Harvesting rays, finally

September 10, 2008 - 8:06 AM by

The Tenne solar power stationIt’s hard to believe, but the private solar power station that Moshe Tenne recently activated on his Negev farm is actually the country’s first. Israel Electric (IEC), the state-run monopoly utility, has been both praised (for its international business savvy) and criticized (for its wasteful ways) in the press lately, but its innovative new program to offer compensation to private do-gooders who feed power back into the grid seems to be working.

The Tenne family established its farm three years ago, and makes its living from a sophisticated dairy barn with 70 cows producing about 800,000 liters of milk a year.

Tenne’s power plant has thin-film solar panels made by Sharp on 600 square meters of the cowshed’s roof. He also installed another array of multicrystal silicon solar cells, a different technology. These are mounted on systems that track the sun during the day and are spread out over about a dunam of his farmland, about a quarter acre. The arrays were installed by the company Solar-Power. Tenne paid for the new power generating system with loans and out of his own funds.

The customers will settle accounts with the IEC by offsetting the power they sell back to the electric company each month against the rest of the electric bill, based on the readings of new electric meters. The system is already powering the farm, and will be hooked up to the national grid in another two weeks.

Tenne reportedly spent NIS 1.3 million on building the power plant, which he estimates will pay for itself in electric bill savings within six years. He’s already hard at work installing wind turbines as well.

But the strange part of this story is that despite Israel’s reputations for technological innovation, sunny weather and apprehensions when it comes to energy, it took until the summer of 2008 for IEC’s incentive program to pave the way for projects like these. (Although to be fair, a private Jerusalem firm called Luz has overseen the construction of nine California solar power plants.)

The country has been working on plans for non-grassroots solar power farms for at least five years, and one such proposal could mean the launch of the biggest plant of its kind in the world. Prof. David Faiman, director of Ben-Gurion University’s National Solar Energy Center in Sde Boker, estimated in 2003 that solar energy plants in the Negev could potentially produce all the country’s power on just 225 square kilometers of land, so it will certainly be interesting to see where this trend takes us.

Tags: , , , , • Category: A New Reality, Business, Environment, General, Technology 

Comments

One Comment on Harvesting rays, finally

  1. Maskil on Wed, Sep 17th 2008 8:10 PM

    2. Rather than invest in giant solar farms, the Israeli authorities should encourage initiatives such as this, i.e. each building, campus or household using its roof surface in order to generate electricity for its own needs and draw any shortfall from (or feed any surplus into) the national electricity grid.

    The idea of giant, centralized solar energy “farms” (what an abuse of that word) is part of the old paradigm that has given us Global Warming. Not only are these solar farms a waste of valuable open space (a scare resource for Israel), but they also represent a “single point of failure” for the grid.

    A similar philosophy should be applied to wind turbine energy. Decentralise and network.

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