combination of all these aspects that makes a country a superpower?<br />
<br />
The world contemplates many answers. While experts in each of these areas would pin it down to one thing, will India’s march towards ‘superpower-dom’ be a smooth sail?<br />
<br />
Recently, former member of Indian planning commission Saumitra Chauduri delivered a lecture on this topic in Mumbai and demolished the myths surrounding the term.<br />
<br />
“India will never be a superpower and is unlikely to become one in near future,” he said while elaborating on the lecture which focused on realising India’s potential in the current scenario.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Superpower: Aspiration or reality?</strong><br />
When India is poised to be on the throes of being identified as a nation that’s going to play a prominent role in the near future, is the status of being a super power an aspiration or reality? While young Indians who constitute the majority of its population want it to emerge as a superpower in the coming years, being a super power is an aspect that seems more like romance with the tag than the real image.<br />
<br />
<strong>Economy: The chief maker?</strong><br />
In a survey done recently by London’s independent think tank Legatum Institute some respondents reacted positively to this focused question. They felt India would be an ‘important’ economic superpower by the end of the decade. Now, this makes it a hazier picture than bringing in clarity on the issue.<br />
<br />
<strong>Growth across sectors</strong><br />
With the new and aggressive government at the helm of affairs, India is certainly looking at concrete steps that can be taken to ensure the growth across sectors both government and private be managed well. Right now, the government isn’t as aggressive as it should have been, in the last six decades as far as policies to promote businesses were concerned. Globalisation and liberalisation apart, India has, within its own structure, seen paced out growth. But, now emphasis looks high on private participation which could accelerate the progress trajectory. But then again, this is an anticipated result than a surefire outcome.<br />
<br />
<strong>Emerging market</strong><br />
If a country is defined by its market potential, India is second only to China in the world for the simple reason that it is the second most populated country in the world. No prizes for guessing the first one. Educated middle class, technology penetration and integration into services, hospitality industry and businesses are thriving right now in India. It holds great potential to the new tomorrow where the country turns into a huge market for new players and trends.<br />
<br />
<strong>Nuclear superpower</strong><br />
If diplomatic relations are anything to go by, India is the place to understand the importance of a nation being a nuclear superpower. Soon, the country will increase its spending on defense and take strong steps to ensure its security – on both land and food for its population.<br />
In that sense, India is truly a superpower that’s going to be a model for the other nations to emulate, given the fact that most of its middle class population will integrate itself into this march to claim the title.<br />
<br />
<strong>Technology superpower</strong><br /> The country carried out a successful <keyword id="164562" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Mars-mission">Mars mission</keyword> within frugal budget. This aspect stands as an important indicator of India’s unabated march in claiming the space in space technology. India is also being a prominent player in the trend of e-Commerce which is currently surging world over.<br />
<br /> However, its poverty levels, and the hungry stomachs that will still make into the charts of various headers of <keyword id="6355833" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="united-nations">United Nations</keyword> statistics may actually cost India its image in some sense.<br />
<br />
<em>Image: Indiatimes, <a href="http://www.slideshare.net">http://www.slideshare.net</a></em><br />

India A Super Power: Close To Reality Or Fantasy?

