Solar power in Israel

The use of solar energy began in Israel in the 1950s with the development by Levi Yissar of a solar water heater to address the energy shortages that plagued the new country.Petrotyranny by John C. Bacher, David Suzuki, published by Dundurn Press Ltd., 2000; Page 7

/ref> By 1967 around 5% of water of households were solar heated and 50,000 solar heaters had been sold.
With the 1970s oil crisis, Harry Zvi Tabor developed the prototype of the solar water heater now used in over 90% of Israeli homes.At the Zenith of Solar Energy
Neal Sandler, ''BusinessWeek'', March 26, 2008. There are over 1.3 million solar water heaters installed as a result of mandatory solar water heating regulations.

Israeli engineers have been at the cutting edge of solar energy technologyIsrael Pushes Solar Energy Technology
Linda Gradstein, ''National Public Radio'', October 22, 2007. and its solar companies work on projects around the world.Looking to the sun
Tom Parry, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, August 15, 2007.
However, even though Israeli engineers have been involved in both photovoltaic and concentrated solar power, the earliest Israeli companies which have become market leaders in their respective fields have all been involved in concentrated solar power.
Some notable examples of this are BrightSource, Solel and Brenmiller Energy which all deal with utility scale projects. Additionally, Herzliya based SolarEdge has become a market leader in inverters for non-utility scale photovoltaic solar power.

In 2009, Israel found natural gas reserves within their exclusive economic zone which may reduce urgency of solar development. Solar technology in Israel has advanced to the point where it is almost cost-competitive with fossil fuels. The high annual incidence of sunshine in the Negev Desert has spurred an internationally renowned solar research and development industry.Solar Energy in Israel
David Faiman for the Jewish Virtual Library. At the end of 2008, a feed-in tariff scheme was approved which has led to many residential and commercial solar energy power station projects.

Israel's objective is to produce 10% of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2020, and a recent cabinet decision gave the objective to reach 30% of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2030.

History and development

In 1949, prime minister David Ben-Gurion offered Harry Zvi Tabor a job on the 'physics and engineering desk' of the Research Council of Israel, which he accepted. He created an Israeli national laboratory and created standards amongst the different measurements in use in the country, primarily British, Ottoman and metric.Bright ideas
Ehud Zion Waldoks, '' Jerusalem Post'', October 1, 2008.Harry Zvi Tabor
Cleveland Cutler, Encyclopedia of the Earth, 2007. Once the laboratory was established, he focused on solar energy for research and development.

Solar energy was particularly attractive because of the abundance and strength in Israel of the sun's rays and Israel's geographic latitude location is on the 30th parallel north, where the annual incident solar irradiance is 2000 kWh per m². Second, Israel lacks oil, and the conflicts with its neighbors made the procurement of a stable source of energy a national priority. In particular, it is argued that the best defense against missile attack felling the national power grid would be to build a distributed power network, which would mean solar fields of 25–50 megawatts across Israel.The solar vote
Yosef I. Abramowitz and David Lehreer, '' Haaretz'', November 2, 2008.

Early in the 1950s, Tabor began to examine why solar installations were inefficient. He eventually devised ‘selective black surfaces’, which his team at the National Physical Laboratory modified using nickel and chrome methods to blacken metals. These surfaces, which became known as Tabor surfaces, are particularly effective at trapping heat for use in solar water heaters.

Tabor and French immigrant Lucien Bronicki developed a small solar power unit, the Organic Rankine cycle turbine, for developing countries with problematic power grids.Israeli Section of the International Solar Energy Society
, edited by Gershon Grossman, Faculty of Mechanical Energy, Technion, Haifa; Final draft. It was designed to neutralize the maintenance issues of reciprocating engines so it had only one moving part, the rotor. A 3 kWe prototype was exhibited at the 1961 United Nations Conference on New Sources of Energy in Rome, but it failed to find commercial success.

Dead Sea Solar pond

In 1965, Lucien Bronicki established Ormat Industries to commercialize the Organic Rankine cycle turbine concept. In the 1970s and 1980s Ormat built and operated one of the world's first power stations to produce electricity from solar energy; the plant was located at Ein Bokek near the southern part of the Dead Sea in Israel.

The plant utilised a technology known as the solar pond, a large-scale solar thermal energy collector with integral heat storage for supplying thermal energy. It was the largest operating solar pond ever built for electricity generation and operated up until 1988. It had an area of 210,000 m² and gave an electrical output of 5 MW.

Solar water heaters

During the period of austerity in Israel in the 1950s, there was a fuel shortage, and the government forbade heating water between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. As the situation worsened, engineer Levi Yissar proposed that instead of the construction of more electrical generation plants, homes should switch to solar water heaters. He built a prototype in his home, and in 1953 he started NerYah Company, Israel's first commercial manufacturer of solar water heaters. By 1967 around one in twenty households heated its water with the sun and 50,000 solar heaters had been sold. However, cheap oil from Iran and from oil fields captured in the Six-Day War made Israeli electricity cheaper and the demand for solar heaters dropped. After the energy crisis in the 1970s, in 1980 the Israeli Knesset passed a law requiring the installation of solar water heaters in all new homes (except high towers with insufficient roof area). As a result, Israel was in 2007 the world leader in the use of solar energy ''per capita'' (3% of the primary national energy consumption).

As of the early 1990s, all new residential buildings were required by the government to install solar water-heating systems, and Israel's National Infrastructure Ministry estimates that solar panels for water-heating satisfy 4% of the country's total energy demand. Israel and Cyprus are the per-capita leaders in the use of solar hot water systems with over 90% of homes using them. The Ministry of National Infrastructures estimates solar water heating saves Israel of oil a year.

Feed-in tariff

On June 2, 2008, the Israeli Public Utility Authority approved a feed-in tariff for solar plants. The tariff is limited to a total installation of 50 MW during 7 years, whichever is reached first, with a maximum of 15 kWp installation for residential and a maximum of 50kWp for commercial. The National Infrastructures Ministry announced in December 2009 on expanding the feed-in tariff scheme to include medium-sized solar-power stations ranging from 50 kilowatts to 5 megawatts, though only one project was approved by June 2010.

Educational and research facilities

The Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP)

Multidisciplinary scientists at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology are pooling resources a
GTEP
to advance the science behind solar power.

Nano science and solar energy

With its strong basis in nanotechnology and science, GTEP is pioneering the field of nano-energy.
*Efrat Lifshitz discovered that nano-sized materials consisting of nanocrystal quantum dots can absorb sunlight not only in the visible range, as materials currently used in solar panels do, but also in the infrared and UV ranges. This makes them ideal in photovoltaic cells used to turn sunlight into electricity, promising much more efficient solar power.
*Nir Tessler leads a group on organic photovoltaic material.
*Gitti Frey specializes in organic electronics - plastic electronics that are functional electronically and optically. They emit light and can transmit electrical signals, or absorb light and generate energy such as electricity. Frey introduces whole new properties in this field, creating effective and useful self-organizing structures on the nano-scale. Frey is working on a solar cell to convert sunlight into electrical energy. She predicts this research will lead to solar-power systems which are cheaper, unbreakable, flexible, more aesthetic and versatile.

National Solar Energy Center

The National Solar Energy Center was founded in 1987 by the Ministry of National Infrastructures, and is part of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.Ben Gurion National Solar Energy Center
In 2007, David Faiman, the center's director, announced that the center had entered into a project with Zenith Solar