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

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).

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- 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."

More on this topic

• Jews make strong showing among 2011 Nobel Prize winners

This story is by:
• 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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24 Aug 2011

GE likes Pythagoras Solar’s photovoltaic glass unit, which generates power for office buildings while letting natural light stream in.

The world’s first transparent photovoltaic window

By Desmond Bentley

GE doesn’t hand out awards easily. So when Pythagoras Solar  beat out nearly 5,000 entrants to win this year’s $100,000 GE Ecomagination Challenge – which recognizes the most promising green energy building innovations – architects took notice.

The Israeli company’s unique solar window is the world’s first transparent photovoltaic glass unit (PVGU), which can make the much-vaunted vision of a net zero-energy building possible."Innovative optics using solar cells will allow solar energy to become part of the next generation of building design," says Pythagoras Solar CEO Gonen Fink. "This will produce benefits such as power generation and reducing the building’s energy needs, while allowing light in."

The product can be adapted to existing buildings, he says. "Retrofitting an office block with our windows can pay back the investment in five years. It’s also aesthetic, which makes the whole concept more attractive to architects."

Window into growing market

Fink founded Pythagoras four and a half years ago together with Dr. Italy Barouche, an expert in neuronal networks. He was previously instrumental in turning fledgling start-up Check Point Software Technologies into a multi-billion-dollar global market leader in Internet security.

"We were working with a group of people looking for added advantages to solar cells and the best applications for solar energy," he recalls. "We decided to concentrate on commercial buildings, working with the market and getting feedback. We started with the question: What does the world need in order to adapt this technology?" After all, he points out, solar energy is ubiquitous.

"The market for solar cells is maturing. I think people underestimate the revolution that’s taking place in the construction industry. There will be other companies in this market, but while many companies are coming up with solutions to reduce energy consumption, this only solves part of the equation."

The issue of commercial buildings’ energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important worldwide, with more stringent legislation in many countries aimed at lowering energy consumption. According to the United States Department of Energy, building operations account for up to 39 percent of the country’s energy consumption and 70% of its power plant-generated electricity. More than 30% of this energy is lost through poor building efficiency.

"The Obama administration has just set new energy reduction targets. Many people have yet to internalize the magnitude of this revolution," says Fink. "New commercial buildings will now include power generation and energy efficiency. The construction industry now has greater understanding of the needs, and huge progress has been made in recent years."
Aesthetically pleasing

Coming up with a breakthrough technology is one thing. Getting the end-user to like it is another. The photovoltaic windows were successfully tested last year in a series of pilot projects in commercial buildings in Israel and the US, including the Sears Tower in Chicago. "We took existing buildings and showed that it works. Then we went to the next stage, which is commercial installation and expanding our manufacturing capacity," says Fink.

Architects, he says, are particularly excited about the new option the product offers. "The high transparency makes for aesthetically pleasing building designs. This process is not something that happens overnight – it can take six months or more to install, and it takes a year or two from design to actual implementation."

This particular product is less suitable for residential use, he explains, because in relative terms, private homes have far fewer windows. "The current method of placing solar panels on roofs is limited – it’s too expensive and has only one use," says Fink, noting that the price of the core ingredient, silicon, is high worldwide. "A significant part of the cost is for labor – it’s expensive to put them on the roof. Also, solar panels need a lot of surface area."

Let the sunshine in

Studies have shown that office workers prefer daylight. Standard windows let in harsh sunlight and heat, which means enormous air-conditioning costs. Blocking windows with curtains or blinds increases the need for artificial lighting. Pythagoras’ optical design uses direct light to generate energy, while optimizing daylight inside the building.

"The idea is to maintain the work environment at a comfortable temperature without massive energy-guzzling cooling and heating systems. There’s a lot of room for this idea to continue to grow, by integrating it into building design. Imagine a commercial facade. If you could replace the glass with glass that can improve energy efficiency, the advantages are multiple."

While the company’s R&D center is in Israel, Pythagoras Solar is now based in Silicon Valley, while much of production takes place in Los Angeles. "This company is about to take off," says Fink. His optimism appears justified. "Until now, the term ‘green building’ has been all about reducing energy consumption. This is the first time we can bring power generation into the equation. Ours is the first product that actually combines both aspects."