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>(Photo by Michael Evans/The White House/Getty Images)</span></p><p class="caption">Former US President Ronald Reagan</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul><li><strong>Officials of the Trump administration have said they want a weak dollar.</strong></li><li><strong>The US government pushing for a weak greenback breaks with recent tradition.</strong></li><li><strong>But 35 years ago, the Reagan administration worked with foreign governments to weaken the dollar.</strong></li></ul><p>At the beginning of the year, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said a weaker dollar "is good for us as it relates to trade and opportunities." The move broke with the tradition of American officials publicly backing a strong dollar, and prompted President Donald Trump to say Mnuchin was <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/trump-mnuchin-weak-dollar-comments-misinterpreted-2018-1-1014027161">taken out of context</a>.  </p><p>But thirty-five years ago, the US government began taking part in coordinated efforts with allies to weaken the rallying dollar. Here's a brief look back at what happened.</p><h2><strong>Why did the dollar strengthen back then?</strong></h2><p>It all started in 1980, when the US inflation rate was in the double digits.</p><p>In an iconic move that set a new precedent for central-bank policies in the US, the Federal Reserve under Chairman Paul Volcker doubled the federal funds rate to a historic high of 20%. At the same time, President Ronald Reagan was pursuing a sweeping economic expansion through dramatic tax cuts and deregulation.</p><p>That combination pushed up long-term interest rates, shored up capital and appreciated the currency. Double-digit inflation began to edge lower, falling to under 4% within three years. And the dollar more than doubled in value versus a basket of currencies - the <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/usd-jpy">Japanese yen</a>, Deutsche mark, French franc and <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/gbp-usd">British pound</a> - between 1978 and 1983.</p><h2><strong>Why might a strong dollar face criticism?</strong></h2><p>A strong dollar makes American products more expensive for overseas customers, so it can weigh on domestic exports. During the 1980s, the current account deficit widened to as much of 3.5% of gross domestic product, a historic peak for the time. </p><p>Though major trading partners may have seen a boost in some exports, the strong dollar was far from received warmly abroad. Other countries complained American interest rates forced them to raise borrowing rates in defense of their currencies, which threatened to slow down economic growth in a time of global economic recovery. </p><h2><strong>What did the US government do about it?</strong></h2><p>Aided by European countries and Japan, the Reagan administration in late July 1983 began to intervene in foreign exchange markets. Those countries coordinated efforts to sell dollars and buy up other currencies.</p><p>While this wasn't unprecedented, it was the first time the Reagan White House had intervened over an extended period of time. Administration officials said they believed currency rates should be guided by a free market, but at the same time saw an intervention as justifiable when the environment was ''disorderly.'' </p><p>Efforts to rein in the dollar culminated in September 1985 when the United Stated, West Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and France signed the Plaza Accord. The agreement marked formal efforts to depreciate the dollar, specifically relative to the yen and the mark.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Andy Kiersz/Business Insider, data from Bloomberg" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/5b64703489c8a186588b477d-960/us-dollar-index-historical.png"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span>Andy Kiersz/Business Insider, data from Bloomberg</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cigna-ceo-express-scripts-merger-and-problem-with-healthcare-2018-7">The CEO of one of the largest health insurers in the US explains the problem with healthcare in America</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

The backstory of how America coordinated with some of the world's most powerful nations to tank the dollar

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>If big data <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/07/11/data-oil-brainstorm-tech/">really is the "new oil,"</a> does this mean that countries will fight over it?<p>This is what Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bljciQEsXBU">suggested in a speech at the company's Google Cloud Next conference on Wednesday</a>.</p><p>"I think big data is so powerful that nation states will fight over how much data matters," he told attendees.</p><p>"He who has the data can do the analytics and the algorithms ... the scale that we talked about will provide huge nation state benefits, in terms of global companies and benefits for their citizens, and so on." (You can watch Schmidt's full keynote speech below.)</p><p>Like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR), big data is pretty hyped - but even so, this is still a bold prediction.</p><p>It came in the middle of Schmidt's keynote - essentially a sales pitch to attendees telling them why they need to hurry up and move all their data and systems to Google's cloud services. "Just get to the cloud now," he said. "Just go there now. There's no time to waste any more."</p><p>His argument is that Google, with its tens of billions of dollars of investment, can build the underlying infrastructure better than any single smaller company could hope to, so it doesn't make sense for them to build their own data centres when their resources could be freed up by using Google Cloud and allocated elsewhere.</p><p>By using Google's cloud services, he went on, it allows companies to scale their businesses rapidly - citing Niantic's "Pokémon Go" smartphone game and Snapchat as two examples.</p><p>And once in the cloud, it gives customers access to Google's tools to access and analyse their all their data in ways they couldn't do by themselves.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>"I'll bet the rest of my professional career that the future of your business is big data and machine learning [a form of AI] applied to the business opportunities, customer challenges, and things before you."<p>When people say data is the "new oil," they tend to mean there are massive opportunities there, making it hugely valuable. With sufficiently advanced technology, you can analyse huge data sets to discover trends and actionable information that would be impossible to figure out before the internet age.</p><p>Google, with its AI expertise, is presenting&#xa0;itself as the cloud industry player best positioned to help ordinary companies to unlock these benefits - benefits that could be of interest to nation states too.</p><h2>Here's Eric Schmidt's full keynote:</h2><p class="tagline">Get the latest Google stock price<a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/stock/GOOG-Quote"> here.</a></p><div></div>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/technologies-future-2030-world-economic-forum-tech-video-2017-2">7 amazing technologies we'll see by 2030</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="gyZHdzOTE6-7W7ygtgWICrMsqtn8Zv54" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Alphabet's Eric Schmidt: 'Big data is so powerful, nation states will fight' over it

