Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is a beautiful day outside, Corn. The sun is absolutely beating down on the Judean hills.
It really is. And that is actually perfect because our housemate Daniel sent us a voice note this morning about exactly that. He was looking at the solar panels on the rooftops around the neighborhood and wondering why, in a country as sun drenched as Israel, we are not seeing even more of it. He wanted us to dig into the history, the current state of solar here, and how we compare to our neighbors and the rest of the world.
Daniel always has a knack for timing. This is a topic I have been following closely, especially with some of the new data coming out of the Ministry of Energy and the Electricity Authority recently. It is a fascinating story of early innovation followed by a bit of a mid life crisis, and now a very urgent scramble to catch up.
A mid life crisis for solar energy? That is an interesting way to put it. Let us start with that early innovation. Most people who visit Israel notice the white tanks and black panels on almost every rooftop. That is the solar water heater, right?
Exactly. The Dud Shemesh. It is probably Israel's most iconic contribution to low tech renewable energy. Back in the nineteen fifties, Israel was facing major energy insecurity. We did not have domestic oil or gas back then, and the regional situation made imports difficult. A physicist named Zvi Tabor developed a selective black coating that could absorb solar radiation while emitting very little heat.
And that led to the mandatory installation law in the nineteen eighties, right?
Yes, nineteen eighty. Israel was actually the first country in the world to mandate that all new residential buildings must have solar water heaters. Today, something like ninety percent of Israeli households use them. It saves about eight percent of our total electricity consumption annually. That is a massive head start that most countries never had.
So if we had this huge head start in the nineteen eighties, why does Daniel feel like we are lagging behind now? When you look at the actual electricity generation, not just heating water, where do we stand?
This is where the mid life crisis comes in. For a long time, Israel was very slow to transition from heating water to generating electricity via photovoltaics. As of the beginning of twenty twenty six, we are hovering around thirteen to fourteen percent of our total electricity coming from renewables, which is almost entirely solar.
Thirteen percent? That feels low for a place where you can practically fry an egg on the sidewalk for six months of the year. What happened to the targets? I remember hearing about a twenty percent target for twenty twenty five.
You are right to be skeptical. We officially missed that twenty percent target. The goal was to hit twenty percent by the end of twenty twenty five and thirty percent by twenty thirty. But a few things got in the way. First, there is the issue of the grid. Our national grid was built for a few large, centralized power plants, mostly coal and later natural gas. It was not designed for thousands of small solar arrays scattered across the country sending power back into the system.
Right, the duck curve problem. I have read about this. You have a massive surge of power in the middle of the day when the sun is out, but that is not necessarily when people are using the most electricity.
Exactly. And because Israel is essentially an energy island, we cannot just export our excess power to neighbors like Germany does with its neighbors in Europe. We have to manage every megawatt ourselves. If the grid cannot handle the surge, the system operators have to tell solar farms to shut down, which is called curtailment. It is incredibly wasteful.
So it is a hardware problem? We just need better wires?
It is wires, but it is also storage. To get past that fourteen percent ceiling, we need massive amounts of battery storage to move that midday sun to the evening peak. The good news is that twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five saw a huge push in battery tenders. We are finally seeing large scale four hour and six hour lithium ion batteries being deployed alongside solar farms.
Let us look at the regional context Daniel asked about. How do we look compared to our neighbors? Jordan, for example, is right next door and has a similar climate. Are they doing better?
This is a bit of a sore point for Israeli energy planners. Jordan has actually been a regional leader. By twenty twenty four, Jordan was getting nearly thirty percent of its electricity from renewables. That is double what Israel was doing at the same time.
Wow. Why is Jordan so far ahead? Is it just a matter of political will, or is there a geographic advantage?
It is a bit of both. Jordan has vast amounts of flat, empty desert land that is relatively easy to build on. In Israel, land is at an extreme premium. We have a huge conflict between using land for solar, for agriculture, for nature reserves, or for housing. Jordan also moved very aggressively on utility scale projects early on.
That brings up that water for energy deal we have talked about before, Project Prosperity. Daniel's prompt mentioned looking at how nations collaborate. What is the status of that?
Project Prosperity was the big vision. The idea was that Jordan would build a massive solar field to provide six hundred megawatts of green electricity to Israel, and in exchange, Israel would provide two hundred million cubic meters of desalinated water to Jordan. It was supposed to be this ultimate win win for regional stability.
But I imagine the geopolitical situation has complicated that.
Significantly. After the events of October twenty twenty three and the subsequent regional tensions, the project faced major delays. There were reports in late twenty twenty five that technical talks had resumed because, frankly, the underlying need has not changed. Jordan still needs water, and Israel still needs green energy to meet its international climate commitments. But the political friction makes it much harder to break ground on something that high profile.
It is a reminder that energy is never just about physics and engineering. It is deeply tied to security and diplomacy. But let us move away from the Middle East for a second. Daniel asked about successful case studies from other parts of the world. Who is the gold standard right now?
