To tackle climate change, new buildings are required to consume as little energy as possible . That’s because, in Europe, buildings are responsible for about 40% of our energy consumption.

Graphene FET Flagship is an ambitious European project focused on the eponymous new wonder material. Graphene, a one-atom thick layer of carbon, is light, transparent and strong, whose characteristics have yet to be fully discovered.

Energy efficiency has become a key objective in the current context of increasing energy demand, decreasing resources and global warming. Key to efficient energy savings, however, are users' awareness and behaviour.

The building sector has become much greener. To get such credentials it has adopted methods borrowed from other industries, such as life cycle analysis ( LCA ), which looks at the environmental impact of a building at every stage from its creation to its decommissioning.

It was developed under the €2.88 million EU funded Digital Environment Home Energy Management System ( DEHEMS ) project. A number of plug-in home energy monitoring meters are already available on the market.

Reducing the energy requirements of buildings is an absolute priority in Europe. The energy demonstration project SARA has developed several public-access eco-buildings in France, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, UK and Uzbekistan.

“ At the end of last year, we were so overwhelmed that we had to start rejecting new membership demands .” Dirk Vansintjan is a board member of EcoPower , a Belgian renewable energy cooperative, founded in 1991.

With buyers facing unusually long delays between ordering and receiving new cars, car manufacturers are pivoting to make key components, including semiconductor chips and lithium-ion batteries .

The global transition from an economy underpinned by fossil fuels to an economy powered by renewable energy is well underway. The pace of that transition, however, has come under scrutiny – especially at the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Francesco is an Italian lawyer. He lives in Rome and is now about to move into a new apartment. “It’s a way to get closer to my office,” he says. “I don’t have a car, I just ride bicycle.

María Regidor co-owns a mini-hydro power plant in Spain, which produces part of the electricity provided to the residents of the Castile and León region.

Energy demand is growing across many countries in the world as populations increase and people get richer. In fact, global energy consumption has risen nearly every year for more than half a century.

Buildings and the construction sector are responsible for over one-third of global final energy consumption and nearly 40% of total direct and indirect CO 2 emissions .

Sales of battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) are increasing as consumers and automakers alike benefit from European government subsidies for electric vehicles.