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Several current and former Wal-Mart workers bashed the company in two TV ads that aired during the Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday.<p>In two 30-second spots, the workers claim that executives treat them like they are "disposable," cut their hours and benefits, and give them erratic schedules.</p><p>The ads were paid for by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.</p><p><span>"The executives and management treat us like we're disposable," one worker says in one of the ads.</span></p><p><span>"They think I'm worthless," another worker says.&#xa0;</span></p><p><span>"T<span>hey cut our hours and force us into part-time jobs," says a third. "We can't survive on these wages," a fourth worker says.</span></span></p><p><span><span>Wal-Mart defended its employment practices in a statement to Business Insider.</span></span></p><p><span>"While the UFCW is committed to spending its members' hard earned union dues on political ads attacking a company that employs 1.3 million Americans, Walmart will continue to focus on our commitment to spending $1 billion this year alone to not only raise wages, but also provide additional skills-based training and other opportunities to build great careers," the company said.&#xa0;</span></p><p>Here's the first ad.</p><p><div></div></p><p class="embed-spacer">&#xa0;This is the second spot.&#xa0;</p><p class="embed-spacer"><div></div></p><p class="embed-spacer">&#xa0;</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/surprising-millennial-brands-favorites-dell-mcdonalds-jcpenney-walmart-2015-8">The most surprising brands millennials love</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="gwb2l5djpf59vINJljM3hv2W96JkP2mP" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Wal-Mart workers bash the retailer and say they feel 'disposable' in a powerful national commercial

The most powerful images from the nation's remembrance of President George HW Bush

<p>Former President George H.W. Bush died last Friday at the age of 94. </p><p>Bush was widely respected for his lifelong dedication to public service and calm, quiet demeanor. </p><p>Over the course of his long, distinguished life, Bush served his country in an array of capacities. He was a war hero, US congressman, diplomat, CIA director, and vice president in the years before he ascended to the highest office in the land. </p><p>Here are some of the more striking images as the nation remembers its 41st president. </p><p> </p>

