Sunpower Israel inaugurated the commercial operation of the largest solar power plant in Israel on Tuesday 6 August.
The 10MW facility is near the Mivtahim settlement in the Negev Desert, about 10km east of Gaza.
In attendance at the launch ceremony were Israel’s energy and water minister Silvan Shalom and representatives from Noy Fund and Enlight Energy, investment partners in the project.
The power plant will span 25 hectares and generate around 22GWh per year, providing electricity for around 3,000 homes. Around NIS150 million (US$42 million) investment was required for the project, which took around seven months to construct.
The Negev Desert is an area of high solar irradiance which is also mostly unsuitable for arable farming, making it a practical location for a PV plant. Electricity will be sold to the grid under Israel’s feed-in-tariff provisions.
Israel was one of the earliest adopters of solar heating for domestic water use but the adoption of PV generation has been gradual. In 2009, the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructures set a target to produce 10% of the country’s energy from renewable sources by 2020. The resolution also stipulated that power stations should be constructed at a rate of no less than 250MW per year, from 2010. As of December 2012, only around 1% of Israel’s energy came from renewable sources.
