“2024 SolarPACES Lifetime Achievement Award” for Aldo Steinfeld
Aldo Steinfeld, Professor for Renewable Energy Carriers in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, received the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's SolarPACES conference in Rome together with Manuel Romero from the IMDEA Energy Institute in Madrid.
With this award, SolarPACES (Solar Power and Chemical Energy Systems), a cooperation programme of the International Energy Agency (IEA), recognized more than 25 years of pioneering work in the field of concentrated solar energy to produce solar fuels. The research teams of Steinfeld and Romero demonstrated the first solar tower for the thermochemical production of kerosene from water and CO2.
In this process, solar radiation is concentrated by a multitude of sun-tracking parabolic mirrors onto a solar reactor mounted on top of a tower. In this way, high-temperature process heat is supplied to the solar reactor. Solar-driven thermochemical processes can produce carbon-neutral fuels such as green hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels.
Steinfeld is Full Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich. Two successful spin-offs emerged from his research: Climeworks commercializes the technology for the direct capture of CO2 from the air, and Synhelion commercializes the technology for solar fuel production.
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