Editor Karel Beckman, editor-in-chief,  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!

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


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.