If we are talking about rooftop solar and grid management, you have to look at South Australia. It is a fascinating case because, like Israel, they are somewhat isolated in terms of their grid.
I remember you mentioning them before. Did they not hit a point where they were running entirely on solar?
Yes, it is incredible. On several days in twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five, during the middle of the day, rooftop solar alone provided over one hundred percent of the state's total electricity demand. For a few hours, the entire state was powered by the panels on people's houses.
How do they do that without the grid collapsing?
They invested heavily in two things. First, the big Tesla battery, the Hornsdale Power Reserve, which provides ultra fast frequency response to keep the grid stable. Second, they have very smart grid management. They can actually communicate with individual home inverters to balance the load. It is a level of digital sophistication that Israel is only just starting to implement with the rollout of smart meters.
That seems like the path forward for us. If we do not have the empty deserts of Jordan, we have to use every roof we have. I remember reading a report from the Ministry of Environmental Protection that said we could get a huge chunk of our power just from existing rooftops.
You are thinking of the twenty twenty three study. It estimated that if we covered every viable rooftop, parking lot, and industrial zone with panels, we could reach over forty percent of our national electricity needs without using a single acre of open land.
Forty percent? That is a game changer. So why is every parking lot in Jerusalem not covered in solar canopies? I would love to park my car in the shade and have it generate power at the same time.
It sounds like a no brainer, right? But the bureaucracy has been a nightmare. Until recently, you needed a full building permit just to put a canopy over a parking lot. Then you had to deal with the Israel Electric Corporation to get a connection point, which could take years. The good news is that in the last eighteen months, they have streamlined the process significantly. We are finally seeing a big uptick in what we call dual use solar.
Dual use. That means using the same piece of land for two things?
Exactly. This is one of my favorite technical developments. It is called agro photovoltaics. Instead of choosing between a farm and a solar field, you do both. You mount the panels high enough and far enough apart that tractors can drive under them and crops can grow in the partial shade.
Wait, do the plants not need the sun?
Some do, but many crops actually thrive in partial shade in hot climates like ours. It reduces evaporation, so you need less water, and the panels stay cooler because of the moisture from the plants, which actually makes the panels more efficient. It is a perfect feedback loop. There are pilot programs in the Galilee right now growing grapes and celery under solar panels.
That is fascinating. It feels like the solution to the land scarcity problem. But what about the economics? Daniel asked about how this powers our lives. For a regular person living in an apartment building in Jerusalem, like we do, can we actually participate in this?
That has been the missing piece for a long time. If you own a private house, you can put panels on your roof and sell power back to the grid. But for apartment dwellers, it was legally very complicated because the roof is shared property. However, new regulations passed in twenty twenty four have made it easier for homeowners' associations to vote on installing solar and sharing the profits or using it to power the building's elevators and common lights.
It feels like we are at a tipping point. The technology is there, the economics of solar are now cheaper than gas or coal, and we finally have the storage coming online.
We are. But I want to bring up one more case study that Daniel might find interesting. It is Morocco. They took a completely different approach with the Noor Ouarzazate complex.
Is that the one with the giant tower and the mirrors?
Yes. It is concentrated solar power, or C S P. Instead of using photovoltaic cells that turn light directly into electricity, they use thousands of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a central tower to heat up molten salt.
Molten salt sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.
It is brilliant because the salt stays hot for hours. They can use that heat to generate steam and run turbines long after the sun goes down. It solves the storage problem naturally. Morocco is now one of the world's leaders because of this. Israel actually has a similar plant in the Negev, the Ashalim power station. You can see the glowing tower from miles away.
I have seen it! It looks like the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings.
Exactly. But here is the catch. C S P is much more expensive to build than regular solar panels. While it was a great idea ten years ago, the price of batteries has dropped so fast that most experts now think photovoltaics plus batteries is the more economical way to go. Ashalim is a beautiful landmark, but we probably won't see many more like it.
So the future is probably more distributed. Millions of small panels on roofs, parking lots, and farms, all tied together by big batteries and smart software.
That is the vision. And it is not just about the environment. For Israel, it is a massive security issue. A centralized coal plant is a single point of failure. If it gets hit in a conflict, half the country goes dark. But if our power is distributed across ten thousand rooftops, it is almost impossible to take down the whole system.
That is a great point. Decentralization is resilience. So, if we look ahead to twenty thirty, do you think we will actually hit that thirty percent target? Or are we going to be sitting here in five years talking about another missed milestone?
I am cautiously optimistic. The bottleneck used to be the government not caring. Now, the bottleneck is just the physical speed of upgrading the grid and installing the batteries. The momentum in the private sector is unstoppable now because it is simply the cheapest way to get energy.
I hope you are right. It feels like we have the ingredients. We have the sun, we have the tech talent, and we have the urgent need for energy independence. We just need to get out of our own way.
