The European Commission has asked airlines to report on "the amount of biomass" they use so that biofuels can be accounted as "zero emission" in the greenhouse gas emissions reports they are requested to produce each year under the EU's carbon scheme for the aviation sector.
EU plans to move towards a low-carbon economy depend upon a transformed cross-border transmissions system that can integrate renewables and smart meters alike, offering energy consumption savings at source. But is Europe on track to meet the challenge?
Arthouros Zervos, president of the European Wind Energy Association, shares his perspective on how to improve Europe's ageing power grid networks so that they can integrate the large amounts of renewable energies needed to meet the EU's 2020 targets.
The advent of cloud computing technology gives the opportunity to further strengthen the EU single market, but to capture its potential countries' laws must be sufficiently harmonised to let data flow easily across borders, writes Robert Holleyman, president and chief executive of the Business Software Alliance.
This study by the Institute for Prospective Technological
Studies (part of the Joint Research Centre - European
Commission) explores (qualitatively) and assesses
(quantitatively) the way that ICTs will influence
environmental sustainability between now and 2020. It
concludes that ICTs can reinforce positive effects on the
environment or, on the contrary, worsen the situation.
Editors
: Carlos Rodríguez Casal, Christine Van
Wunnik, Luis Delgado Sancho, Jean Claude
Burgelman and Paul Desruelle
Authors
: Lorenz Erdmann (IZT), Lorenz Hilty
(EMPA/FHSO), James Goodman (Forum for the
Future), Peter Arnfalk (IIIEE)