Offshore wind - 3,500 new turbines by 2020?

Although the PM has taken a few verbal pastings from us over the past few months on key climate issues like airport expansion and new coal-fired power stations, in a new speech today he did much to redeem himself by announcing an ambitious plan to ensure Britain generates 15 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

To be sure, the government has promised as much in the past and failed to deliver, but there seemed to be something different about today's Renewable Energy Strategy Consultation - some meat on the bones which indicated that the plan might just be more than empty rhetoric. The government is consulting on ambitious plans designed to allow the UK to meet its share of an overall EU target to generate 20 per cent of energy (electricity, heat and transport) from renewables within 12 years.

Sweden has the best overall record on a range of environ- mental and social issues

As Euro 2008 kicks off in Austria and Switzerland this week with no British teams involved, a new quick web guide has appeared to help us decide which of the remaining 16 competing nations most deserves our support. Who should I Cheer For sensibly ignores footballing talent and instead ranks each country by ten criteria including spending on health, aid and the military, carbon emissions and renewable energy production.

Figures for the UK are also included in the list for comparative purposes and, guess what, we don't come out too well, particularly on the key climate change factors. The UK has the third highest carbon emissions (10.2 tonnes per person) behind the Netherlands and Germany, and comes joint last in terms of electricity generated from renewables (just 4 per cent).

Another country is well on the way to making the switch as last week Argentina joined the rapidly growing list of nation states getting ready to use only energy efficient light bulbs.

If the Argentinean president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner gets her way, by the end of 2010 mandatory efficiency standards will be introduced which will effectively ban incandescent bulbs. Better yet, she said her decision came as a direct result of the campaign run by our office in Buenos Aires.

And earlier this year, Italy followed Ireland's example to become the second EU country to propose similar efficiency standards and is also expected to remove incandescents from sale in 2010. All these bulb bans are a small but vital step in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, and introducing minimum energy efficiency standards on all electrical equipment has to be the ultimate goal.

Fashion is a fickle beast but now a whole city is going retro (well, not quite but it was too good a pun to waste). The long-awaited plan to retrofit all buildings owned and operated by the Greater London Authority (GLA) with energy-saving systems and technology is finally in motion with contracts awarded to companies which are going to slash the capital's emissions.

While much of the discussion about energy efficiency in buildings has focused on new houses, there are still millions of older buildings that lack proper insulation or top-notch heating systems. No matter how good those eco-towns are, if and when they're built they'll only represent a small proportion of the building stock in the UK. Fortunately, the GLA have a cunning plan.

Tomorrow night is the start of E-day. This isn't a drug fuelled dance party in east London, but a chance to show what we do together, no matter how small, can make a big difference.

E-day, or Energy Saving Day, is an experimental action by an independent organisation that aims to tackle climate change in a "fun, positive, evidence-based and inclusive" manner. It is made up of many familiar groups, businesses and individuals including Christain Aid, City of London, National Trust, National Grid, Tesco, us and, oddly, power companies.
Read more »

Excellent news reaches us from the Philippines where a ban on old-fashioned incandescent bulbs has recently been announced.

Visit EfficienCity, our climate friendly town

If a picture speaks a thousand words, a multimedia-packed, animation-filled interactive town must speak a million. Which is why we've launched EfficienCity - to explain exactly what decentralised energy is and how it works in practice (which can otherwise be a wordy business).