The Global Energy Prize laureates will be announced at a ceremony in Kaluga

The meeting of the International Global Energy Prize Award Committee, which will identify the winners of this year's prize, will be held on September 7. The ceremony of the announcement of the names of the laureates and a press conference will take place in Kaluga on September 8. The laureates will be on a video call during the event.

The location of the event wasn't chosen randomly, Kaluga is the place where the conquest of the space and the peaceful atom has begun.

The ceremony of the announcement of the laureates and press conference will be held at the site of the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky State Space Exploration Museum. It will be attended by the Acting Governor of the Kaluga Region VladislavShapsha and the President of the Global Energy Association Dr Sergey Brilev. The Chairman of the International Award Committee, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rae Kwon Chung will join the event through video chat. It is also expected that Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yanovsky and Chairman of the Global Energy Association Board of Trustees and Vice Chair of the World Energy Council (WEC) Oleg Budargin will participate in the press conference.

This year, the geography of shortlist applications has expanded dramatically, with 78 scientists from 20 countries nominated. In 2019, 39 scientists from 12 countries participated in the nomination cycle of the Global Energy Association.

This year the number of nominations is almost equal: Non-Conventional Energy - 29, Conventional Energy - 27, New Ways of Energy Application - 22.

International experts have shortlisted 15 nominees out of 78 candidates. These are the leading scientists from Australia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, China, Japan and the USA. Five scientists are running for each of the nominations.

The shortlist for the Global Energy Prize 2020 looks like this:

I. Conventional Energy Nomination:

• Richard J. Goldstein (USA) – “Heat power engineering. For major advances in optical measurement systems for fluid velocity and temperature, development of cooling designs widely used in high performance gas turbines, novel and important measurements in thermal convection, and major leadership roles in the engineering community”
• Demin Wang (China) – “Exploration, production, transportation and processing of energy resources. For inventing a set of world-leading layered mining and testing technologies, represented by ‘Songliao method’, ‘eccentric water distribution, production distribution process’ and "current limiting fracturing process"”
• Carlo Rubbia (Italy) – “Nuclear energy. For the general commitment in the field of energy to achieve a better world sustainability”
• Zhao Yang Dong (Australia) – “Electric power industry. For outstanding and sustained contribution in operation, control and cybersecurity of smart grid”
• Jinliang He (China) – “Electric power industry. For fundamental research and development of advanced electric power transmission technologies”

II. Non-Conventional Energy Nomination:

• Peidong Yang (USA) – “Renewable energy. For pioneering semiconductor bio-hybrid systems for artificial photosynthesis”
• Adolf Goetzberger (Germany) – “Renewable energy. For lifetime achievement as a pioneer in renewable energy and founder of the largest European Solar Energy Research Institute”
• Jay Keasling (USA) – “Bioenergetics. For developing a simple and much less expensive microbial-based synthesis to be used in developing countries”
• Piotr Zelenay (USA) – “Fuel cells and hydrogen energy. For pioneering contributions to fundamental research, technology development and commercial production of fuel cell catalysts and devices”
• Masahiro Watanabe (Japan) – “Fuel cells and hydrogen energy. For proposing several novel concepts in bimetallic alloy catalysts, which are now being used in commercialised co-generation systems and fuel cell vehicles”

III. New Ways of Energy Application Nomination:

• Eli Yablonovitch (USA) – “Efficient energy use. For his fundamental contributions in the fields of photovoltaics, semiconductor lasers, and photonics, and their translation in technologies for more efficient solar energy exploitation and telecommunications”
• Nikolaos Hatziargyriou (Greece) – “Efficient energy use. For outstanding and sustained contribution in operation and control of microgrids”
• Xinghuo Yu (Australia) – “Efficient energy use. For outstanding and demonstrated contribution in new ways of energy application in cyber-physical environments”
• Andrew Bruce Holmes (Australia) – “New materials used in modern energy engineering. For leadership in the field of organic electronic materials synthesis and device applications for energy efficient organic and polymer light emitting diodes and thin film solar cells”
• Henrik Lund (Denmark) – “Efficient energy use. For creating the advanced energy system analysis software EnergyPLAN, which is a freeware used worldwide that have form the basis of more than 100 peer reviewed journal papers around the world.”