Negev to house world's largest solar power station

June 15, 2003
http://www.israel21c.org 

The world's largest solar power station is being planned in 
the Negev. The station, which would be the first ever built 
in Israel, will be based on technologies developed in 
cooperation with the Ben-Gurion University's National Solar 
Energy Center, part of the Blaustein Institute for Desert 
Research in Sde Boker. 

"Israel is prominent on the world stage for developing solar 
technology, but until now, we haven't really harnessed that 
knowledge for our own needs," Prof. David Faiman, director of 
the Solar Energy Center told ISRAEL21c. 

American environmentalists are excited about the prospect of 
such a project coming into being. 

"There is intense interest in this sort of 'concentrated 
solar' technology in parts of the United States, like our 
desert Southwest, that have similar conditions to the Negev," 
said Seth Kaplan, senior attorney at the Conservation Law 
Foundation, who advocates for development of alternative and 
renewable energy sources. "This project could plot a course 
for those areas to become major sources of clean energy, 
allowing them to play a part in efforts to reduce the 
dangerous emissions from fossil fuel power plants. The U.S. 
is increasingly looking to Israel for hi-tech innovations. 
This project shows that this trend extends to rapidly 
expanding field of alternative energy production." 

The station has been approved in principle by the government, 
and a tentative 1,000 acre site has been selected, but has not 
yet been budgeted. The plant is planned initially to supply 
100 megawatts of power and grow to 500 megawatts, about 
5 percent of the country's current generating capacity. 
When construction is finished in 2012, it should employ some 
100 people. 

The primary obstacle in the use of solar power in Israel 
until now has been price. Producing electricity with solar 
energy now costs 1.5 times more than using coal or 
petrochemicals. This obstacle has proved difficult to 
overcome, even though the current alternatives to solar 
energy pollute the environment and encourage dependence on 
Arab oil. 

"Thus it won't be easy to carry out the project, even though 
the government decided last November that 2% of energy must 
be renewable by 2007, with an additional 1% every three 
years," said Aharon Zohar, an Interior Ministry representative 
on the 20-member committee responsible for organizing the 
project. 

According to Faiman, the world's current two largest solar 
power stations, which were constructed by a now-defunct 
Jerusalem company, Luz, have generating capacities of 80 mw. 
each, enough power to meet the needs of 160,000 people. 

During its few years of existence, Luz constructed nine 
solar power plants in California. The first had a mere 15 mw. 
capacity, the next six plants were 30 mw. each, and finally 
two 80 mw. plants. All of the plants are still fully 
operational and, thanks to the recent technological advancements, 
will soon be producing more power. 

Luz's patents were inherited and improved upon by the Solel 
Company of Beit Shemesh. In a two-and-a-half-year joint 
research project between Solel and the National Center for 
Solar Energy, co-funded by the National Infrastructure 
Ministry and the U.S.-based Belfer Foundation, new advances 
have been made in solar technologies. 

"If a Solel plant is built in Israel and is shown to be 
successful, it will make the company a strong competitor on 
the world scene, and international projects could be financed 
in the Third World by the World Bank," Faiman told The 
Jerusalem Post. 

The principal aim of the project was to complete research 
into and test the viability of the Direct Steam Generation 
(DSG) Loop that Luz had left in the development stage when 
it went bankrupt. According to Luz's calculations, replacing 
the original oil-heating loop with one that employs DSG 
technologies within the solar collectors themselves would 
result in a 15% increase in power production. Part of the 
joint project called for testing various new vacuum tube 
types that have been developed to act as replacements for 
broken tubes in the aging California plants. 

At the Blaustein Center, the oil-heating loop that Luz 
handed down was used to quantify the new tubes' performance, 
Faiman said. Not surprisingly, it turned out that all of 
Solel's new tubes were improvements on the originals. To the 
scientists' astonishment, one of the new types produced a 
20% to 25% improvement. This will enable the plants in 
California to be upgraded and clearly establishes Israeli 
solar technology as unequalled, Faiman said. 

"Now that the government has committed itself to building 
a solar energy plant, Solel can verifiably say that local 
solar technologies are the most advanced in the world with 
a proven record of high efficiency, high reliability, 
cleanliness, and low system cost," he added. He said that 
solar energy plants in the Negev could theoretically produce 
all the country's power on 225 square kilometers of suitable 
land.