Households and small businesses using independent power systems, or microgrids, still find it hard to cope without their national electricity grids.

When Justin Bieber made his way to Stockholm in September 2016, city officials hardly expected the tween heartthrob to pave the way for sustainable urban policy .

Exascale supercomputing refers to super fast computers to be implemented between 2018 and 2020 to analyse massive volumes of data. The downside: they consume vast amounts of energy.

More than the 70 percent of the protein sources required by animals bred in the European Union are imported from non-EU countries . Soybean dominates the protein supply for animal feed .

Over the last few decades the energy landscape has been changing drastically in Europe. An increasing amount of electricity is now generated from renewable sources, such as solar and wind energy.

The 43-story Strata tower in London was one of the first buildings in the world to incorporate wind turbines into its structure. It has three small turbines – each with a rated capacity of 19 kilowatt hours – built into its roof.

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

In the wake of the Brussels bombings, the French blogger Francis Pisani addressed the quandaries of modern, connected European cities facing terrorist threats .

The European construction industry and home-builder citizens are increasingly aware of sustainable choices. Some solutions can be more expensive than others, although sometimes this only concerns the construction phase.

All too often, conversations on renewable energy meander toward the same end: green technology is a nice thing, though it has to become economically viable before widespread adoption becomes the norm. ...

Traditionally our electricity grids were designed to move power from large nuclear and fossil fuel power plants to consumers, but renewable energy will see changes to allow smaller power generation from wind and solar to be hooked up to the grid.

Cooling and heating public buildings remains an expensive and a mostly unresolved issue in Europe. According to the not-for-profit think-tank Buildings Performance Institute Europe , Spain has about 11.

In Europe, households are responsible for 32% of greenhouse gas emissions and 42% of energy. Cement production alone contributes to 5% of manmade CO 2 emissions .

There is nothing like the real world to reveal a project’s true worth. This is why a project called BRICKER will test its mettle out by retrofitting public buildings situated in three different countries in three different climatic zones .

Transforming districts into near-zero energy consumption urban areas could be a reality in the next few decades.

The quest towards low energy consumption in city districts requires many changes not only at building level, but also at district level.

Energy consumption in the non-residential sector, such as public and industrial buildings, is typically about 40% higher than in the residential sector.

There is much need to develop energy efficient solutions for residential buildings in Europe. The EU-funded project, MeeFS , due to be completed by the end of 2015, is developing an innovative multifunctional and energy efficient façade system to retrofit residential buildings.

CARTIF III is a new building that forms part of an applied research institute, called the CARTIF Technology Centre, based in Valladolid, Spain. This building is singular.

Innovative solutions are required to improve the energy efficiency of the existing residential building stock in Europe. But combining such innovation with better management and new business models creates unique retrofitting opportunities .