Press release, May 8, 2009

Award for the pioneering promotion of renewable energy sources 

For his long-lasting and worldwide commitment to the dissemination of solar energy, Hermann Scheer, member of the German parliament, president of EUROSOLAR, chair of the World Council for Renewable Energy and recipient of the alternative Nobel Prize, has received the Karl Böer Solar Energy Medal of Merit 2009 this Thursday in Newark, USA.

Hermann Scheer received the award in Gore Recital Hall of the Roselle Center for the Arts at the University of Delaware. In his speech, Hermann Scheer underlined the important benefits resulting from a global and accelerated promotion of renewable energies. „The present phase of the global economy presents us with enormous potentials for an ecologic upswing“, Scheer said. He is, after former US-president Jimmy Carter (1993), the second politician and after the founder of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Solar Energy systems in Freiburg, Germany, Adolf Goetzberger (1997) the second German national to receive this award.



Since 1993, the medal is given every two years in honour of Karl Wolfgang Böer, a long-time University of Delaware faculty member, founder of University of Delaware’s Institute of Energy Conversion and a distinguished scientist in the field of solar cells. With this medal, individuals who have made significant pioneering contributions to the promotion of solar energy as an alternate source of energy are honoured.

Former US-president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter has been the first individual to receive the medal. The recipient of the award is chosen by a panel of commissioners composed of scientists and presidents of several solar energy-related professional societies, a representative of the U.S. Secretary of Energy, the past recipient and a member of the Böer family. 

Contact:
Helmut Lölhöffel,
EUROSOLAR press relations officer
Tel.: 0049-(0)30 24 62 89 24
Mobile: 0049-173 61 60 004

Laudatio by Dr. Wolfgang Palz (WCRE)