efficiency

After three months of our campaign to turn VW away from the Dark Side, millions of views to our campaign film and over 440,000 Jedi emails and phone calls later, Volkswagen have finally responded to us with a letter.

Back in 2007 when the European Commission was trying to agree a law that would force car makers to produce less-polluting cars, I saw first hand how car manufacturers tried every trick in the book to stop it being passed.

This combined heat and power plant in Denmark is up to 95 per cent efficient

To celebrate our launch of EfficienCity, we're starting a new, weekly column for all the closet energy geeks out there. Every week, we'll take an in-depth look at one of the technologies we feature in EfficienCity - tidal power, wave power, wind energy, combined heat and power, micro-hydro power, anaerobic digestion, biomass and the rest. We'll also be looking at issues like baseload and the regulatory context for decentralised energy.

So remember to check back each Wednesday and, if you have any suggestions for energy solutions to climate change you'd like to see us cover, just post a comment at the bottom of this page and we'll try to slot it in.

John Sauven, our executive director,writing in The Guardian on why Gordon Brown's reluctance to embrace the economic and environmental potential of renewable energy technology is costing us time, money and could eventually cost us the climate.

At the centre of Britain's efforts to tackle climate change are targets for renewable energy, energy efficiency and ultra-efficient combined heat and power (CHP) plants.

Yet as warnings about the impact of global warming grow more severe, every single one of those targets is projected to be missed or has already been abandoned.

If you like our film, please help us to make sure that the UK gets a genuinely clean and efficient energy system.