In the middle of southern Israel’s desert, engineers are hard at work building the world’s tallest solar tower, reflecting the nation’s high hopes for renewable energy.
Once completed late next year, the Ashalim Tower will rise to 240m, taller than Paris’ Montparnasse Tower and London’s Gherkin, according to the Israeli government and the consortium building it.
Covered in stainless steel, the square tower in the rocky Negev Desert with a peak resembling a giant lighthouse will be visible from dozens of kilometers away.
Photo: AFP
A field of mirrors covering 300 hectares — the size of more than 400 football pitches — will stretch out from its base, directing sunlight toward the tower’s peak to an area called the boiler, which looks like a giant lightbulb.
The boiler, whose temperature will rise to 600°C, generates steam that is channeled towards the foot of the tower, where electricity is produced.
The construction, costing an estimated 650 million euros (US$723 million), is being financed by US firm General Electric, which has bought the energy business of France’s Alstom, with Israeli private investment fund Noy also involved.
Israel’s government launched a tender for the project in 2010, committing to purchase electricity from it over 25 years as part of a shift toward renewable energy and energy independence.
The country mainly generates electricity using plants fired by coal, natural gas and fuel oil. Its domestic supply of natural gas has grown with the discovery of fields in the Mediterranean.
Solar requires a major investment, though costs are gradually coming down.
Energy from a solar tower is “two to three times more expensive to produce than classic electricity plants using carbon,” for example, said Eran Gartner, who heads the Megalim consortium managing the project.
The tower should provide 121 megawatts, or 1 percent of Israel’s electricity needs, enough for a city of 120,000 households.
The nation of 8 million people is seeking to make renewable energy account for 10 percent of its total consumption by 2020.
Solar power offers a clean alternative to fuel and carbon-fired electricity plants, which contribute to global warming with their heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions.
“The government agreed to move ahead with this technology — even though we do not hide the fact that it is more expensive than traditional electricity production — precisely to achieve lower costs over time,” Gartner said at the site.
“The second solar tower will be slightly less expensive, the third much less expensive, et cetera,” he said.
He predicted a futuristic landscape of towers overlooking the desert.
Israel could in theory meet all its electricity needs through solar energy by using only 4 percent of the Negev Desert, said Eitan Parnass, head of the Green Energy Association of Israel.
Israel’s offshore gas finds are a major boost toward energy independence, but Parnass said it must continue to diversify to avoid reliance on a single source in the turbulent Middle East.
“We are in a situation where we cannot simply look at the economic aspect,” he said.
“Israel has no choice but to diversify its energy independence, first for reasons of security,” he said.
However, critics have panned the project as too expensive and complex compared with other solutions.
Yael Cohen, an Israeli lawmaker with the opposition Zionist Union alliance and co-chair of the Green Movement political party, said the project has “requirements so demanding and costs so high” that it cannot be replicated.
Solar power has for years formed a part of life in Israel, where rooftop panels are often used to heat the water tanks of homes.
A solar tower and its field of mirrors, a technology known as concentrated solar thermal, is only profitable as part of a large-scale project, unlike a photovoltaic field, where each panel acts as a small generator.
The Ashalim Tower will be equipped with 50,600 projecting mirrors, amounting to a total reflective surface of 1 million square meters.
Like sunflowers, the mirrors will turn toward the path of the sun.
Engineers have developed reservoirs for the task of storing heat when the sun is not out.
“It’s the big plus of solar tower technology ... centralization and stockage of energy at nighttime opens the path to massive use of solar electricity in Israel,” Parnass said.
Solar towers have already been built in locations such as Morocco, South Africa and California, where the world’s tallest at present — standing at 137m — is in Ivanpah in the Mojave Desert.
“We multiplied the size of the mirrors by a third compared to the previous generation,” Gartner said. “Everything is connected by WiFi instead of by cables. The tower and its boiler are also designed to reduce costs. Everything is done to pursue profitability.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day