Reprinted from Daily Alert, Friday, April 20, 2012

Teachers from Rural U.S. on Educational Journey to Poland and Israel – Corinne Lestch
17 teachers from schools across the U.S. are still processing an emotionally powerful trip to Poland and Israel to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust, and bring back their experiences to the classroom. "We’re using the Holocaust as a lens to teach social justice, and we wanted to concentrate on teachers who have very little access to resources or survivors," said Sondra Perl, an English professor who helped create the Holocaust Educators Network at Lehman College.
    "They’re addressing local issues in their own home states around injustice, tolerance, bullying, racism. Most of them are not Jewish." "Poland broke my heart, and Israel blew my mind," Perl recalled a teacher from Idaho saying. (New York Daily News)

Free Israeli Cataract Clinics Treat 1,000 Ethiopians – Rivka Borochov (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
    When the seven-person crew from the Israeli volunteer organization Eye from Zion arrived in a remote region in Ethiopia in February to provide free cataract surgery, they were expecting several dozen patients. 1,400 showed up.
    The organization has performed the 20-minute procedure on thousands of people in Asian and African countries.
    After an initial 170 operations in the regions of Debark and Gondar, Eye from Zion founder Nati Marcus planned to return with another team of four eye doctors, a couple of nurses and a technician over the course of the year to finish the job for those on the waiting list.
    No one at Eye from Zion receives any money for their services.

Israeli Defense Firm to Add 100 Jobs in Maryland (Baltimore Sun)
    ELTA North America, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., has opened a location in Maple Lawn in Howard County, Md., where it plans to create 100 new jobs, the state Department of Business and Economic Development said Wednesday.
    Most of ELTA’s employees are scientists, engineers, programmers and technicians who develop products for the armed services.

New Israeli Technology to Recycle Cellulose in Sludge – Karin Kloosterman (Green Prophet)
    Refael Aharon, the CEO and founder of Applied Clean Tech, says his company has refined the process of turning the cellulose in sludge – toilet paper, fecal matter and washing machine lint – into new paper.
    The finished product has no odor and poses no biological hazard. "It’s a real recycled paper," Aharon says.
    The company is already using its cellulose-based raw material in envelopes.

U.S.-Israel 3-D Printer-Makers Merge, Form $1.4B Company – Nataleeya Boss (Twin Cities Business)
    Eden Prairie, Minn.-based 3-D printer manufacturer Stratasys, Inc., will soon merge with Objet, Ltd., a Rehovot, Israel-based company that also makes 3-D printers, the companies said Monday. The equity value of the combined company will total approximately $1.4 billion.

Israeli company Better Place celebrates fourth anniversary, officially inaugurates its first fleet of electrical cars.

Elad Benari & Yoni Kempinski, January 23, 2012

The Israeli company Better Place on Sunday celebrated its fourth anniversary. The company marked this special occasion by officially inaugurating its first fleet of 100 electric cars. A convoy of 70 cars, driven by dozens of the company’s employees, took to the streets of Tel Aviv for their first rides.

The electric car developed by Better Place has no exhaust pipe and no gas cap, but rather a simple electric socket. It runs on a 450-lb. lithium-ion battery and can go as far as 140 miles before the battery needs to be swapped or recharged at the recharging stations. 200 such stations are expected to be available around the country in the future.

Better Place announced that the delivery process of the new cars will take place in stages and will progress as the infrastructure across the country is completed. The company expects that the deliveries to the general public will begin in the second quarter of 2012.

In 2010, Israel’s Ministry of Transportation gave Better Place a permit to import 13 Renault Fluence electric cars for testing. Israel has long been committed to electric cars, and has expressed hope that by the end of this year it will be the world’s first nation to host a national electric car network.

One of the innovations of the electric cars is that its motor is silent, eliminating the loud exhaust noises in regular cars.

“You hear a noise that lets you know the car is on,” Zohar Beit’or of Better Place told Arutz Sheva. “It’s exactly like the noise that an electric camera makes.”

“The car is so silent that you can actually speak quietly and have a nice conversation without the need to shout,” he said. “It really makes you relax.”

Beit’or noted that he was very excited about the official launch of the new cars, adding he has worked for three years on this project.

“When I started, we only had plans on PowerPoint and we shared many ideas on how this day would look,” he said. “And it’s happening now. For me, it’s a piece of history.”

