Technoport Awards 2012 – Hydro Green Aluminium Award

By Svein Richard Brandtzæg
April 17, 2012

The Hydro Green Aluminium Award was established to inspire innovation that improves the climate footprint of aluminium.

Although it requires lots of energy to produce aluminium, and CO2 is an inherent part of the production process, aluminium is a part of the solution to climate change:

• Aluminium makes cars lighter, using less fuel and emitting less CO2.
• In buildings, smart aluminium solutions reduce energy waste for heating and cooling.
• In packaging aluminium can increase shelf life of food and drinks, reducing waste and CO2 – and lighter packaging reduce CO2 in transportation.
• And the best part: aluminium can be endlessly recycled, and turned into new products over and over again, using only a fraction of the initial energy needed to make aluminium. 75% of all aluminium ever produced in the world is still in use today, making aluminium not an “energy waster”, but an energy bank.

If business and industry are to contribute to a world economy that can secure more welfare to more people and at the same time emit far less greenhouse gases – we all have to invent new, green solutions, and we need to reduce the climate footprint in our own production.

The winners of this year’s Hydro Green Aluminium Award have helped us make one important step forward in our mission to combat the world’s waste of energy, by turning specialist knowledge into real change in real life.

Leading to the first commercial application of the 1987 Nobel Prize winning discovery of high‐temperature superconductors, today’s winners have invented new technology for preheating aluminium billets in the step before they are turned into extruded profiles. The new technology halves the energy consumption – and at the same time both improves quality and productivity.

Dear friends, the jury has decided that – for their groundbreaking work on the “Energy-saving superconducting aluminium billet induction heater” – the winners of this year’s Hydro Green Aluminium Award are:

Dr. Niklas Magnusson, SINTEF, and Prof. Magne Runde, SINTEF/NTNU.

Please give them a warm hand!