Arava Power, a joint venture of Kibbutz Ketura and foreign backers led by Yosef Abramowitz, announced that is has won approval from the Israel Electric Company (IEC) to build an 80MW solar PV field on kibbutz land in the Arava. IEC issued its approval once it had determined that it could run a line from the Arava to the national grid.
Once built, the Arava PV field will be the largest in the world, twice as big as the current largest field in Germany, which has a capacity of 40MW. The solar panels will be built on about 1500 dunams of kibbutz land within four years and will cost US$400 million.
Abramowitz has stated that the IEC’s approval was a critical step, as the land can now be rezoned from agricultural to power station use.