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu, Engineering News

reprinted August 4, 2011

Israel, a water-constrained country, is leaving no stone unturned in conserving this precious resource through a range of measures, including recycling, efficient use and desalination.

The country currently recycles about 75% of its municipal effluent for irrigation, mostly in the arid south, which receives a measly 100 mm/y of rainfall. An ambitious target of 100% recycling by 2014 has been set and, by that date, all agriculture in Israel will be based on retreated water, according to water utility Mekorot professional instructor Gal Shoham.
He told journalists from across the globe during a recent tour of Mekorot’s Shafdan wastewater treatment plant, in the Dan region, that, while the recycled water is used for irrigation, it is of potable quality and contributes to preserving the environment by curbing ecological damage caused by untreated wastewater.

Serving about two-million people in the densely populated Dan region, which incorporates the city of Tel Aviv, the Shafdan plant – Mekorot’s largest and one of the most advanced in the Middle East – treats 130-million cubic metres of wastewater a year.
Secondary effluent from the plant is used to infiltrate fields in Rishon Letzion and Yavne. From these fields, the effluent is recharged into aquifers, where it undergoes natural physical, biological and chemical processes that improve its quality. Water from the aquifers is pumped to the Negev desert, about 90 km away, where it is used for irrigation by citrus, carrots, potato, lettuce, wheat and flower growers.
Besides the Shafdan plant, Mekorot operates five other wastewater treatment plants with a daily flow of 460 000 m3 and a yearly capacity of about 180-million cubic metres.
Mekorot accounts for about 40% of the wastewater treated in Israel, or about 200-million cubic metres a year, and for the reuse of 60% of the country’s treated wastewater for agriculture.
The touring journalists – from all continents of the world – were also able to visit Ayala Water & Ecology, which has developed natural biological systems for the purification and enhancement of water, soil and air. The wastewater Ayala treats includes effluent from dairy farms, poultry farms and abattoirs, as well as other agricultural enterprises.
The company’s natural biological systems are also capable of treating domestic and industrial effluent containing oils, fats, hydrocarbons, emulsions and detergents, besides other things.
The company operates a facility at the Hiriya landfill site, in the Dan region, that treats landfill leachate as well as fresh garbage and contaminated drainage.
Ayala’s cutting-edge technology has been recognised internationally and its founder, Eli Cohen, is Israel’s representative on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s environmental specialist team in the phytotechnology applications field.
Ayala’s Hiriya site is a stone’s throw away from Arrow Ecology, which has developed technology that separates biodegradable organics like food and paper out of solid municipal waste before it is used to produce biogas that is fed into combined heat and power plants. The Hiriya site generates 1 MW of its electricity needs.
Solids like plastics are sold for recycling, while sludge from anaerobic reactors is used for agricultural purposes.
CEO Yair Zadik said the company’s 150 t/d plant treated 5% of all the garbage generated in Israel and that its technology could reduce landfilling by up to 80%.
Arrow Ecology built the first plant outside Israel, in Sydney, Australia, in 2008 and is to soon build further plants in Italy, China and India.
On the efficient water use front, Israel’s Netafim is perhaps the most well known enter- prise, with its drip irrigation systems now manufactured or distributed in several regions of the world.
The drip systems ensure that water is released directly onto a plant, tremendously cutting back on the amount of water used by irrigation methods such as flooding or sprinkling.
Netafim chief sustainability officer Naty Barak said during a tour of the company’s plant at the Hatzerim kibbutz – or gated community – that, thanks to drip irrigation, Israel’s Arava desert, which receives only about 20 mm/y of rainfall, has been turned into a significant agriculture hub, accounting for 65% of the country’s vegetable exports.
Netafim president and CEO Igal Aisenberg said the major success stories of drip irrigation on the African continent were the 11 600 ha Simunye sugar estate, in Swaziland, and the Kitui irrigation scheme, in Kenya’s arid east.
“[At Simunye], a cost analysis of seven different irrigation options was undertaken, and the one that offered the best return was the conversion of the dragline sprinkler system to subsurface drip irrigation.
“A postinvestment audit confirmed a sucrose increase of 15% and a water saving of 22%, compared with the sprinkler system, and this was better than originally expected,” said Aisenberg.
At Kitui, donors led by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation launched a drip irrigation project for 200 poor small-scale vegetable growers, most of whom were women and old people who could not continue irrigating their crops with buckets.
Moving from bucket to drip irrigation increased yields and income by 140% and 200% respectively, and saved water use by around 60%.
Meanwhile, desalination will account for 450-million cubic metres of Israel’s yearly water consumption of 1,4-billion cubic metres – up from about 300-million at present – when the Sorek seawater reverse-osmosis (SWRO) plant, currently under con- struction, starts operating in mid-2013.
The150-million-cubic-metre-a-year plant is being built by IDE Technologies, a joint venture between Israeli enterprises ICL Group and Derek Group. IDE built and operates – under a 25-year ‘build, operate and transfer’ (BOT) deal – the 118-million- cubic-metre-a-year Ashkelon plant, which was commissioned in 2005, and the 127-million- cubic-metre Hadera plant, which has been operating since 2009.
The Hadera plant – currently the biggest of its kind in the world – is also a 25-year BOT project.
The Via Maris consortium runs Israeli’s third operational SWRO desalination plant, Palmachim, with a capacity of 45-million cubic metres a year.
IDE Technologies executive VP for special projects Fredi Lokiel told Engineering News that the use of technologies like IDE’s proprietary three-centre technology and cascade boron treatment had helped the company to achieve some of the lowest costs for high-quality desalinated water at both Ashkelon, where a cubic metre costs $0,53, and at Hadera, where the cost is $0,57/m3.
He said that of the 1,4-billion cubic metres of water consumed in Israel each year, about 750-million cubic metres is used for domestic purposes, which meant that the 300-million-odd cubic metres supplied by the Ashkelon, Hadera and Palmachim plants accounts for close to 50% of Israel’s domestic water, as desalinated water is not used for agriculture or industrial purposes.
• Israeli companies and many others from across the globe will showcase their water, environmental and renewable-energy technologies at the Water 2011 conference and exhibition, in Tel Aviv, in November. The last Watec event, held in 2009, was attended by more than 20 000 people from 94 countries.
• Zhuwakinyu visited Israeli as a guest of the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute
.