The company’s Oren Kassif explained that while the Renault company makes the cars, the infrastructure is Israeli and developed by Better Place. This includes charging spots, battery swap stations, and the command and control software.

“This is the first time you can say, at a country-wide level, that you can drive an electric car anywhere in the country,” he said. “What we’ve shown today is that we can deliver the cars, we can sell them, we can have customers driving on the road anywhere they wish.”

He added, “It’s a very exciting day. For the past four years we’ve been developing the systems and the infrastructure, recruiting people and bringing in more investors and customers.”

www.israelnationalnews.com

Alternative energy community amazed by Aidan Dwyer, 13, who came up with notion of arranging solar panels in shape of tree branches to maximize sunlight collection

Nimrod Avraham

Published:
01.16.12, 09:25 / Israel Environment

Aidan Dwyer, a 13-year-old boy from New York, has become the toast of the alternative energy community, after coming up with an inspirational way to enhance solar panels’ reception – arranging them in the shape of tree branches.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Dwyer came up with the idea of arranging solar panels in the shape of trees. After studying the mathematical relationship of the arrangement of leaves and branches on trees and the Fibonacci Sequence – which starts with the numbers 0 and 1, followed by the sum of the prior two numbers in the sequence – he realized that Fibonacci numbers can be found in many plants and flowers in nature. 

He then conducted several photovoltaic array experiments comparing his design to standard solar panel arrays, and found it was 20%-30% more efficient in collecting sunlight.

According to the report, the design “used the greatest number of PV panels within the least amount of physical space, making his concept a truly practical and efficient design.”

Innovation aside, Dwyer’s calculation were disproved after experts reviewed them more carefully and discovered he measured volts instead of the watts, but that has not stopped the alternative energy community from hailing his original thought process and experiments.

He was also awarded the 2011 Young Naturalist Award by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and has filed a provisional patent application for his research on collecting solar energy.

Reprinted from WaterWorld

BE’ER SHEVA, ISRAEL, Jan. 10, 2012 – Israel still remains one the world leaders in wastewater recycling and a collaboration between local farmers has demonstrated why the country will continue to lead with this application.

A co-operation of 34 farming settlements recently pooled their resources together to construct an effluent reuse system next to a wastewater treatment plant. Previously, the quality of reclaimed water from the facility was not suitable for “unlimited irrigation” purposes.

A MODOtec filtration system, including downstream Ultraviolet Technology treatment, with a capacity of 60,000 m³/day, was selected. A total of 90% of the produced effluent will be piped for agricultural irrigation and the remaining 10% used for irrigation of Be’er Sheva’s municipal parks.

Wastewater effluent reuse is becoming a common strategy in the region, especially for agricultural irrigation purposes, which have exhausted many groundwater supplies in the region.

Since 2000, the use of treated wastewater for irrigation by Israel’s agricultural sector increased from 17% of water consumed by the sector to more than 50%. Regulation has been a key driver, with stringent regulations to upgrade effluent standards set in motion in 2000 by Israel’s parliament.

In January 2010, the government approved regulations that would upgrade the 1992 minimal standard of 20 ppm biological oxygen demand (BOD) and 30 ppm total suspended solids (TSS) to 10 ppm BOD and 10 ppm TSS.

Estimates from the World Bank show that currently more than 40 million m³ of municipal wastewater is recycled daily and is expected to increase to approximately 55 million m³ by 2015.

Growth is likely to be centred around the Middle East region, which lacks natural sustainable potable water supplies and relies upon desalination for its drinking water needs.

Oman is playing host to a large scale water reuse project that will see thousands of kilometers of pipeline laid to connect homes to a new network. Haya Water’s project aims to connect over 30,000 homes, office and commercial buildings to the water reuse network. This will be supplied by a 80,000 m³ capacity wastewater treatment plant, using Membrane Bioreactor technology (MBR).

###

- WaterWorld Middle East conference and exhibition will be launching in Qatar on February 6-8 2012 and will include conference sessions on Water Reuse and the use of MBR technology. For more information please click here.

Latest Articles

Wastewater reuse relieves agricultural irrigation drought in Israel (Jan 10, 2012)

by Lawrence Kadish, Stonegate Institute
January 4, 2012 at 5:00 am

At year end, 2011, as Americans emptied their wallets at the gas pump and crude oil reached almost $100 a barrel, OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia reported an $81.6 billion 2011 budget surplus.

