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 70 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, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 26 March 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, NPR, 22 October 2007. and its solar companies work on projects around the world.Looking to the sun, Tom Parry, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 15 August 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 in 2011 was to produce 10% of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2020, and officials from Cabinet and The Electricity Authority gave the goal in 2023 to produce 30% of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2030.
History and development
In 1949, the 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, The Jerusalem Post, 1 October 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, 2 November 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.Infrared Technology Fundamentals, by Monroe Schlessinger, Irving J. Spiro; CRC Press, 1995, ; reference is at page 68
Tabor and French immigrant Lucien Bronicki developed a small solar power unit, the Organic Rankine cycle turbine, for use by 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.
Citing lack of land for ground solar PV parks, Israel mandated in 2023 that all newly constructed commercial buildings install rooftop photovoltaic solar panels.
+Photovoltaics cumulative capacity (MW)International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power System Programme20042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120220.91.01.31.83.024.569.9190237481731780905.6100514501916224836564750
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, at Ein Bokek, near the southern part of the Dead Sea in Israel.
The plant used 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 until 1988. It had an area of 210,000 m2 and produced an electrical output of 5 MW.Carl Nielson, Aliakbar Akbarzedeh, John Andrews, Humberto R Becerra L and Peter Golding, 'The History of Solar Pond Science & Technology', Proceedings of the International Solar Energy Society, 2005.
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 pm. 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 oilfields 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).The Samuel Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology — Publications — Solar energy for the production of heat Summary and recommendations of the 4th assembly of the energy forum at SNI
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 2 June 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 seven years, whichever is reached first, with a maximum of 15 kWp installation for residential and a maximum of 50 kWp for commercial.Approved — Feed-in tariff in Israel 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 had been 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 at GTEP to advance the science behind solar power.
Nano science and solar energy
GTEP is working in 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 that are cheaper, unbreakable, flexible, better-looking, 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 to create a home solar energy system that uses a 10-square meter reflector dish.Reflective mirrors seen raising solar potential, Ari Rabinovitch, Reuters, 10 August 2007. In testing, the concentrated solar technology proved to be up to five times more efficient than standard flat photovoltaic silicon panels, which would make it almost as cheap as oil and natural gas. A prototype ready for commercialization achieved a concentration of solar energy that was more than 1,000 times greater than that from standard flat panels. According to Faiman, who led the Israeli team that developed the technology, 10% of Israel's population (1,000 megawatts) could live on the energy from 12 square kilometers of land.Zenith Solar’s Light of a Thousand Suns , Green Prophet, 17 December 2007.
Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research
The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research facility was founded by Amos Richmond in 1974 and is part of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. It has a solar energy research program that has assisted in the development of passive heating, involving the mitigation of extremes of heat and cold in the desert through efficient storage from day to nighttime. One research project is an inhabited adobe house with prisms that transmit heat during the day and can be rotated to allow the heat to discharge at night installed in the room.
There is a double-skin greenhouse that uses copper sulfate solution as a heat screen during the day. The liquid, pumped between the two skins, protects the interior from ultraviolet rays, and collects heat. At night the liquid is recirculated, returning the heat to the greenhouse.
Weizmann Institute Solar Research Facilities Unit