November 21, 2008 | 6:51 pm

Bright idea for solar energy

Posted by Adam Wills

Professor David Faiman is my kind of scientist – he doesn’t mince words and he has a quick British wit.

His Python-esque introduction was lost on the crowd of about 75 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel last Sunday, but they listened with rapt attention once he began discussing what could well become the standard of solar power collection in Israel and possibly the world.

Faiman, educated at Oxford and the University of Illinois, is a physics professor, chair of the Department of Solar Energy & Environmental Physics at Ben-Gurion University’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Sede Boqer and director of Israel’s National Solar Energy Center. He was one of four lecturers at the Nov. 16 Excellence in Research Symposium sponsored by the American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (isn’t that name just crying out for an “of” or a “for”?).

The other speakers were good (Dr. Alon Friedman, Zeev Wiesman and Dr. Eli Lewis), and I hope to write about their research in the near future, but none of the presentations on Sunday were as engrossing as Faiman’s, which clocked in at a brisk five minutes with fewer than five PowerPoint slides.

“Let me start with the bad news,” he said.

According to Faiman, the solar panels sitting atop homes and businesses in Israel for the last 20 to 30 years are good for one thing – heating water. “If we were to start lining all of the roofs in Israel with [solar] PV panels, it would only allow for 3 percent of the energy of Israel for one year,” he said.

He’s hoping to generate 40 to 50 years worth of energy in the desert with new solar technology.

Working with ZenithSolar on a technology Ben-Gurion University developed in partnership with Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, Faiman is hoping to shift our solar paradigm in the direction of a concentrated solar energy generation system based on a new optical design and high-efficient solar cells. Rather than a flat panel, the system looks like a satellite dish, with mirrors concentrating sunlight with 1,500 times more power at a central generator “that converts light to electricity. The generator also gives off intense heat, which is captured via a water-cooling system for residential or industry hot-water uses,” Neal Sandler reported in Business Week.

Faiman says that the system could provide electricity at about $1/watt, making it competitive with oil and natural gas.

But Israel’s efforts to go green won’t amount to much. The nation’s consumption of resources is about one-quarter of 1 percent compared to the rest of the world, he said. “Israel can’t offset the world’s environmental problems.”

But it can export a solution to nations like the United States and China.

Zenith installed its first two 7-meter dishes at Kibbutz Yavne on Nov. 4, and if all goes well the solar collectors would go on sale in Israel sometime in the next year and then abroad. A home-based unit could retail for less than $20,000; residential systems currently on the market in the United States range from $10,000 to $100,000.

When I asked Faiman about daytime light pollution that could result from placing the Zenith system in an urban area, as posited in the Business Week article, he answered with typical British aplomb: “That’s a stupid place for it. It needs to be out of town.”

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