The White House action at the same time was to ask Congress to increase our debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion to $16.4 trillion to cover budget deficits.

Nations decline and fall when their economies and monetary policies are incompetently managed. Unfortunately, it appears to be a lesson lost on too many of our leaders who have allowed the very stability of our nation to be imperiled by budget deficits and mounting debt. Our leaders have also failed on Energy Independence, allowing the cost and supply of the strategic commodity of oil to be controlled by foreign nations.

The ominous linkage between cyclical recessions and our repeated failure to achieve energy independence and oil price stability has caused much hardship on our citizenry and severe damage to our economy.

The historical evidence is clear. Whenever oil prices spiked as they did between 1972-1980, and then again between 2003-2008 and beyond, recessions in America followed.

In 1972, crude oil prices were $ 3.60 a barrel. By 1980, the cost of that barrel was $ 37. This 1000% oil price increase contributed to a negative economic chain reaction. The CPI more than doubled during this period. Double digit Inflation ensued, causing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. This, in turn, sent the Prime Rate to over 20% by 1980. A recession followed.

Whenever the United States took serious notice of oil prices as an underlying cause of these problems, Congress would debate energy savings and energy independence. A concerned OPEC would then divert America’s attention by opening their spigots, increasing production and causing oil prices to drop to under $20 a barrel and remain relatively low for a period of time. While the immediate crisis would be averted by these actions, Congress did little to protect our future. Consequently, by 2003, oil was up again to $30 a barrel and steadily increased to over $90 in January 2008 and spiked to over $140 in July 2008.

As in the past, by 2008, the enormous increase in the cost of oil resulted in nationwide price increases and surcharges in substantially all industries. It was an assault, like a fiscal tsunami, that put too great a financial burden on the United States economy and its citizenry and set the stage for business failures, unemployment and a decline in real estate values. Rating agencies blessed mortgage investments based on a rising economy however, the chaotic oil spikes triggered the opposite effect. Thus, as in a violent storm, weak structures failed, especially the over-leveraged mortgages and the volatile mortgage-backed securities and related financial markets, which became illiquid. causing the American economy to experience the 2008 meltdown.

A significant part of this ruinous economic condition involves enemies sworn to destroy the United States. Since 911 the United States has spent trillions of dollars on Homeland Security and our military to sustain the War on Terrorism. It is grimly ironic that simultaneously, trillions of dollars have left our economy to purchase oil mostly from OPEC nations that directly or indirectly support radical Islamic fundamentalists. This absurdity has resulted in a punishing double body blow to our economy.

It is now almost 40 years since our country was first adversely affected by its failure to become energy independent. The United States has the natural resources and the technology to produce clean energy. Over time however, we have lost our way time and again because we have been confronted with a deliberate policy by obstructionists seeking to prolong the debate over energy independence for the specific purpose of preventing a national consensus on energy policy.

Are the obstructionists the sincere environmentalists or the professional anti-capitalist environmental radicals who would have us return to an agrarian society? Other suspect quiet assassins of American energy policy include: foreign interests influencing Washington, and those who own domestic oil production and seek to sustain high oil prices and unprecedented returns, and still others who sell their manufactured products to foreign oil suppliers and do not want to lose those lucrative markets.

Those who aspire to be our future elected leaders should immediately present their strategy for energy independence — one that marginalizes the obstructionists — and commit to a plan of action.

The voters are aware of the hazards of our present policies that will lead us into the role of a third world debtor nation. They want more than vague speeches. Who we are as a nation in the 21st Century will be determined by how we strengthen our economy by streamlining government operations, eliminating wasteful spending, and most importantly promoting economic growth that creates jobs. Energy Independence can be a major first step in this effort. It will help us achieve a balanced budget and genuine national security in a world of lethal threats and economic challenges.

These are the issues that should and must define all nationwide election campaigns.

Lawrence Kadish is an Advisory Board Member of the Stonegate Institute and a trustee of the Claremont and Hudson Institutes.

IEI believes Israel may be sitting on vast reserves of shale oil, second only to those in the United States.

By Daniella Cheslow (AFP) – December 18, 2011

BEIT GUVRIN, Israel — Among the serene vineyards and pine trees of Israel’s wine-growing heartland, a towering drill is boring 600 metres (2,000 feet) underground, dredging up black rocks that smell like petrol.