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/new-photos-of-nsa-and-others">First Look/Trevor Paglen</a></span></p><p class="caption">NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.</p></div><p></p></div></div>If you want the complete picture surrounding Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency, PBS' Frontline documentary "United States of Secrets" is where you should start.</p>
<p>While journalist Glenn Greenwald has promised many more leaks to come from the ex-NSA contractor, this two-part series reveals context, interviews with many more whistleblowers in the national security state, and the back story that brought us to the front page stories of mass surveillance with the aid of Silicon Valley heavyweights.</p>
<p>"This is as close to the complete picture as anyone has yet put together," veteran Frontline filmmaker Michael Kirk said in a statement. "And it's bigger and more pervasive than we thought."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/">Part one</a>, which aired on May 13, detailed "the program" that emerged shortly after Sept. 11, with whistleblowers describing a surveillance operation that turned from foreign targets into a domestic dragnet.</p>
<p>In part two, which Business Insider screened prior to <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/local-schedule/">tonight's airing on PBS</a>, the series explores the secret relationship between the NSA and Silicon Valley tech companies, and how they have often worked in tandem to gather and warehouse personal data.</p>
<p>It's a thrilling and disturbing documentary, featuring interviews with a remarkable amount of the key players. You should definitely watch it, as these three anecdotes from the part two of the series are just a small piece of the overall picture:</p>
<h3>In 2003, an AT&amp;T technician discovered a secret room being used to copy all internet traffic coming through his building</h3>
<p>In one interview, AT&amp;T technician Mark Klein talks about the mysterious Room 641a he found in his workplace in San Francisco. "There's no door handle, so it looks kind of odd," he said.</p>
<p>Inside the room, he found what appeared to be the government using a splitter to copy all internet traffic moving through the AT&amp;T internet backbone.</p>
<p>"One half is going to the secret room, and the other half is going to its normal, assigned destination," Klein said. "But it's been copied in the process."</p>
<p>While he went public with his find after reading a New York Times report on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, the existence of the program has still never been confirmed nor denied. "It still remains an open question," one woman says.</p>
<p>That open question leads to an interesting exchange between the filmmaker and an agitated Robert Deitz, the general counsel for the NSA from 1998 to 2006, who refuses to comment.</p>
<h3>One tech CEO challenged the constitutionality of the government demanding his customer data - and won</h3>
<p>In the post-PATRIOT Act era, national security letters (NSL) demanding user information from tech companies have become an all-too-common practice, with most companies complying with the letters and never speaking out against them. </p>
<p>But Nick Merrill, CEO of a web hosting company called <a href="https://www.calyxinstitute.org/">Calyx</a>, decided to challenge the constitutionality of one such letter, which he received in 2004. Noting that it wasn't signed by a judge, Merrill said the letter asked for significant information from his company and instructed him that he couldn't tell anyone he had received it.</p>
<p>"I thought that it was not legal and not constitutional," Merril said. "I decided to disobey the <span>commandment that I not tell anyone and I called my lawyer."</span></p>
<p>He was the first - and only one up until 2013 - to challenge NSL's on constitutional grounds. The FBI later withdrew the letter after an appeals court ruled it unconstitutional.</p>
<p>"I think that they were afraid that we would make it to the Supreme Court and they were not 100% certain that they would get the answer that they want," Merrill said.</p>
<p>But perhaps the most interesting exchange on the topic of NSL's is with Andrew McLaughlin, Google's Director of Public Policy from 2004 to 2009.</p>
<p>"I think that Nick challenged that is fantastic. I would love it if Google had challenged that," he says, before the interviewer asks him, "Why didn't they?" He responds: "I have no clue. No idea."</p>
<h3>Edward Snowden went ballistic after a Guardian reporter pulled out his iPhone to interview him at his Hong Kong hotel</h3>
<p>With reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras already meeting a not-yet-revealed Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel, The Guardian sent a senior correspondent to vet him and make sure he was legit.</p>
<p>"I asked 'do you mind if I tape the interview on an iPhone' and as soon as he saw the iPhone, it was like bringing out a microphone direct into the NSA," said reporter Ewen MacAskill. "He was totally appalled. He said 'get that out of the room as quickly as possible.'"</p>
<p>Snowden had many other ways to ensure he wasn't being surveilled or recorded, which the reporters - not yet familiar with the massive treasure trove of documents eventually revealed - initially thought were odd.</p>
<p>"He would often put a blanket over his head when he wanted to enter his computer system to prevent overhead cameras from picking up the password to the encryption," said Glenn Greenwald.</p>
<p>As they examined some of the documents - with the first revealing the NSA <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order">had captured millions of phone records from Verizon customers</a> on a daily basis - MacAskill sent a coded message back to his editors to indicate Snowden was the real deal: "The Guinness is good."</p>
<p>The Guardian only gave The White House four hours to respond. As it was clear the government was only trying to stall, they decided to go ahead with the story.</p>
<p>"Where we are now is in a place where we're living behind one way mirrors," says Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman in the closing to the documentary. "Corporate America and law enforcement and national security state know so much about us. And we know so little about them. We know so little about what they're doing. How they're doing it. That is a very uncomfortable position to be in."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/pressroom/press-release-united-states-of-secrets-how-the-government-came-to-spy-on-millions-of-americans/">"United States of Secrets: Part 2" airs on PBS tonight at 10 p.m.</a> Here's the trailer:</p>
<p></p>

The Most Interesting Revelations From Frontline's Powerful Expose Of The National Security Agency

The <keyword id="3778499" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="NATIONAL-COMPANY">National Company</keyword> Law Appellate Tribunal on Monday allowed <keyword id="45609" type="DOMAIN" weightage="20" keywordseo="JSW-Steel">JSW Steel</keyword> to acquire of <keyword id="612116" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Bhushan-Power-Steel-Ltd">Bhushan Power &amp; Steel Ltd</keyword> for Rs 19,700 crore by providing it immunity from prosecution.A two-member bench headed by Chairman Justice S J Mukhopadhaya, said that <keyword id="13852" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="JSW">JSW</keyword> <keyword id="34570" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="steel">Steel</keyword> will be immuned from the acts done by the former promoters of the Bhushan Power &amp; Steel Ltd.<br /><br />However, it also said that prosecution against the former promoters under the money laundering act by the Enforcement Directorate can continue.<br /><br />It has also rejected the petitions filed by operational creditors, seeking higher claims.<br /><br />The bench said that the EDITDA earned by BPSL during its Corporate Insolvency resolution period will be given to JSW Steel.

