Clean Energy's posts with tag: clean-energy
April 22, '08  (IsraelNN.com) The Infrastructure Ministry has announced a mammoth project that will supply Eilat with almost of its needed electricity by using a solar power station. Approximately 3,000 acres will be set aside for the project. Ministry officials said that there are very few cloudy days in Eilat that would require using electricity from the Israel Electric Corp. (IEC). The ministry also said that the Negev and Arava will be given first preference in other projects to promote solar energy. The generating capacity of IEC often is pressed to its limits, causing brownouts and blackouts in peak periods of demand during the hot summer months and during cold spells in the winter.
January 16, '08 (IsraelNN.com) Jerusalem's municipality has placed its first solar-powered garbage dumpster on Jaffa Road, in the city center, according to Globes.
The solar-powered dumpster can accommodate 750 liters (200 gallons) of compacted waste even though it is only 150 liters in size.
The dumpster has a built-in solar-powered compression system that can compress garbage to up to a fifth of its volume and operates for up to five days on the power supplied by just one hour of sunlight.
|  | September 30, 2007 The electric car is being resurrected. Amid the global threats of pollution, oil funded terrorism, and 'peak oil', the Western world is looking to replace fossil fuels with clean, renewable sources of energy.
| | | Cornucopians are becoming extinct; scientists, engineers, politicians, and oil tycoons have recognized that we have used 50% of the world's oil supply in less than 150 years, and with China and India ramping up their industrial economies we may run out of our most used energy source in far less time. A full circle energy solution would include fully renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric along with efficient machines to plug into those systems. In other words, the West desperately needs a futuristic approach to life without oil. Enter Israel.
A country minuscule in size and barren of natural resources, Israel has succeeded in defending herself from a barrage of existential military threats while becoming a leader in the global economy. Great in intellectual capital, Israel has developed the world's largest solar power plant (from which PG&E has agreed to purchase 553 megawatts of power, enough power for 400,000 Bay Area homes), as well as the world's largest water desalination plant. She has the greatest number of companies listed on the NASDAQ other than the United States and Canada, has raised the greatest amount of venture capital funds second to Silicon Valley, and has the greatest number of scientific research papers published per capita.
The latest project comes from an Israeli who wants to use Israel's 'gift of enterprising' to help humanity wean off of oil. Shai Agassi, former executive at German software enterprise company SAP AG, is leading a new team of minds into not-so-charted territory. Agassi completed military service in Israel as a programmer for the IDF, and then earned his bachelors degree in computer science from The Technion in Haifa. Venturing into the business world, he later sold the most successful of his software startups for over $400 million to SAP, where he continued working until March 2007.
What he was up to next was first reported in August by Reuters - holding company Israel Corporation agreed to invest $100 million in Agassi's new electric vehicle venture, pending due diligence, with several other investors; the first round funding is $200 million, bringing the total value of the venture to $300 million. The company is stealthily named BetterPLC, a reference to an automated method of manufacturing.
The electric car is a major component of the energy paradigm shift: one where the world relies mainly on renewable sources of energy, thereby reducing the human effect of global warming, shifting the currency balance away from Muslim terrorists, and declawing the menace of peak oil.
"Our goal is to get to 100,000 cars on the road in 2010," said Agassi. He believes that since Israel has an 89% tax on vehicles, and a 100% tax on fuel, if there were zero emissions and zero fuel, there would be zero taxes on cars.
"You tell an Israeli that Israel will be the first country to eliminate the use of oil, and they sign up," Shai said in a speech given at Stanford University. But he realizes that the electric car won't stop in Israel, "If we can do it Israel, and it works, we can create a repeatable model that maybe then works in London... and then we can hopefully do it 50 times in China."
And about powering the new fleet, "We actually think there is a missing entity in the automotive industry that would create, effectively, ubiquity of electrons. Ubiquity of charge. Somebody that will guarantee you that wherever you go, you can charge your car... [and] actually be cheaper for you than buying a fuel-based car."
President Shimon Peres has reportedly told Shai's company along with other vehicle manufacturers that the Israeli government would be willing to provide grants and tax-benefits for the construction of electric vehicle factories.