This is oil shale, rocks saturated with kerogen, a material that turns into oil and gas under intense heat.

Huge deposits of this kerogen-rich rock lie deep underground in southern and central Israel in quantities which Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI) says could make the country an oil superpower and break its dependence on imports.

Shale oil production is often attacked for its high carbon footprint and for being prohibitively expensive, but the entrepreneurs at IEI insist they have found a cleaner, greener and cheaper method of extraction.

And they plan to prove it in the Ela Valley, a Biblical site in the Judaean hills some 30 kilometres (18 miles) southwest of Jerusalem where David is said to have battled Goliath.

But two years into a first round of experimental drilling, IEI faces a firestorm of criticism from environmentalists who say the project is a dangerous experiment in an ecological corridor that lies over the main source of Israel’s limited national water supply.

Oil shale exists in deposits around the world, including major sites in the United States, China, Estonia, Australia and Jordan. IEI believes Israel may be sitting on vast reserves of shale oil, second only to those in the United States.

If their estimates are right, shale oil could have a revolutionary impact on the Jewish state’s energy portfolio.

Israel currently consumes around 100 million barrels of oil a year, most of it imported from Russia and former Soviet states. It also relies on natural gas, around 60 percent of which comes from domestic sources while the rest is supplied by Egypt.

And while two major offshore gas finds have raised hopes that Israel could supply its own needs, the shale oil deposits could potentially dwarf these discoveries and provide for Israel’s energy needs many times over.

Scott Nguyen is vice-president of technology at IEI, a subsidiary of American telecoms giant IDT. A veteran of Dutch Shell Oil, he wears the tan leather boots and giant belt buckle of his native eastern Texas.

"Even in the early 1900s, people said oil shale will be the heir apparent to oil," Nguyen said. "The difficulty is implementing the technology to make it economic to do it."

The key to oil shale is kerogen, an organic material locked into rocks that, given a few aeons, would develop into petroleum. Production is expensive because it speeds up millions of years of geological processes.

While shale oil has been a known fuel source for centuries, it has always been more expensive and less convenient to produce than crude oil.

In Estonia, which produces 90 percent of its power from oil shale, production has declined as a result of cheaper alternatives and more stringent EU environmental penalties.

Extraction involves mining the rocks and heating them with large amounts of energy to convert the kerogen into oil and gas in a process which spews out pollution, litters the land with spent shale, consumes torrents of water and rips gaping scars in the landscape.

And burning it is four times as polluting as natural gas.

But Harold Vinegar, Nguyen’s boss and former chief scientist at Shell, has developed a new form of "in-situ" conversion, which converts the kerogen into shale oil underground, thereby cutting out the mining process.

His method involves drilling 200 metres into the deposit, inserting heating elements, then ratcheting up the temperature to 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees F) for at least three years. At that heat, the rocks release the kerogen and it can be pumped up in liquid form.

But first, the extraction process, which has been under development since the 1980s, must be shown to work.

To date, IEI has carried out only small-scale field studies of the conversion technology, and should it get the necessary licence to run a full pilot in Israel, it will be the first proper commercial-scale trial of the process.

"If we are successful in implementing our in-situ conversion technology in Israel, it will make it easy to do it around the world," Nguyen said.

For years, the main way of extracting shale oil was through open-pit mining, a dirty process which which is very expensive, with production costs of around $70-$100 per barrel.

But using its technology, Nguyen says the barrel production cost would be $30-40.

And he says the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by extraction would "be lower than the emissions from the mix of comparable oil supplies once we reach the commercial phase."

The firm sees the process of sequestering part of the carbon dioxide emissions as "economical and technically favourable," he says.

No one knows how much oil is trapped in the rocks in Israel.

Vinegar believes there could be up to 250 billion barrels of oil, a figure far higher than that published by the London-based World Energy Council which in November 2010 put the figure at closer to four billion barrels.

Whatever the size of the resource, it is substantial. To date, IEI has invested about $20 million in the appraisal phase, and plans to invest up to $30 million more to design the pilot, which in its next stage involves oil shale exploration.

Nguyen says IEI has carried out some field experiments in Canada, but Israel is the first commercial site.

"There is no prior experience in the world (for in-situ conversion), and therefore this is exactly the time to do it," said Moshe Shirav, a researcher at the Israeli Geological Survey.