JSW Steel gets approval to buy Bhushan Power without risk of prosecution

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://flic.kr/p/6JjAL">lollie-pop/Flickr</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The US District Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, will hear arguments this Tuesday over the Obama administration's <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/08/01/what-you-need-to-know-about-obamas-biggest-global-warming-move-yet-the-clean-power-plan/">Clean Power Plan</a>, which dictates carbon-cutting standards for states based on their greenhouse-gas emissions.</p><p>The Supreme Court <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-supreme-court-puts-obamas-clean-power-plan-on-hold-2016-2">put a hold</a> on enforcement of the plan in February to allow legal challenges to it to be resolved in court. If the Court of Appeals rules that the government can legally enforcement the plan, the country will have to start using a lot more renewable energy (like wind and solar) - and much less coal - by the year 2030.</p><p>Part of the plan calls for the creation of incentives to encourage states to build wind farms. Though the US invested <a href="https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/2015-windtechreport.final_.pdf">$14.5 billion</a> in wind-power project installations last year, wind farms still provide less than <a href="http://www.awea.org/generationrecords">5%</a> of the nation's energy, according to the American Wind Energy Association.</p><p>But what would a US powered only by wind actually look like?</p><p>To answer that question, AWEA's manager of industry data analysis, John Hensley, did the following math: 4.082 billion megawatt-hours (the average annual US electricity consumption) divided by 7,008 megawatt-hours of annual wind energy production per wind turbine equals <strong>approximately 583,000 onshore turbines.</strong></p><p>In terms of land use, those 583,000 turbines would take up about the total land mass of Rhode Island, Hensley says, because wind projects typically require 0.74 acres of land per megawatt produced.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://pictures.reuters.com/archive/MEXICO-WIND--GM1E85F02KL01.html">Jorge Luis Plata/REUTERS</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>To make his calculation, Hensley considered that the average wind turbine has an output of 2 megawatts of power and is 40% efficient. That means it can reach its full power-generating potential 40% of the time, since wind is not always blowing and farms sometimes shut down for routine maintenance. That percentage also accounts for constraints to the electrical grid - if an electrical grid receives more power from a wind farm than it can handle, for example, managers will turn off a few turbines.</p><p>Forty percent is actually pretty efficient, Hensley says. For comparison, solar projects operate at an average of <a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/01/3-solar-cell-efficiency-records-just-4-days/">20%</a> efficiency, and fossil-fuel production facilities operate at 40% to 60% of their full capacity on average.</p><p>When you multiply a wind turbine's average potential (2 megawatts) by its 40% annual energy efficiency, 365 days a year, you get Hensley's estimate of the megawatt-hours of energy production each turbine can produce (7,008).</p><p>Thanks to technological advancements in wind turbine technology, the cost of deploying wind energy has <a href="http://energy.gov/eere/articles/unlocking-our-nation-s-wind-potential">fallen by 90%</a> since the 1980s.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Chris New</span></p><p class="caption">A turbine at the Block Island Wind Farm near Rhode Island.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Wind turbines can also now be built taller and larger than ever, allowing them to harness more power than in years past, Hensley says. Offshore wind farms, in which turbines are installed in oceans rather than on land, can offer about 33% more power than onshore ones, since there is more wind blowing over the sea than on land.</p><p>Of course, installing more than half a million turbines across the US would be a moonshot project, even with the recent cost reductions. But investing in more renewable energy - so that we're less dependent on fossil fuels - is certainly a worthy goal.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/map-world-energy-sources-fossil-fuels-nuclear-renewable-2016-4">This map shows the places that would go dark if we banned fossil fuels tomorrow</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="czb3QzMzE64A5agQ2EL8geCr7H8QODQs" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

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The 25 most powerful nations on earth

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RANKED: The 25 most powerful nations on earth

India A Super Power: Close To Reality Or Fantasy?

Preetam Kaushik

The backstory of how America coordinated with some of the world's most powerful nations to tank the dollar

Gina Heeb

Alphabet's Eric Schmidt: 'Big data is so powerful, nation states will fight' over it

Rob Price

Wal-Mart workers bash the retailer and say they feel 'disposable' in a powerful national commercial

Hayley Peterson

Wal-Mart workers bash the retailer and say they feel 'disposable' in a powerful national commercial

Hayley Peterson

The most powerful images from the nation's remembrance of President George HW Bush

The most powerful images from the nation's remembrance of President George HW Bush

John Haltiwanger

The Most Interesting Revelations From Frontline's Powerful Expose Of The National Security Agency

Paul Szoldra

JSW Steel gets approval to buy Bhushan Power without risk of prosecution

PTI

Here's how much of the US would need to be covered in wind turbines to power the nation

Leanna Garfield

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