After an intense period of deliberation, the Zayed Future Energy Prize (ZFEP) selection committee has selected its six finalists. In 2010 – the prize’s third and biggest year yet – there were 391 submissions, 30% more than the previous year. Having been subjected to a rigorous assessment process and external analysis, each was passed to the prize’s review committee.

The prize for the overall winner is $1.5m (€1.1m), with up to two runners- up potentially receiving $350,000 each. However all the finalists will benefit from such a prestigious endorsement, especially in the wake of the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, which underscored the need for initiatives, technologies and leadership that can really make a difference.

As the chairperson of the review committee, Dr Sgouris Sgouridis, says: “There are many very strong candidates but ultimately the prize will go to the one that has made the greatest contribution to innovation, long-term vision and leadership in renewable energy and sustainability.”

The final decision now rests with the judging panel, overseen by Professor Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel includes such luminaries as Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson (President of Iceland), Khaled Irani (Jordan's minister of energy and mineral resources), Lord Foster (founder and chairman of Foster & Partners), Lord Browne (managing director of Riverside Holdings), Ahmed Ali Al Sayegh, (chairman of Masdar, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company), and Susan Hockfield (president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The six finalists – one of whom will be proclaimed the winner at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi on 18 January – are:

VESTAS
Wind turbine giant Vestas has made good on its aspirational maxim “wind, oil, gas” over the past 30 years, pushing its technology into the mainstream and relentlessly pitching it as a viable large- scale, sustainable energy resource. Today more than 41,000 Vestas turbines in 65 countries generate 60 million megawatt- hours (MWh) per year. In 2009 alone, the turbines it produced and shipped will save 163 million tonnes of CO2 – enough, it claims, to more than offset the United Arab Emirates’ 2006 CO2 emissions. Vestas does not rest on its laurels, though, and is constantly looking to break new ground. The new V112-3.0MW is a point in case, cost- effectively unlocking previously inaccessible wind resources by effi ciently tapping into low and medium wind-speed sites.

BAREFOOT COLLEGE
Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College in Rajasthan, India, has taken grassroots action to new levels by training more than three million oppressed, impoverished and neglected people for modern-day jobs – from teaching and midwifery to architecture and medicine. For the purposes of the ZFEP, the Barefoot College has been recognised for its astonishing track record in training solar engineers. Since 1990, without using the written or spoken word, thousands of semi- literate rural women from 28 of the least developed countries in the world have brought their new-found skills back to their villages, preventing 4.6 million litres of kerosene from entering the atmosphere.

E+CO
Since 1994, E+Co has operated as a clean-energy enabler extraordinaire in the developing world by nurturing a band of entrepreneurs who have brought clean energy to more than 6.2 million people, created 5,300 jobs and offset 4.6 million tons of carbon emissions.

E+Co is about ripple effects: a cook-stove distributor creates jobs and incentivises the next level of entrepreneurship by engaging a network of ‘evangelists’ who promote his products and receive a percentage of every cook-stove sold. Increased sales reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, improve local economies by putting money in people’s pockets and decrease harmful airborne pollution that especially impact women and children.

To date, E+Co has made 268 investments totalling $40m (€30m) in more than 20 countries, with an 8.7% portfolio return (after write-offs and before costs), and mobilised an additional $213m (€160m).

Terry Tamminen

Few people tell the Terminator what to do, but Terry Tamminen is that rare political animal – someone with genuine vision and the guts to follow through. As secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and later as cabinet secretary, Tamminen was the unsung hero of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate-change action. His influence is there in achievements such as securing 3,000MW of solar, 33% of energy from renewables, hydrogen fuel stations and hundreds of vehicles, and $150m per year to incentivise truck fleets to convert to clean alternative engines.
Since 2007 he has run a non-profit organisation, Seventh Generation Advisors, focused on creating solutions for global businesses such as Pegasus Sustainable Century Merchant Bank, Wal-Mart and NetJets. His team is also heavily involved in the R20 Regions of Climate Change Action, an alliance of 70 regional governments, 20 countries and the UN.

Amory Lovins

A doyen of the American environmentalist movement and founder of the independent, entrepreneurial, public-benefit think-and- do tank the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Amory Lovins has contributed more than most to our low-carbon enlightenment.

Widely considered one of the world’s leading authorities and innovators in energy efficiency, his most enduring work centres on game-changing super-effi cient integrative design. “From four decades’ practical efforts to use energy radically more efficiently in buildings, vehicles and factories, I have synthesised an ‘integrative design’ methodology that makes energy savings much larger (even tenfold or more), yet often cheaper than small savings,” he explains. “This breakthrough changes diminishing returns into expanding returns to investments in energy effi ciency. The method applies accepted engineering principles, but asks diff erent design questions in a diff erent order.”

FIRST SOLAR

In 2008 the aptly named First Solar became the first photovoltaic (PV) company to break the $1 watt barrier (today its modules are produced at $0.76 per watt). It also became the first company to achieve an annual manufacturing capacity of more than 1GW: to date, First Solar has produced more than 26 million solar modules with the peak capacity of over 2GW of clean solar energy.

Then it introduced the industry’s first recycling technology for cadmium telluride thin-film PV modules and established a pre-funded programme for the collection and recycling of its modules.

It also became the first pure PV producer to join the Desertec industrial initiative – a hugely ambitious proposal for a renewable energy network spanning the Middle East, northern Africa and Europe (see page 56) – and built the world’s largest operating PV facility (Sarnia, an 80MW facility in Ontario).