Shirav says IEI will keep a close eye on the environmental impact of the process through monitoring wells dug alongside the oil shale drill shafts.

But Akiva Flexer, a geology expert at Tel Aviv University, is concerned about the possible impact on the Mountain Aquifer, Israel’s main source of drinking water which lies just 200 metres below the shale oil deposits.

"It’s Israel’s most important aquifer," Flexer said. "If you have some dry crack, and there’s a certain leak it is enough that one drop of oil gets in and you can’t drink the water."

But Nguyen says a leak would be out of the question because an impermeable layer of clay separates the shale from the aquifer.

"In the pilot, we will have ground water monitoring wells where water can flow above and below the pilot areas," he said.

"If there is contamination in the water, we will stop heating and treat the contamination by removing and diluting it."

IEI, he says, will fully restore the land where they extract and produce shale oil, and the company is working with environmentalists to ensure their concerns are addressed.

But they have not managed to convince a local activist group called "Save Adullam" which fears the project may do irreversible damage to the aquifer which supplies both Israel and the Palestinians.

"I don’t want to risk the safety of the Israeli and Palestinian water supply on the ‘hope’ that everything will be OK," said spokeswoman Rachel Jacobson.

According to Israel’s infrastructure ministry, IEI was granted a licence to appraise the area for oil production from shale with the aim of "testing the method and its impacts from every angle, including, of course, the environmental impact."

So far, however, no environmental impact statement has been prepared, prompting Save Adullam and the Israeli Union for Environmental Defence (IUED) to petition the high court last year for a stop-work injunction.

But the court rejected their argument, saying the exploration fell under Israel’s 1952 Petroleum Act which grants energy explorers a free hand to search for oil and gas with minimal government interference.

For now, IEI has drilled into five sites, searching for the best place to start a full-scale pilot, with oil production set to begin as early as 2013.

By 2020, IEI expects to be extracting some 50,000 barrels per day (bpd), representing about a sixth of Israel’s daily oil imports, which in 2009 stood at 282,200 bpd, Nguyen says.

Mikhal Harm, secretary general of the Estonian branch of the World Energy Council, said that even Estonia, a leading producer of shale oil, had yet to solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions.

He also said that in-situ conversion has not yet been proven commercially feasible anywhere in the world.

But he believes the shale oil deposits will end up benefiting Israel.

"The fact is that people need energy, and in the near future oil shale will be a big part of the energy portfolio," he told AFP.

"I don?t think people should be afraid of oil shale in Israel. They should welcome it, but with strict enough rules."

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

Ministry of Environmental Protection

http://www.environment.gov.il

Updated: 12/07/2011

In November 2011, the Ministry of Environmental Protection granted 250 million shekels to private entrepreneurs and local authorities for promoting the construction of twenty facilities for the treatment of organic waste and transfer stations for sorting throughout the country. These facilities are a vital and complementing link in the implementation of the separation of waste at source program which has been introduced in Israel.

In total, some 600 million shekels (about $165 million) will be invested in the construction of recycling and waste to energy facilities over the next three years (40% by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and 60% by entrepreneurs/local authorities). The facilities will treat some 8,000 tons of waste per day, about two-thirds of the daily quantity of municipal waste which is generated in Israel.

The facilities include two phases of waste treatment:

• Sorting of the waste into its different components in transfer stations, with recyclables going to material recovery facilities. This will increase the quantity of recycled materials and significantly decrease the quantity of landfilled waste.
• Treatment of the organic fraction of the waste (such as food remnants), constituting some 40 percent of the municipal waste, and its transfer to:

1. Compost facilities where the waste will be transformed into fertilizer for agriculture.
2. Anaerobic digestion facilities where the biodegradable waste will be fermented to produce biogas for the generation of electricity. The electricity produced in these facilities will be sold to the electricity grid under preferential tariffs.

The new facilities will provide for the treatment of the waste which is separated within the framework of the separation of waste into two streams project, which is spearheaded by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Some 31 local authorities have already joined the project and have received some 350 million shekels of aid for financing a municipal infrastructure which will make two dumpsters available for every resident, in his home and in the street.

The material recovery facilities and transfer stations will receive the waste, sort it and provide for its recycling, thereby saving some 900 million shekels worth of raw materials which were previously landfilled every year.

Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan: "The world already understands that waste is a raw material in and of itself. Investing in an industry which will implement the recycling revolution and will transform waste from nuisance to resource is an economic and environmental interest. Establishing a recycling and waste to energy market will prevent unnecessary exploitation of natural resources and raw materials, thereby significantly reducing the economic costs and environmental degradation that are finally borne by the consumer."

Separation of Waste at Source: Facts and Figures

• Some 12,000 – 14,000 tons of mixed waste which originate in local authorities are generated in Israel every day, totaling some 4.4 million tons per year.
• According to forecasts of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the annual quantity of waste increases by 3%-5% every year.
• The quantity of organic waste produced in Israel is estimated at a million and a half tons per year, constituting some 40% of the weight of solid waste in Israel and 10% of its volume. Most of this waste originates in food products, fruits and vegetables, etc.
• According to the estimates of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, some 4,600 tons of municipal organic waste are generated in Israel every day. This waste has a high potential for the production of biogas in renewable energy facilities and for the creation of compost for soil improvement.

The advantages of a separation of waste into at least two streams program include environmental advantages due to the prevention of pollution, the decrease in the quantity of landfilled waste and the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. These environmental advantages are complemented by economic benefits due to the creation of new jobs in the recycling market, savings in resources and reduced costs associated with landfilling.

More Links:

Recycling

Separation of Waste at Source

‘Born-again Zionist’ revolutionizing solar energy field

Professor David Faiman of Israel’s National Solar Energy Center is dedicated to ensuring the country’s ‘energy independence’.

By David Sheen, October 7, 2011

A scientist who immigrated from the U.K. and became one of Israel’s top solar-power researchers is spearheading efforts to push the country into a new age. Prof. David Faiman, the director of Israel’s National Solar Energy Center at Sde Boker, says the government must immediately invest in major solar energy infrastructure projects, coupled with a public relations push to convince the populace of their necessity.
Faiman moved to Israel right before the Yom Kippur war and says the subsequent Arab oil boycotts convinced him the country must embrace alternative energy, specifically that drawn from the sun, which he has spent the last decades of his career working to harness.
Faiman believes Israel is far from reaching its goal of 10 percent energy from renewable sources by 2020, and called the recent inauguration of a five megaWatt solar field at Kibbutz Ketura a drop in the bucket compared to the country’s swiftly developing energy needs.

A professor of physics at Ben-Gurion University’s Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and chair of the Department of Solar Energy and Environmental Physics, Faiman has one solution, curved solar panels that minimize the economic and environmental cost of producing solar power, one of the biggest barriers to the field’s development.
Recently, Kvutzat Yavneh, a kibbutz east of Ashdod, adopted a new solar technology inspired by Faiman’s ideas. This year, the technology was exported to South Korea, and next year there are plans to ship the panels to Italy and China. The improved panels promise higher energy yields, reduced land use, lower per-unit costs and less environmental damage.

Faiman was born in Amersham, a small town outside of London, as German bombs were being dropped on British cities during World War II. He says he always wanted to be a successful physicist and attained physics degrees in the U.K. and the U.S., crowned by a post-doctorate at Oxford University. But at the same time, Faiman, who grew up in a Zionist home, says he kept looking toward Israel.
"I feel extremely privileged to have been born at a time and in a place that have enabled me to be part of a Jewish nation with a state of its own," he said.
Although Faiman had long pondered immigrating, it was his star-cross’d encounter with an Israeli actress performing a run in England with the Royal Shakespeare Company that sealed the deal for him.
That woman, Ofra, became his wife, and Faiman accompanied her back to Israel, just shy of 30, on the eve of the Yom Kippur War. Ofra went on to act and direct in Israel, while raising the couple’s three children.

Faiman specialized in nuclear physics and worked for CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, before immigrating to Israel to work with the Weizmann Institute.

But the Arab oil embargo that followed the Yom Kippur War jolted Faiman into rethinking his research in light of national needs.

"I did a lot of soul-searching as to what would be the most useful way I could use my scientific training. The subsequent oil crisis and Ben-Gurion University’s decision to establish the Blaustein Institute helped me crystallize my scientific future," says Faiman. "At Sde Boker, I became a born-again ‘Ziontist’."

Today, Faiman is at the forefront of developing the next generation of renewable energy systems, certain that Israel must turn to solar solutions. "I like to think that our grandchildren will find it hard to believe that we lived in a world in which electricity was not generated mainly from solar energy," says Faiman. "Just as my own grandfather, who was born in Russia in 1872, once expressed amazement to me that most people no longer know how to ride a horse."

