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078 SUSTAINABLE ENERGYlead, and Europe will move steadily towards its 2020 targets, although there may be some bumps in the road. In North America, both Canada and the US seems poised for another round of growth, and as Mexico’s energy reform gets bedded down we should be looking at a period of rapid development in that newly liberalized energy market.In Latin America, Brazil will continue to lead, although Chile, Peru, Uruguay and now Argentina will make a contribution. In Africa and the Middle East, besides market leader South Africa, both Morocco and Egypt seem poised for solid growth in the next five years, and smaller markets in Kenya, Ethiopia and elsewhere are moving.In non-China Asia, India is the main story, which has now surpassed Spain to move into the fourth place in the global cumulative installations ranking, and had the fifth largest market last year. Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia and now Indonesia are all ripe for market growth. All told, wind capacity should nearly double in the next five years.Other than climate, two other major trends are having a major positive impact on the wind business:Cratering prices: while very low wind prices have characterized the US market for some time, and the Brazilian and South African tendering systems have also generated low prices for the last several years, we have recently seen a spate of tender results in Egypt, Morocco, Peru and elsewhere with what up until now were unheard of prices outside the US plains states – in the vicinity of 40/MWh or below, and in the case of Morocco, below 30/MWh. Is this the new normal? Time will tell, but it is clear that the costs of both wind and solar technology have fallen dramatically in recent years, and new and complex financing structures are creating the conditions for renewables to be competitive in an increasing number of markets. Of course, some of this is explained by the excellent wind resources in some of these locations, but the downward pressure on prices will continue, and not just in new markets. China is lowering its feed-in tariff for wind this year, and will do so again in 2018.US Market Stability: The United States, as a pioneer in the global wind industry as well as having some of the best wind resources in the world, has had much lower prices than most of its OECD competitors for some time, but the difficulty was always the on-again, off-again Photo Credit: © Stiftung OFFSHORE WINDENERGIE