Europeans take climate change seriously, as today’s Eurobarometer survey results show. Nearly nine in ten of us think it is a serious problem.
One of the major causes of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions. The EU has pledged to reduce its emissions by 80-95% by 2050. To get there, we will need a zero carbon power sector by 2050 – that means emissions-free electricity.

Europe, Asia and North America will remain the global leaders in wind power development for the foreseeable future, a panel session at the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) conference was told on Thursday in Vancouver.

CanWEA President Robert Hornung, in his capacity as a board member of the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), added that the wind power sector in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and Australia and New Zealand should also show remarkably rapid growth in coming years.

Canada’s wind energy sector has recently become a national success story and the next five years should see continual rapid growth in the industry, the president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) said Wednesday in Vancouver.

But Robert Hornung also told people attending CanWEA’s annual conference that there is significant political uncertainty about the long-term prospects for Canada’s wind market beyond 2016.

Connecting Ireland to France, the UK to Belgium and Germany to Sweden – passing via offshore farms and hub connections – there could be a new network of under-sea electricity cables bringing electricity from where it is created out at sea to where it is consumed.

And new research published today has found that such an interconnected grid could be cheaper than originally expected – an offshore electricity grid in the North and Baltic seas, as opposed to cables that connect individual offshore wind farms to the shore, could in fact result in a €14 billion reduction in investment costs.

The European Union’s energy import bill last year totalled a massive €355.15 billion – that’s slightly more than the annual wealth of Poland in 2010 (GDP was around €341 billion). Take that amount and share it between the EU’s 503 million citizens and it comes to €706.8 a year.

Divide it again per working day and you get €2.70 – in other words every single working day of the year EU citizens are paying €2.70 on fossil fuel imports – the equivalent to an expensive cup of coffee every day.