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Which energy blogs are making a difference?

jcwinnie's After Gutenberg offers thought leadership on energy technology. It provides technical insights on energy technology, with an emphasis on transport - primarily electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. Posts are in-depth and high quality. Considering this, jc's posting frequency is impressive. A must for those following this fast evolving field.

The Energy Blog by Jim Fraser is now running for over 2 years. Jim is a blogger with a mission on alternative energy and changing lifestyle, posting typically a few times per day.

Metaefficient is approaching its 4th birtday. Posts are at least every weekday, and tend to be short and to the point, breaking news on green products and projects. Metaefficient provides a one-stop information source on information not easily found elsewhere.

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Since the European Council meeting last week, we now have a 20% target by 2020, or actually 3 targets: 20% reduction in greenhouse gasses, 20% primary energy savings against baseline and a binding 20% target for renewables for the EU. However, it's the member states, not the EU who will build this renewable capacity. The 20% renewable target is a grand aggregate of national targets, using various technologies, none of which have been defined except for the clause that national targets can be differentiated.

In the energy sector, we have prior experience with the EU Council adopting a binding target for its member states as a group through the burden-sharing agreement in the Kyoto protocol. According to the European Environmental Agency in its report on Greenhouse Gas Emission Trends, the EU is actually set on a course to meet its 8% Kyoto target by 2010, but if we look at the numbers, the EU-15 will have reduced its emissions by 4.6%, with a further 0.8% coming from sinks and 2.6% from acquiring emission reductions outside the EU, primarily through the Clean Development Mechanism. The fact that one can meet an 8% binding reduction target by an actual reduction of 4.6% demonstrates the flexibility offered by aggregate targets.

Filling up at the gas station will cost around 50 €, and loads about 450 kWh of energy into the tank. A combustion engine will convert this energy into approximately 100 kWh of mechanical energy, to be used for propulsion, on-board electronics and airconditioning. Consuming this amount of fuel emits over 150 kg of CO2.

But now, electric vehicles are entering the market with battery charges of 25 - 30 kWh. This is still about a quarter of what a combustion vehicle has available. But the performance of electric vehicles can become similar or even better, bridging the gap through regenerative braking, the different torque-speed characteristic of the electic motor, and its very high efficiency to convert electric into mechanical power. And 30 kWh of electricity requires only 75 kWh of primary energy, and emits only 15 kg of CO2. This is a factor 6 improvement in primary energy use, and even a factor 10 in CO2 emissions. At night tariff, 30 kWh of electricity will come at about 2 euro.

Energy comes in many different forms - kinetic, thermal, chemical, magnetic, electric. From the humble electron-volt (eV) used to describe nuclear processes, to the tera-watt-hour (TWh) output from nuclear power stations, we count 34 orders of magnitude. Oil experts like to think of energy in terms of tonnes of oil equivalent (toe), coal experts in tonnes of coal equivalent (tce) and power engineers swear by the kilo-Watt-hour (kWh) and its multiples MWh - GWh - TWh. All these units are measures of energy, and can be expressed in the SI unit of energy, the Joule. Many of the units on this page, while commonly used, are not part of the International System of Units (SI).

A recent report from the European Environmental agency discusses the impact of household consumption on the environment. Households make final choices on goods and services they consume, and drive a production chain. Although the impact of an individual household is relatively small, Europe's 200 million households are a major contributor to problems such as climate change, air pollution, water pollution, land use and waste.