Israel’s Epic Solar Tower Soars to the Sun
Israel is building a solar energy tower that will soar 820 feet high, part of an ambitious renewable energy project deep in the desert that could kickstart the lagging local industry.
According to the Associated Press, the tower, part of a sprawling solar power campus called Ashalim, will be the largest solar energy initiative in Israel when it is finished in 2018.
For years, Israeli engineers have created advanced solar energy technology for export. But they found it difficult to implement their ideas at home due to government bureaucracy. Today, Israel gets less 2.5 percent of its energy from renewable energy, far behind cloudier countries like Germany, which derives 30 percent of its electricity from solar and wind power.
The Ashalim project, created by BrightSource Energy with General Electric and NOY Infrastructure & Energy Investment Fund, is meant to change that.
The solar tower uses 50,000 mirrors, which reflect the sun’s energy onto the tower, which heats a boiler that creates steam to spin a turbine and create electricity.
About a dozen solar tower fields exist in the world, including three towers in California.
In addition to the tower, another plot at Ashalim will store solar energy when the sun goes down. A third area of the project will use photovoltaic technology to produce power. Together, the solar tecnhologies will generate about 310 megawatts of power, which is about 1.6 percent of the country’s needs.
Israel’s Finance Ministry says if the Ashalim site is successful, it will aim to create more renewable projects.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO