Last week. Shai Agassi's Project Better Place was in the news with its announcement that it would spearhead an electric vehicle initiative in Israel so that it would be oil independent in 10 years.

Today, Ecofin, a UK investment firm, announced an enormous $105 million cash infusion into Israel based Solel.

With concentrated solar power sites in Europe and the US Southwest, this company is clearly onto something.
Following reinforces view that this excellent path to follow (not only path):

• Concentrated Thermal Solar Power on 1% of the Sahara would supply enough electricity for the world.
• In sunny, arid locations, one square kilometer of land can generate as much as 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year using solar thermal technology, enough power for 50,000 households..
• The solar energy falling on an area the size of a basketball court is equivalent to 650 barrels of oil a year.
• Easy to build.
  • Solar power plants can generally be built in their entirety within a few years and can follow demand more closely than most conventional power projects. This is primarily because solar plants are built almost entirely with modular, commodity materials and thus have short development and construction times. In contrast, many types of conventional power projects, especially coal and nuclear plants, require long lead times, and this causes significant disparities between the demand and the supply.
• Don't use a lot of land
  • CSP plants seem to use a lot of land, but when looking at electricity output versus total size, they use less land than hydroelectric dams (including the size of the lake behind the dam) or coal plants (including the amount of land required for mining and excavation of the coal). While all power plants require land and have an environmental impact, the best locations for solar power plants are on land, such as deserts, for which there might be few other uses.
• Lots of jobs
  • CSP plants are labor intensive, so they generally create more jobs per dollar invested than conventional electricity generation technologies.
• Low cost
  • Even without pricing cost externalities (like pollution and CO2 emissions), the cost of solar thermal power is going down. Currently, the cost of solar thermal produced energy can be close to 12 cents (US) per k/Wh. However, many economists and investors predict that this price will continuously drop over the next ten years with increased installed capacity, to 6 cents per kW/h, as a result of technological improvements, economies of scale and volume production.
• Bono says great things about it.

More background on Solel and $105 million transaction

• Solel is currently constructing 150MW of solar thermal plants in Spain.
• Research and development carried out by Solel’s team of engineers has improved the output of the solar thermal field by more than 40% compared to the original SEGS plants.
• Solel signed a power purchase agreement with the Pacific Gas & Electric company to supply a solar thermal power field of 553MW in California.
• Solel employs approximately 300 staff and its headquarters and R&D centre are based in Bet Shemesh, Israel. It has subsidiary offices in Spain and the United States.
• Commenting on the transaction, Bernard Lambilliotte, Ecofin’s Chief Investment Officer said: “The use of parabolic troughs in the creation of solar thermal power plants represents a real opportunity to develop a utility scale solution to renewable energy. Solel has the longest track record in this industry, having built the original SEGS plants, and we fully support the entrepreneurial approach to reducing the cost of solar thermal power followed by their CEO Avi Brenmiller and his team.”