Notes from an article in this week’s Science, which describes recent progress in Europe toward achieving goals for renewable energy use as well as the new Strategic Energy Package. The author, Janez Potoènik, is the European Commissioner for Science and Research:
The strategic energy package sets a target of 20% of Europe's energy coming from renewable sources by 2020. If successful, this would mean that by 2020 the European Union (EU) would use about 13% less energy than today, saving €100 billion and around 780 metric tons of CO2 each year. For this to be realistic, significant strides need to be made, technologically speaking . . .
The Seventh Framework Programme increases the annual funding available to energy research at the European level to €886 million a year, compared to €574 million a year in the previous program. But this is not enough: more combined effort is needed.