Well said. And hey, speaking of getting out of the way, if you are listening to this and you have found this deep dive into solar energy helpful, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on Spotify or whatever podcast app you are using. It actually helps other people find the show and keeps us going.
It really does. We love doing these deep dives for you guys. If you want to see the show notes or get in touch with us, you can head over to myweirdprompts.com. You can find the R S S feed there and a contact form if you have a prompt like Daniel's that you want us to tackle.
Thanks to Daniel for the prompt. It was great to finally sit down and look at the numbers for twenty twenty six. It feels like we are finally moving in the right direction.
Definitely. Alright, I think that is a wrap for today. This has been My Weird Prompts.
I am Herman Poppleberry.
And I am Corn. We will see you next time.
Stay sunny, everyone.
Let us get into the specifics of the grid for a moment, Herman. You mentioned the grid was not built for this. If I am an entrepreneur and I want to build a ten megawatt solar field in the Arava desert today, what actually happens when I call the electric company?
Oh, it is a process. First, you need what is called a system survey. The Israel Electric Corporation looks at the high voltage lines near your site and calculates if they can handle the additional load. For years, the answer was almost always no. The lines were already at capacity from the gas plants. But in twenty twenty four, they started implementing what they call non firm connections.
Non firm? That sounds a bit shaky.
It basically means you can connect to the grid, but the operator reserves the right to cut you off if the grid gets too crowded. To make that work for investors, the government had to create a new compensation model. But the real breakthrough is the requirement that new solar fields must include at least four hours of battery storage. By storing the energy on site and releasing it slowly, you do not overwhelm the wires.
So the battery is not just for the night time, it is also a buffer for the grid during the day.
Exactly. It is like a traffic light for electricity. It prevents a massive pileup on the transmission lines. This is something California has been doing very successfully. They have added massive amounts of storage in the last three years, and it has almost entirely eliminated their afternoon blackouts.
California is another great comparison. They have that similar Mediterranean climate. I know they have had some controversy recently over their net metering rules, though. The incentives for people to put solar on their own roofs.
Yes, they moved to what they call N E M three point zero, which significantly reduced the amount of money the utility pays you for the extra power you send back. It caused a bit of a slump in rooftop installations. Israel is watching that closely. Right now, our incentives are still pretty good, but as we get more solar, the value of that midday electricity goes down. The real value shifts to the energy you can provide at eight p m.
Which brings us back to batteries. It seems like every road leads to storage.
It really does. And I want to touch on one more thing Daniel asked about, which is the history. We talked about the Dud Shemesh, but did you know that Israel was also a pioneer in large scale solar thermal? A company called Luz International, founded in Jerusalem, built the first major solar thermal power plants in the Mojave Desert in California back in the nineteen eighties.
Wait, an Israeli company built the California plants?
Yes. At the time, they were the largest solar plants in the world. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt in the early nineties when oil prices crashed and federal tax credits in the U S expired. It is a classic story of being too far ahead of the market. But the engineers from Luz went on to found almost every other major solar company in Israel today. The DNA of the global solar industry is surprisingly Israeli.
That is a proud legacy. It makes it even more ironic that we have been lagging behind in our own domestic generation. It is like the shoemaker's children having no shoes.
Precisely. But the shoes are finally being made. We are seeing these massive floating solar arrays on reservoirs now, too. Have you seen those?
I have! They look like giant blue carpets on the water. Why put them on water instead of land?
It is that land scarcity issue again. Israel has hundreds of water reservoirs for agriculture. By covering them with panels, you get three benefits. You generate power, you stop the water from evaporating in the heat, and the water keeps the panels cool, which makes them more efficient. It is another one of those beautiful dual use solutions.
It is amazing how many of these solutions involve just being clever with the space we already have. We do not need to pave over the desert if we use our roofs, our parking lots, our farms, and our reservoirs.
Exactly. And that is the shift in thinking. We are moving from big, industrial, centrally planned projects to a more organic, distributed web of energy. It is more complex to manage, but it is much more robust.
I like that. A web of energy. It feels more natural, in a way. Like a forest rather than a single giant tree.
That is a great analogy, Corn. A forest is much harder to knock down than a single tree.
Well, I think we have given Daniel plenty to chew on. From the nineteen fifties water heaters to the twenty twenty six battery revolution. It is a big journey.
It really is. And it is one that we are living through right now. Every time you see a new panel going up in the neighborhood, that is another little piece of that forest being planted.
Alright, let us wrap this up before the sun goes down and we have to rely on those batteries we keep talking about.
Good idea.
Thanks again for listening to My Weird Prompts. Check out the website at myweirdprompts.com for more episodes and to find our RSS feed. We are also on Spotify, so make sure to follow us there so you never miss an episode.
And don't forget that review! It really helps. Until next time, I'm Herman Poppleberry.
And I'm Corn. Thanks for joining us.
Bye everyone.
Take care.