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Sivan 28, 5771, 30 June 11 12:23

by Elad Benari

(Israelnationalnews.com) An American company will help fund an Israeli company that uses microbial fuel cells to turn waste water into an energy source, Greenbang.com reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, Energy Technology Ventures, a joint venture of GE, NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips, has decided to invest an undisclosed amount in the Israeli company Emefcy Ltd. This is Energy Technology Ventures’ first investment in a non-U.S.-based company and is also its first investment related to water.

Emefcy was founded in early 2008 by serial water technology entrepreneurs Eytan Levy and Ronen Shechter. The company is marked as one of the most promising water technology start-up companies and has received technology leadership awards such as The Guardian’s Cleantech 100, Global Water Technologies top 10, Artemis Top 50 and more.

Emefcy’s technology uses the principle of a fuel cell to generate electricity directly from the water. Its “electrogenic bioreactor” features an anaerobic anode chamber connected to a cathode chamber by an ion exchange membrane, produces electricity as organic matter in waste water decays and drives a current through the fuel cell.

This is different from other systems which use aerobic processes or anaerobic digestion to produce methane (natural gas) from the decomposition of organic material in waste water.

The technology generates electricity and also produces treated water as a by-product. The result transforms waste water treatment “from an energy-intensive, cost-intensive and carbon-intensive process, into an energy-generating and carbon-reducing process.”

Emefcy expects to apply its process initially for waste water treatment in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

“We will use Energy Technology Ventures’ investment to continue development of our technology into full-scale commercial implementation by the end of this year for municipal and industrial wastewater treatment,” said Levy.

Energy Technology Ventures is a company which focuses on the development of next-generation energy technologies. It invests in and offers commercial collaboration opportunities to companies in the renewable power generation, smart grid, energy efficiency, oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy, emission controls, water and biofuels sectors. The three companies behind Energy Technology Ventures intend to help start-ups develop next-generation energy technology.

General Electric recently announced that it would be building a research and development center in Israel, its eighth in the country.

The new center, which will be built near its GE Healthcare subsidiary in Haifa, will focus on medical devices, water and CleanTech.

GE previously has worked with Israeli companies such as the Better Place electric car initiative as well as with companies dealing with medical devices and CleanTech.

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