A sunny future

October 11, 2007 - 3:58 PM by David Brinn

One of the perks of my job – including having an Israelity logon – is to occasionally bring foreign correspondents to some out of the way place they generally wouldn’t get to.

This week, in collaboration between ISRAEL21c and our friends at the Israel Project and our very special friend Faye Bittker from Ben-Gurion University, a dozen correspondents from some very alphabety American, European and Asian media, took a day off from Gaza, the Knesset, Hizbullah, and the IDF, and bussed it down to Sde Boker.

Why? To see reputedly the world’s largest solar dish, courtesy of Professor David Faiman, Director of the National Solar Energy Center of Ben-Gurion University’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research.

faiman
Prof. David Faiman talks to reporters under his big dish.

Faiman is somewhat of a solar energy guru, and is the main mover in the world of concentrator photovoltaic cells (CPV cells), a new type of solar power cell which jusr might be the future of electricity for you and me.

Faiman’s apparatus, which resembles an enormous satellite dish, rises high above his modest offices in the middle of the Negev desert. Each of the dish’s mirrors can concentrate the sun’s energy by a factor of about 20 before reflecting it up to the solar cells that hang suspended over the apex of the dish. When all 50 of the mirrors used for the project are uncovered (sometimes only one or two are used for testing purposes), the cells are on the receiving end of the light of a thousand suns.

From there, I’m lost. While the reporters surrounded Faiman getting details, I along with Rachel from TIP were delving into the details for lunch at the Beersheva campus of BGU.

At the end of the day, it was an enlightening trip, pun intended. And one that hopefully you’ll be reading, seeing and hearing about on your favorite alphabet media soon.

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