Re: Israel to Build the Largest Solar Power Plant in the World.
- From: "Hajj Jafar" <Sjafar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:59:29 GMT
I want to thank the Zionist for their good effort, so when we take Palestine back, everything will be ready to use.
Hajj Jafar
"jgarbuz" <jgarbuz@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:c82b7bf9-1851-4bb6-8774-caa4a365f27a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(IsraelNN.com) Israel is poised to build the largest solar power plant
in the world. The solar power station is being planned in the Negev
and will also be the first ever built in Israel. The web based
Israel21c.org reports that the facility 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 project has been preliminarily approved by the Israeli government,
and a 1,000 acre site has been selected, but has not yet been
budgeted. The plant is planned to initially 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.
.
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