FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)The world is going green. It’s just taking a very long time.
China is a serial polluter, but the government is investing heavily in green energy, probably for several reasons. First off it creates jobs. Second off, China wants to compete on the global stage. Thirdly, China realizes it is a serial polluter and wants to offset some of the criticism.
In the U.S. we’ve been hearing the promises for years. Solar, wind, clean burning shale. But today unfortunately only a very small amount of American energy is created through clean technologies.
Israel perhaps has more to gain than anyone else from going clean. Right now Israel is almost fully dependent on fossil fuels that pollute the country. Israel still gets it’s oil from secondary sources because Arab nations won’t sell to Israel directly. It’s expensive and Israel is helping fuel its enemies.
That’s just one of the many reasons why Eilat recently hosted clean energy companies from all over Israel, and investors, global stock exchanges and government agencies from all over the world flew in to see if Israel’s clean-tech boom will be as successful as Israel’s technology boom.
The fact the conference was in Eilat, on Israel’s southern tip along the Red Sea was not an accident. Eilat is within eyesight of the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia. The oil tankers come in within a stone’s throw of Eilat to fuel Egypt and Jordan. The Eilat Alternative Energy Conference was a clear shot across Saudi Arabia’s bow, an attempt to show the world Israel aims to be a global energy leader, soon.
While Israel is still almost fully dependent on dirty fuel, largely coal and oil for its energy needs, the country makes up for its massive shortage of natural resources with an abundance of brain power, ingenuity and an entrepreneurial spirit matched by none.
The amount of Israeli companies specializing in powering the future is too long to mention, more than one hundred were present in Eilat. But a few of the all-stars are setting new standards in solar, wind and bio-energy.
Zenith Solar has a solar farm set up on Kibbutz Yavneh just south of Tel Aviv. They are helping power the kibbutz with electricity and the solar dishes on a good day are Yavneh’s sole provider of hot water. The old boiler system is almost completely obsolete. Zenith isn’t special for that reason. It is special because it is able to harness more of the sun’s rays than anyone else by far. The average solar dish is considered to be about 25 percent efficient.
That means it is able to use about a quarter of the solar energy it captures. Zenith’s dishes hold 80 percent. CEO Roy Segev’s dream was to have homes throughout California have a Zenith dish in their backyards to power the house and provide hot water. That won’t happen for now, in part because of regulation issues and cost which has always been an issue. But he says, “at the rate we are going now in terms of global sales and production we are getting very close to parody with the cost of traditional sources of energy.”
Sovna is a wind-power company that has carried through on an idea a lot of people have probably had. Instead of setting up wind farms away from population centers, Sovna is putting wind turbines on tall buildings in Tel Aviv. The buildings create wind tunnels. Sovna’s devices are installed on the rooftops of skyscrapers where they capture wind 20 meters above those roofs. That energy is then stored, sent back into buildings as a power source, and sent back into the national grid to help power the rest of the country. Sovna is also conducting tests on New York City skyscrapers right now.
Seambiotic is a firm started by a British born, former star attorney in Israel named Daniel Chinn. His company isn’t just on the road to making bio-diesel out of algae, they’ve also found a way to take the exhaust from pollution causing fossil fuel smokestacks at one of Israel’s biggest powerplants in Ashkelon, and make that pollution alternative.
Seambiotic takes the carbon dioxide waste, funnels it into algae pools causing the algae to grow faster and stronger. That carbon dioxide is one of the things allowing the company to harvest a new batch of algae every week while traditional corn based bio-fuels can only be harvested once or twice a year. Chinn says, “within five or ten years we will really be able to drive down the cost of algae based fuel, and that’s really the only thing stopping us right now.” This year Seambiotic is in the process of setting up one of the largest algae growing facilities in the world, in China.
Aora Solar has set itself up in one of the most desolate parts of the Negev Desert, at Kibbutz Samar. The kibbutz is generally very quiet, the homes look like something you saw in Star Wars on the desert planet of Tatooine. The Chief Operations Manager is Yuval Susskind, a South African immigrant with big goals.
His company points hundreds of mirrors towards a fruit shaped shelter suspended 40 yards above the desert floor. You can see it from 30 miles away. It captures the directed sunlight and turns it into power and hot water. It is perfect for isolated villages in towns and for developing nations that have no access to power or an electric grid like in India, Africa and China.
Arava Power was founded by an American named Yossi Abramowitz. He and his family moved from Boston to the Negev based Kibbutz Kettura three years ago. He was a volunteer on the kibbutz 20 years ago and returned with his family to get away from the hustle and bustle of Boston. On his first day with his family in the Negev he said he opened up the door and felt an enormous amount of heat smacking him in the face. “It was like that burst of hot air you feel on a hot August day in New York City when the subway approaches.”
Abramowitz went on to say “I thought this whole area must run on solar power. I asked around, I was shocked to find out there was no industrial solar power, not only at the kibbutz, but in all of southern Israel.” It took Yossi two years to get through a mountain of Israeli bureaucracy, but he did it. Siemens now owns 40 percent of the company and is investing heavily to make Abramowitz’s vision of a solar panel lined Negev a reality.
Then there’s “Better Place,” headed by former Israeli Deputy Chief of Staff and possible future Chief of Staff, General Moshe Kaplinsky. “Better Place” is producing battery operated cars that will have no need at all for gasoline. Kaplinsky says, “most of the world’s oil comes from places that don’t share western values. It is a huge mission to reprogram the way the world drives but it is the right mission for Israel.”
The company will start selling cars next year to the public, at costs similar to regular gasoline powered cars. Hundreds of Israeli companies have already ordered them for their employees. In Israel, unlike in the U.S., many companies provide vehicles for their employees and the gasoline to fuel them.
“Better Place” was founded by Shai Agassi who left his job as a top executive at the German software giant SAP to pursue his dream of making battery operated cars. The company just opened its first operations center in a former giant oil storage tank in a former fuel depot in Tel Aviv. It is completely open to the public. Hundreds of Israelis and potential investors come from all over the world every day to learn more about the idea and to test drive “Better Place’s” cars.
When you drive it, the car itself is very quiet, but when you press the gas pedal the car accelerates as well as any gasoline fueled car. It is not like driving a golf cart. The operations center is as well produced as any exhibit you’d see at Disney’s Epcot Center, complete with Shai’s hologram explaining his vision of the future, which hopefully isn’t very far away.
Jason Gewirtz, who grew up in Maryland, is as senior producer at CNBC. He recently produced the one-hour show “Beyond The Barrel: The Race To Fuel The Future,” in which the Israeli companies mentioned above and other operations will be features. It will air at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 22, which is Earth Day. For more information, visit http://www.cnbc.com/id/36123486/ .