Faiman is concerned about the effects that the country’s consumption and population growth rates will have on Israel’s energy requirements and its announced target of ten per cent renewables by 2020. "This straight line that has been rising for last 20 years at a rate close to two billion kiloWatt hours per year, reached 60 billion last year. What that means is, ten years from now, in the year 2020, we are going to be at close to 80 billion," says Faiman.
The ten per cent goal, out of a projected total of 80 billion, is eight billion, and with ten years to arrive at that figure, that would mean mandating an annual increase of 0.8 billion kiloWatt hours produced per year. "0.8 every year means something like 400 megaWatts of installed capacity. Nobody ever built a 400 megaWatt photovoltaic plant anywhere in the world. Nobody ever built even a 100 megawatt plant! So we actually have to build photovoltaic plants every year at four to five times the largest plant that’s ever been built," says Faiman. "That’s the meaning of ten per cent renewables."
The main reason that solar technologies have not yet been adopted en masse, in Israel and around the world, is that up until now the cost of producing electricity using solar panels has exceeded the cost of producing electricity by burning fossil fuels. Faiman and his colleagues hit upon a novel method for reducing panel production costs: separating the two functions of collecting energy and converting energy.

Although collection surfaces must be large, in order to catch as many solar rays as possible, Faiman realized that the "wafers" which convert these solar rays into electricity needn’t be. By bending the panel into a parabolic dish and re-focusing all the sun’s rays onto a small receiver only one-thousandth the size of the dish, Faiman’s model minimizes the size of the most economically and ecologically expensive component of the panel.
Ordinarily, focusing so much solar energy onto a such a small area would burn the solar converter, rendering it useless. But Faiman hit upon another idea to turn that liability into an advantage. By running water or some other liquid over the solar converter, the radiated surfaces are cooled down to manageable levels. The heat energy absorbed by that liquid is then transferred to water stored in large tanks, making it unnecessary to use electricity or burn fossil fuels to heat running water.
At the program’s pilot project at Kvutzat Yavneh, water pumped from the panels into a 5000 gallon storage system actually exceeds 80 degrees Celsius and needs to be cooled significantly before it can even be pumped into kibbutz members’ homes for domestic comsumption.
Since 2009, Israeli company Zenith Solar has been making Faiman’s ideas a physical reality, assembling the solar panel kits in a Kiryat Gat factory. Company co-founder and CEO Roy Segev says that by using the CHP technology – which stands for ‘combined heat and power’ – the panels are able to reach efficiencies of over 70%, as opposed to conventional PV panels, which record efficiencies of only between 10 and 15 per cent.
In addition to harvesting much more energy from a smaller space, which preserves precious land resources, Segev says that far less landfill is produced from their waste.
"The majority of the materials here are mirrors, plastic, metals, etc," says Segev. "They are 99% recyclable." Most importantly for most people, the CHP panels will soon be able to produce energy at parity with conventional energy sources, says Segev. "If we get these machines at mass production – not millions of machines, but rather at a rate of 500 to 1000 units a month – they would generate energy at less than 10 cents U.S. per kiloWatt hour."
Despite the impressive performance of Zenith’s panels and the contracts they’ve signed with buyers abroad, the Israeli government has yet to invest in a large-scale solar power production plant, using CHP or any other technology. "It would be very nice if we were to back a local industry, rather than imported industry," says Faiman, but he stresses that Israel’s solar energy needs are so great that there is plenty of business to go around. "I don’t want to put the importers out of business. On the contrary, I want to give them so much business, they’ll have money coming out of their ears."
In the current economic climate, it may prove difficult to convince government officials to invest in long term renewable energy infrastructure for the country. It may take a public education campaign to create a shift in consciousness and a groundswell of support for Faiman’s plan. "We pay taxes, and out of our taxes, things which are perceived as being the common good are paid for, such as roads and schools and defense, you name it, all of the things that enable life to be tolerable," says Faiman. "If energy independence were to be considered a public good or a national strategic priority, then it could be paid for with our taxes."

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• David Sheen

Published September 14, 2011 | FoxNews.com

The global warming theory left him out in the cold.

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that "global warming is occurring."

The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man’s actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Giaever does not agree — and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.

"I resign from APS," Giaever wrote.

Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that "the evidence is incontrovertible."

