Two years of EER online

And the winner is ... Dutch windmills

Editor Karel Beckman looks back on the second year of EER's online existence. For EER, the news has been overwhelmingly positive: the number of subscribers and visitors has continued to grow. He also reveals what was EER's best-read story of 2011. Rather surprisingly, it was a story about Dutch windmills!

Best read this year: 'The Dutch lose faith in windmills' by Karel Beckman and Alexander Haje
In our second year of online operations, EER has continued to show steady growth on all levels. The number of registered subscribers grew from 28,550 to 34,500. The number of absolute unique visitors increased from over 70,000 in 2010 to 110,000 in 2011. The number of unique page views went up from 310,000 in 2010 to over 700,00 this year. We now have had over 1 million unique pageviews since we started two years ago.

The top-10 countries that our visitors came from showed only small changes. The list for 2011 is as follows (with last years position between brackets):

1. UK (2)
2. Netherlands (1)
3. US (4)
4. Belgium (3)
5. Germany (5)
6. France (6)
7. Italy (7)
8. Norway (-)
9. Russia (7)
10. Sweden (-)

The top-10 of cities is also fascinating to us anyway. This is as follows:

1. Brussels (1)
2. London (2)
3. Paris (3)
4. Amsterdam (4)
5. Moscow (5)
6. Berlin (10)
7. Groningen (6)
8. The Hague (7)
9. Rome (-)
10. New York (-)

And so what were the most-read articles? Without further ado, here's our top-10 for 2011:

1. Karel Beckman and Alexander Haje, The Dutch Lose Faith in Windmills
2. Matthew Hulbert, The Ten Inconvenient Truths that Shape our New Energy World Order
3. Hugh Sharman, The Coming UK Energy Meltdown
4. Jan Willem Nienhuys, The Risks of Radiation
5. Ekke Overbeek, Shale Gas Doesn't Make Poland the New Norway Yet
6. Michael Klare, The Global Energy Crisis Deepens
7. Stefan Nicola, German Shale Gas Faces Uphill Battle
8. Marcel Vitor, Nuclear or Gas?
9. Rudolf ten Hoedt, Gazprom: Back in the Game and Ready to Take on Brussels
10. Karel Beckman, Our Unpredictable Bright Energy Future

Second best: 'The Ten Inconvenient Truths that Shape our New Energy World Order' by Matthew Hulbert
Frankly, I don't really know what to make of this list! We have had a lot of important stories from Brussels, for example, that I thought would end up higher in the list. Fortunately, these were well read too, but I suspect that readers in the end prefer "market stuff" to "policy stuff".

I would have liked to give you a list of my personal favourites of the last year too, but I won't do so, because I am afraid of forgetting people. So I will just single out one article. We published a number of in-depth stories on the pros and cons of CCS (carbon capture and storage), but I have to admit that the one I liked best was by Robin Mills, which was "in defence of" CCS. The reason I liked it is that even though I personally was quite skeptical of CCS, Robin managed at least to convince me that there is a case to be made for it. You can check out this story here.

My personal high point of the year was the Award EER won for "Excellence in Written Journalism on topics relating to international energy economics". This Award is given out annually by the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) and was handed to us in Stockholm in June. Thanks, IAEE for this memorable event. I see it as a compliment to all the contributors to our website of the past year.