Carbon capture and storage remains a nascent technology: no one has yet proved that an integrated process can work on a commercial scale. But the US, Canada, Australia, the European Union and others have pledged billions of dollars to back demonstration projects. This suggests commercial deployment could be possible around 2020.

Even so, any transition to carbon-free generation will take decades. Low-carbon technologies are generally more expensive than fossil-fuel plants: some, such as offshore wind, are a lot more expensive. And with wind, power generation will not be constantly available. Britain, which is backing Europe's fastest expansion of wind power, is building into its plans for 2030 a huge margin of spare generation capacity which can be used when there is no wind.

Nine European countries have today signed a major agreement to develop the
world's first large-scale offshore wind energy grid in the North and Irish
seas, providing a boost to the continent's fast-expanding offshore wind
industry.

UK energy minister Lord Hunt joined with ministers from Germany, France,
Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland to sign the
agreement on the sidelines of today's European Council meeting in Brussels.

Mr Sharrock says bonded internet connections are not yet available anywhere, but are "right on the edge" of becoming commercial.

Customers would need a special broadband modem, capable of splitting and integrating transmissions over two lines.

"The future is fibre," he says, but techniques to squeeze more out of copper lines would help the quarter of households that won't benefit from the Government's $1.5 billion ultrafast broadband initiative.

Three types of risk

The expert group put together by the Commission has already identified three types of risks:

• 
  Import risk, where raw materials are imported from a politically instable region or from a country where the market economy does not work. "That is relatively easy to do as the World Bank has put together governance indexes which measure the political and economic stability index of countries," the EU official explained.   
• 
  Production risk within the EU, with potential problems such as land access. "If we are in a country for example where the population density is very high, where urbanisation is very high, obviously access will be weak," the EU official explained.
• 
  Environmental risk, based on indicators such as air or soil pollution, where the impact of raw materials use is measured from an environmental point of view. "This is innovative compared to other studies," the EU official said. "We have just launched a life-cycle analysis to determine what the environmental impact is for each raw material in terms of exploitation, use, treatment, recycling etc., for air or soil pollution as well as emissions of greenhouse gases."