Energy Exchange

High tech entrepreneurs here repeatedly tell you that Israel is a small market, so if you hope to have your idea become a commercial success, from the start it must be designed and developed with other countries and cultures in mind.  What is true for software is also true for innovative ideas for sustainable living.  The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, a program of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was established in 1974 to facilitate the sustainable development of the Negev desert – an area comprising 60% of Israel’s total land mass – but quickly established itself as one of the world’s leading research institutions on the challenges of living sustainably on the world’s many dry lands.  Professor Pedro Berliner, the director of the Institute tells the story of how they discovered that planting acacia trees in close proximity to crops like wheat or maize produces better results for both trees and crop than if planted apart.  The idea was piloted in Kenya and is now being brought to Botswana, where the Blaustein Institute hopes to develop a permanent presence in partnership with one of Botswana’s existing universities.  This is a good reminder that simple, low-tech solutions can often make a big difference to both people and the planet.

Credit: Zazzle

Of course, when it comes to energy, things are rarely ever simple.  Professor David Faiman, Chair of the Department of Solar Energy & Environmental Physics at the Blaustein Institute, spent the rest of the morning explaining the challenges of bringing solar energy to scale.  For over 30 years, Dr. Faiman has pioneered research into concentrated solar, and a commercial product based on his research, manufactured and marketed by Zenith Solar, shows tremendous promise for raising efficiency, lowering cost, and greatly reducing the physical footprint of commercially meaningful quantities of solar electricity.  Dr. Faiman would surely be both embarrassed and amused to be called a solar energy rock star, but I’ll call him that all the same. 

Equally exciting is the work Dr. Faiman has been doing to conceptualize what would be required to transition Israel’s electric grid to renewable energy.  Dr. Faiman, like many Israelis I’ve met on this trip, is both a visionary and a realist.  On the one hand, he believes it is possible for Israel to get to 90 percent renewable energy based on solar, energy storage, and natural gas-fired generation, but on the other hand, he believes it could take 60 years to get there.  His primary point is that Israel needs to start the transition now for there to be any hope of making even a 60 year deadline.  This means phasing out coal (which Israel continues to depend on quite a bit) and staying away from nuclear, both of which are too inflexible for a renewable-centric world.  Investments in natural-gas fired generation might be ok, as some of these facilities would likely be required to recharge the energy storage systems that would perform the lion’s share of the work in-filling where solar output is unavailable or varies.  His overarching concern is that Israel will continue to make short-term decisions that lead to the construction of conventional energy infrastructure, such as new coal plants (a proposal for a new plant was only narrowly defeated two years ago)  that all but lock the nation into a long-term future of fossil fuel dependence and high carbon pollution.

After a short visit to the research facility of Brightsource, a concentrating solar energy provider active in the United States, we began our hour and a half journey back to Tel Aviv.  As the bus rumbled along, I reflected on the irony that in a land of all this energy technology innovation, so little of it is actually deployed in Israel.  Indeed, practically the only place you see solar photovoltaic panels deployed in Israel are on the ramshackle homes of the Bedouin, who for a variety of reasons, are not otherwise connected to Israel’s electric grid.  Tel Aviv may be a sophisticated, high tech capital, but it is the agrarian, socially-traditional Bedouin, who is light years ahead when it comes to embracing advanced energy technology.

I’ve now asked several Israelis why this is, and two answers stick out in my mind.  The first is that Israel is a place where everyone focuses on the near term, because the future is so unpredictable.  Random rocket attacks (a rocket slammed into Beersheva this morning about a half hour after we checked out of our hotel there) and sudden outbreaks of serious fighting certainly contribute to a “live for this moment” attitude.   The second answer is tied to the first.  As one Israeli explained to me, after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel, like the rest of the world suffered the consequences of high oil prices and invested in renewable energy, but as oil prices fell, the government came to view renewable deployment as expensive and unnecessary.   The recent experience of the oil embargo notwithstanding, the energy minister at the time concluded that Israel’s energy requirements will always be so small in the general scheme of things that even in times of global shortage there will always be fossil fuels available somewhere, albeit at a price.  In short, Israel did not have an energy supply problem, it had a money problem, and the only challenge was to find the cheapest of available options.