Every dollar generated by these clean energy plants is a dollar not spent on oil, and a barrel of oil not burned. This makes for a win-win situation for capitalists and for environmentalists.
Within 5 years Israel should be shipping the first electric automobile ready for mass adoption. If the Israeli car succeeds in the marketplace it will have potential to reduce anti-Semitism in the world, and further legitimize Israel's standing.
The reputations of German and Japanese automobiles have certainly diluted American memories of old wars; if the Israeli car is as reliable as its German and Japanese competitors, then maybe it can dilute Arab memories of past wars, and be the car we all ride towards peace.
And in the future people will no longer ask who killed the electric car. They'll ask who killed the internal combustion engine. And the answer will be: Shai Agassi, Israeli.
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| | New Energy Source is the Pits by Gil Ronen
(IsraelNN.com) Israeli biomass energy start-up Genova, which is now setting up its first pilot plant, uses olive pits to make energy. | | | The company, which was founded in September 2004, has its headquarters in the town of Karmiel, in the Galilee, reports Israel21c. Biomass, or organic waste, is a by-product of various industries worldwide, including forestry, agriculture and livestock farming. The biomass is generally transported to a landfill to decompose, or it is burned. Decomposition and burning both create methane, a greenhouse gas which, if harnessed properly, can be a valuable source of energy. An engineer named Dr Yuri Wladislawsky, who immigrated to Israel from Tbilisi, Georgia in 1996, came up with a new way of burning the biomass. He decided to use it on olive waste, from the presses which produce olive oil. The thinking was this: if the company could succeed in harnessing olive waste, which is difficult to use because of the pits, it would be able to handle all other kinds of biomass successfully. Wladislawsky founded Genova with this aim in mind, initially setting it up within the Misgav Technology Center incubator in the Galilee. Genova's technology employs a new, secret technique to maintain the high temperatures needed for the conversion process. The olive waste is heated and dried and then introduced into the converter, where it undergoes two processes: pyrolysis and gasification. These involve heating the biomass to 800 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which its molecules break down. Several gases, including methane and carbon monoxide are produced which, because they are lighter than air, flow upwards through a pipe into a standard gas turbine to generate electricity. The other by-product, coke, can be sold for use to power air conditioners or as filters for various substances. "Only ten percent of the electricity we produce is used to power the [olive waste conversion] process," said Yonat Grant, an industrial engineer who is the CEO of the company. "The process is 90% efficient. Our competitors are only 50% efficient, at best." While the cost of producing a kilowatt with the competitors' systems is 9 cents, Genova's cost is only 2 cents per kilowatt, she says. Genova's high efficiency and low cost has attracted much attention. The Israel Electric Company added a $60,000 investment to the NIS 1.4 million (about $300,000) that Genova received from the government-run Misgav incubator over the two years of its stay. Genova has designed a pilot project in which olive waste from the village of Julis, in northern Israel, is fed into a converter in order to produce electricity which in turn powers the press in a self-sustaining system. The process is being carried out in a 200 kw/hour plant in the Druze village. | | | Besides energy, the experiment has also generated a great deal of interest. An investor in California, famous for its wine industry and high awareness of environmental issues, asked to try out the Genova reactor with vineyard waste products. There is also interest coming from Australia, which has a flourishing olive oil industry. It is expected that other investors in the “green” industries won’t be far behind. | | |
| IsraGood Posted: 20 Sep 2007 12:54 AM CDT  (Hat Tip: Israel Times, Image Credit: Inhabitat.com)Hy (Chaim) Brown whose notable projects include constructing Disney World in Florida, as well as the World Trade Towers (that were sadly destroyed on 9/11, 2001) may be making yet another mark upon humanity by constructing affordable solar houses for "the rest of us." (Jerusalem Post) The model of the 70-square-meter houses, which he says can be added onto as families expand, was the brainchild of his engineering students at the University of Colorado, where he commutes to teach. They twice won a US government-sponsored competition to create a workable home that runs exclusively on solar energy, the second time for building one that families could afford.