"In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society.

"The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period," his email message said.

A spokesman for the APS confirmed to FoxNews.com that the Nobel Laureate had declined to pay his annual dues in the society and had resigned. He also noted that the society had no plans to revise its statement.

The use of the word "incontrovertible" had already caused debate within the group, so much so that an addendum was added to the statement discussing its use in April, 2010.

"The word ‘incontrovertible’ … is rarely used in science because by its very nature, science questions prevailing ideas. The observational data indicate a global surface warming of 0.74 °C (+/- 0.18 °C) since the late 19th century."

Giaever earned his Nobel for his experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in superconductors. He has since become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears, Climate Depot reported, noting that he was one of more than 100 co-signers of a 2009 letter to President Obama critical of his position on climate change.

Public perception of climate change has steadily fallen since late 2009. A Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll from August noted that 57 percent of adults believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009.

The same study showed that 69 percent of those polled believe it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. Just 6 percent felt confident enough to report that such falsification was "not at all likely."

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Reprinted from Daily Alert, August 5, 2011

• Israel Helps Stem Global Food Crisis – Laura Kam
  As crops fail in Russia, as dust bowls replace fertile land in Asia and Central Africa, the issue of food security has leapt to the top of the world agenda. Israel, a desert nation, has developed a range of agriculture and water technologies that are already helping to feed the world. For decades, Israeli agriculture experts have been sharing their expertise with some of the poorest regions on earth, creating sustainable self-sufficiency in food and water supplies. In recent years, Israeli expertise has been heavily in demand in India, Africa and China.
      Israel is also a world leader in desalination – converting salt water to fresh water for human consumption or irrigation. The writer is the executive director for global affairs at The Israel Project. (Ynet News)
• Israeli Ingenuity Powers GM’s Cars of Tomorrow – David Halevi
  General Motors, one of the world’s largest automakers, not only has an R&D facility in Israel, but an entire corporate structure in Herzliya. The mission of GM Israel is to develop the technologies that will make the car of tomorrow the best vehicle ever built. GM opened its Israel site in 2005 and expects about 200 people – mostly engineers – to be on board by the end of 2013.
      GM Israel is developing technology in five areas: advanced sensing and vision systems; human interface systems that adapt voice and touch technology for autos; wireless enabling, allowing a vehicle’s systems to use networks to ensure constant communication; infotainment; and vehicle control and robotics for driverless navigation. One of GM’s venture capital funds, located in Israel, invested in Israeli startup Powermat, which makes wireless charging mats for cell phones and other electronic devices. GM plans to include the mats in vehicles as soon as 2012, allowing drivers to easily recharge their handheld devices while on the road. (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Observations:

Land for War – Efraim Karsh and Asaf Romirowsky (Wall Street Journal)

• In putting the Palestinian demand for statehood to a vote, Abbas will end up subverting the international organization’s longstanding solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict – UN Security Council Resolution 242 – with unpredictable results. Passed in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, Resolution 242 established the principle of "land for peace" as the cornerstone of future peace agreements between Israel and the Arabs, to be reached in negotiations between the two sides. Israel was asked to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict."

• The absence of the definite article "the" before "territories" was no accident: Issued a mere six months after Israel’s astounding triumph over the concerted Arab attempt to obliterate the Jewish state, the resolution reflected acceptance by the Security Council of the existential threat posed by the 1949 armistice line. The Security Council expected negotiations between Israel and the Arabs to produce a more defensible frontier for Israel, one consistent with the right of every state in the region "to live in peace with secure and recognized boundaries."
• In the 44 years that have followed, Israel has persistently striven to make peace with its Arab neighbors. It withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, constituting more than 90% of the territories occupied in 1967.
• The Palestinians have consistently misrepresented the resolution as calling for Israel’s complete withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines. They also sought to undermine the resolution’s insistence on the need for a negotiated settlement, seeking time and again to engineer an internationally imposed dictate despite their commitment to a negotiated settlement through the Oslo process. Since the inauguration of the Obama administration, Mr. Abbas has dropped all remaining pretenses of seeking a negotiated settlement, striving instead to engineer international enforcement of a complete Israeli withdrawal without a peace agreement, or, indeed, any quid pro quo.
• Mr. Karsh is director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London. Mr. Romirowsky is adjunct scholar at the Middle East Forum and a doctoral student at King’s College London.