Fast forward to today.  The Egyptian natural gas pipeline that carried 40 percent of Israel’s natural gas supply was blown up this spring.  And, what is the response?  The Israel Electric Company simply switched to purchasing fuel oil and coal while it waits for the nation’s significant new offshore gas reserves to come on line.  A triumph for short term thinking in a nation that sells its visionary clean energy technologies to the rest of the world.

Source: Trekkie Gal

A lumber yard in the middle of Tel Aviv is an unlikely place to discover innovative new technology to transform ocean waves into energy, but there I was watching a demonstration of wave-to-energy technology in a makeshift wave tank constructed by Shmuel Ovadia.  Ovadia is a talented engineer passionate about harnessing the power of the ocean when he is not otherwise engaged in running his successful high-end lumber business.  See for yourself at:  http://www.sde.co.il/.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I am on the first day of a seven trip for U.S. energy leaders sponsored by Project Interchange, an educational institute of the American Jewish Committee, and by the time I arrived at Ovadia’s lumber yard in the late afternoon, I had already seen tremendous creativity in the unlikeliest places.  Our morning was spent walking down Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, Israel’s equivalent of Silicon Valley, dropping by several of the technology incubators that are a large part of the reason why Israel is known as the “start-up nation.”  

Here, 20-somethings only a few years out of Israel’s army – where technology and project management skills are acquired and honed – are developing innovative software at a furious pace.  The aging, somewhat decrepit buildings dating back to Israel’s socialist early years, are brimming with entrepreneurial drive and youthful spirit.  Most interesting to me was a visit to the IDC Elevator, where Shmuel Chafets, Director of Business Development for Giza Venture Capital, described a recent investment in a start-up that is applying sophisticated software and smart grid technology to improve the efficiency of water delivery systems, which – among other things – anticipates leaks before they happen. 

In Israel, a nation increasingly reliant on energy-intensive desalination, saving water is also saving energy, a lesson at the heart of our report two years ago on the Energy-Water Nexus in Texas.  This visit got me wondering whether this same technology might be helpful in EDF’s efforts to partner with gas utilities to reduce methane leaks along their distribution systems.  Surely such smart grid ingenuity can be used to help fight the causes of global warming and not just the fresh water scarcity that is one of its many symptoms?

While software companies in Israel do well in attracting venture capital from the United States, Europe and, more recently, Southeast Asia, guys like Shmuel Ovadia struggle to attract capital to their bright ideas.  Even venture capitalists like to see commercial scale prototypes before investing major dollars, and good-old fashioned mechanical technologies are a whole lot more physically difficult and expensive to get to commercial scale than software solutions.  So it takes a special type of investor to risk the serious capital it takes to bring a hardware solution to market. 

It is a challenge, but not impossible, as our visit to Better Place’s Tel Aviv showroom demonstrated.  Here, we were treated to a test drive of the Renault Fluence ZE, an all-electric four passenger sedan, that has a range of approximately 100 miles and a battery that can either be recharged at home or our work or swapped out in a 5-minute visit to a Better Place ‘refueling’ station.  When you buy the car (and had we been Israelis, sales people were there ready to take our order), you buy a contract for miles to go with it.  Included in that contract are up to two charging stations, the electricity they supply, and access to any of Better Place’s battery swapping stations now being constructed throughout Israel. 

In short, the Better Place’s Renault Fluence is like the cell phone I have carried with me to Israel.  It is my phone, but I purchase the international sym card and the corresponding minutes of voice and data from Orange, a local carrier, which is easily slipped into the phone and recharged with new minutes as needed. 

Tomorrow we head down south to the Negev to see what is brewing in the world of solar energy.  I can only imagine what surprises await us.  I’ll keep you posted.