The house, fully equipped with appliances - including dishwasher, washing machine, refrigerator, oven and tailor-made items such as a Shabbat heating plate (or, for Beduin needs, a courtyard for livestock) - costs $50,000, and can be assembled from start to finish in two weeks. All it requires to run efficiently, says Brown, is four days of sun per month. Though perfect for the climate of the Negev, the house can be erected anywhere.
"My idea is to dream big," he says. "Who knew we'd have Israel?" Although a 70-square meter house may not be a dream home for some individuals and families, this type of housing may appeal towards the lower income families, especially since they come with "free" electricity. | sss
By Judy Siegel September 05, 2007 Israel21C.org
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Prof. Arie Zaban: This will mark the beginning of a whole new path that combines independence from fossil fuels with a greener, more sustainable future.
| | A Bar-Ilan Univeristy nanotechnology expert has invented a photovoltaic cell - which produces electricity from the sun's rays - that could be dramatically cheaper to produce.
The cells, which are composed of metallic wires mounted on conductive glass, can form the basis of solar cells that produce electricity with efficiency similar to that of conventional, silicon-based cells while being much cheaper to produce, says Prof. Arie Zaban, head of BIU's nanotechnology institute, who has just patented the technology.
The design is based on nanotechnology, which makes use of microscopic structures, and originally involved cells with an area of less than one square centimeter. But, Zaban said, his research took a "giant" step forward when he increased the size of the cells to 100 square centimeters.
"Initially, we created linked arrays of very small cells, which led to a loss of efficiency because the sunlight hitting the space between the cells was not converted to electricity," Zaban explained. With much more surface area, the new array actively captures the sun's energy and becomes "a practical choice for solar energy production," he said.
Zaban's cells feature a sponge-like array of microscopic "nanodots" arranged on flexible plastic sheets. The key to his system is the use of standard semiconductor material injected with an organic dye, which makes it become energy absorbent. Orionsolar, a Jerusalem-based company that has entered into a partnership with Bar-Ilan, is developing commercial applications for inexpensive, dye-based photovoltaics based on Zaban's work.
"Given the state of the technology, I believe that the new solar cells will be available commercially within the next five years," he said. "This will mark the beginning of a whole new path that combines independence from fossil fuels with a greener, more sustainable future."
Another of his recent discoveries involves reducing the amount of platinum used in photovoltaic cells, another important step towards reducing production costs. "We've found a way to produce platinum nanodots ... [which] reduce the amount of platinum needed by a factor of 40," he said.
"Cost is an important factor in the success of any solar technology," Zaban explained. "To become widely adopted, solar cells must generate electricity at lower cost than what we now spend on fossil fuels. At the same time, we have to make the basic infrastructure extremely affordable - because the third-world countries that stand to reap the most benefit from solar power usually lack the money to invest in it. By making cells more efficient and keeping material costs down, nano-based techniques are moving us closer to that goal." |
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| | | A new power plant in the Hefer Valley has begun to produce electricity from manure and other organic waste. According to Globes, the power plant will generate 2-2.4 megawatt/hour (MW/h) by the end of the year. Its initial output is 1.6 MW/h, of which 1.3 MW/h is delivered to the national grid and 300 KW/h is used to operate the facility itself. The Tambour Hefer Ecology plant is located near Hadera. The Hefer Valley Cooperative Society is accomplishing two goals through the plant. It was ordered to reduce pollutants generated by the communities’ 12,000 dairy cows and is also using the 600 tons of manure generated daily to produce electricity. "This is unquestionably an important milestone,” Granite HaCarmel CEO Amiaz Sagis said. “This facility fits in with Granite HaCarmel's strategy to invest in infrastructures and ecology. The company is also investing resources to develop alternative energy, water treatment, and desalination." The web site TreeHugger.com took notice of the Israeli project, pointing out an additional benefit: “[Also positive] is that methane has a stronger greenhouse or ‘climate forcing’ effect than C02. The benefit of capturing methane before it escapes a farm manure pond, subverting its destiny of dispersing to the stratosphere, far exceeds the obvious short-term gains of making methane and its byproducts useful for farmers.” If successful, the project is due to be replicated in other areas of the country with high concentrations of dairies and cattle-ranches.
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