Solar Power in Israel - History and Development

History and Development

In 1949, prime minister David Ben-Gurion offered Harry Zvi Tabor a job on the 'physics and engineering desk' of the Research Council of Israel, which he accepted. His first task was to create an Israeli national laboratory to create standards amongst the different measurements in use in the country, primarily British, Ottoman and metric. Once the laboratory was established, he focused on solar energy for research and development.

Solar energy was particularly attractive for two reasons. First was the abundance and strength of the sun's rays on Israeli land. Israel's geographic latitude location is on the 30th parallel north, where the annual incident solar irradiance is 2000 kWh per sq.m. Second, Israeli land lacks oil, and the conflicts with its neighbors made the procurement of a stable source of energy a national priority. In particular, it is argued that the best defense against missile attack felling the national power grid would be to build a distributed power network, which would mean solar fields of 25–50 megawatts across Israel.

Early in the 1950s, Tabor began to examine why solar installations were inefficient. He eventually devised ‘selective black surfaces’, which his team at the National Physical Laboratory modified using nickel and chrome methods to blacken metals. These surfaces, which became known as Tabor surfaces, are particularly effective at trapping heat for use in solar water heaters.

Tabor and French immigrant Lucien Bronicki developed a small solar power unit, the Organic Rankine cycle turbine, for developing countries with problematic power grids. It was designed to neutralize the maintenance issues of reciprocating engines so it had only one moving part, the rotor. A 3 kWe prototype was exhibited at the 1961 United Nations Conference on New Sources of Energy in Rome, but it failed to find commercial success.