Is the world moving towards renewable energy?
What is the situation in Israel?
‘It’s pretty amazing. We are at the forefront of technology development in these areas, but not at the forefront of application. Less than 10% of the electricity in Israel is produced with renewable energy. Israel has goals that can hardly be called ambitious, it is not doing enough to reach them and it lags behind countries whose capabilities are lower than its own, even in our ‘neighborhood’. I am very disturbed by the knowledge that the government allocates so much money to so many sectoral purposes but not to this purpose that affects the existence of all of us. If they don’t invest in a big way, it just won’t happen. Even if there is an awareness that a change must be made, in Israel there are many hindering barriers and competing economic interests. There are many renewable energy companies that have given up on Israel and are operating successfully abroad, where it is easier.’
What are the barriers in Israel?
“One of the things that sabotaged the way at the beginning was the lack of interest of the electric company before the reform. She did not want to be competed with in the production of electricity in the large power plants. Then, Israel found gas deposits in the sea. Suddenly an alternative was discovered that brought with it enormous economic interests. The investment in the development of the gas sector depended on securing the economic interests of the gas companies for years, and this conflicts with the interests of establishing solar infrastructures. The discovery of the gas reservoirs contributed to anesthetizing and delaying the issue. There are many additional barriers, especially with regard to complicated, slow, contradictory and not always appropriate regulation or the need to adapt the existing electricity infrastructures. Renewable energy also brings with it technological innovation and regulation has difficulty keeping up with its pace and adjusting itself. A massive development of the electricity network is required, and state investments of tens of billions as in the transmission network.’
You specialize in geopolitics. What’s going on with our neighbors?
“We are in one of the areas known as a ‘hot spot’ of climate change. The situation in the Mediterranean basin is catastrophic in terms of the consequences of the climate crisis. Arab countries around us have not progressed too much, but some of them are progressing from Israel even though our level of development and wealth is much greater. In Jordan, a very poor country that has to import all its energy, there is more than 20% of renewable energy – mainly solar and wind. In Egypt there is a huge demand for electricity and on the other hand the large gas deposits in the Mediterranean basin. They produce a total of more than 12% renewables. Lebanon, a country that is in a tremendous crisis in all respects is also in an energy crisis, and its crisis is so great that it was willing to regulate its maritime border with Israel and perhaps buy gas indirectly from Israel through Egypt. The renewable energies there are in the region of 6%, but this is increasing. In Syria, the renewables are at zero, maybe 3%.”
Your interesting research marks a surprising area as a success story.
“The most inspiring story in the region is the story of Gaza. In the research I did two years ago together with Liuoz David and Iti Fishhandler we realized that something is happening in Gaza. Gaza has a diesel-based power generation facility that cannot satisfy all the needs of the residents, and several power lines from Egypt that are no longer operational today. Most of the electricity comes from Israel. Israel pledged at the time to supply electricity as long as the Gazans paid, but this situation changed two years after the disengagement after the rise of Hamas. Israel continues to supply electricity, but puts fuel into the power plant in humanitarian quantities and not according to the demands of the Gazans. The result is a continuous electricity crisis that affects all areas of life. In many places in Gaza in the last decades, people had 4 hours of electricity a day.
“We tried to understand why this is happening in Gaza and not in other places. We found that the most significant thing is that after periods of massive fighting in Gaza there is a jump in the installation of solar panels, due to the geopolitical crisis. There is a renewable energy revolution here that happened paradoxically because of the conflict in front of us. In the West Bank it is a different story. In the research I carried out with Oshri Mitzvah Ben-Yair and Iti Fishhandler, we examined the protocols of the planning committees and interviewed the parties involved, and we discovered something very interesting: in most cases, what defeats the Palestinians’ requests to establish solar sites are Israel’s security arguments. Requests are not approved for many years, and when there are sites that are established in the territory, Israel destroys them. Unlike the Gaza Strip, in the West Bank the conflict is on the ground, and Jews in the region receive more permits. They say that where there is electricity there is sovereignty, perhaps this is part of the story of why the sector is stuck in the West Bank.
“Even in the Bedouin diaspora we see an interesting process. Today there is almost no camp without solar panels, because Israel does not recognize the villages and does not provide them with infrastructure. They generate electricity and consume it immediately – in Israel this is against the law because they must sell to the grid. People manage to become electrically autonomous and replace polluting diesel generators. This improves their quality of life: reduces deadly air pollution and also the dependence on expensive fuels. And despite this, all the Bedouins I interviewed would be happy to connect to the electricity grid if they could.’
In the USA, the government is investing billions in the transition to renewable energy, also in Europe and China. These are strong countries, but there are also poorer countries that manage to initiate processes.
“A country that stands out as a success story is actually Vietnam. It produces 40% of its electricity with renewable energy and is running ahead. Their appetite for regeneration is large and impressive, even though Vietnam has coal and oil deposits. Also Morocco, which has more than 20% of electricity from renewable energy. They are building a huge wind and solar farm in the Sahara that will supply electricity to 7 million homes in the UK through submarine cables.’
Israel and Jordan signed a memorandum of understanding according to which Israel will supply Jordan with desalinated water, and in return the Emirates will build a solar field in Jordan from which electricity will be flowed to Israel. This is the local hope for achieving the renewable targets – 30% by the end of the decade.
‘I’m skeptical about it. At the moment this field is not growing. It’s just the understanding, and there are plenty of understandings. When I look at the geopolitics of energy, I see how difficult it is to make such collaborations between countries that have had conflicts between them. Israel has already tried quite a few times in the past to connect to the power grids of other countries and it failed. For example, they tried to connect Eilat, Aqaba and Taba, but entrepreneurs who wanted to do it explained that it was impossible to calculate the geopolitical risk component and the projects fell through. In other parts of the world, such ideas have not always succeeded. There was an attempt at a similar project in Morocco – to sell electricity to Spain and France. In the end, they did not want this interdependence because between the countries there is precipitation, suspicion and continuous conflicts like the two Spanish enclaves inside Morocco. In recent years, we see that even a country like Norway, which produces over 100% of its electricity from renewable energy, talks about ‘electricity sovereignty’ when the European Union wants to buy renewable energy from it.
“In the gas economy we see something similar. The Israeli companies have a huge interest in producing the gas for Europe. We are not ready to make a gas pipeline through Turkey despite the Turkish desire because of the precipitation in front of them. That is why they are thinking of making a pipe that has no precedent in the world from an engineering and economic point of view – the Istamed. This is a project that I do not believe has feasibility. From an economic point of view, it is very expensive, and by the time they finish building it, Europe will need much less gas because it ran ahead with renewables.’
One of the claims in recent years is that renewable energy can reduce geopolitical conflicts. Putin, for example, cut off Europe’s ‘oxygen pipeline’ and used fossil resources as a weapon.
“We depend on energy for everything, so it plays a big role in geopolitics. The transition to renewal raises the question of what will happen next. We want to think that if every country can be energy independent, maybe the sting of energy as a weapon will go away. Since we are not yet in a world where renewables are dominant, it is very difficult to estimate what will happen. Despite this, we are already identifying things that undermine the thought that a transition to renewable energies will lead to a new geopolitics. For example, we see the difficulties of erecting wind turbines in the South China Sea, and the threats to them, for example from China or the threats they pose to maritime traffic and fishing. These things provoke serious disputes between the various countries in the region and China. It is difficult to protect the maritime space and countries have many disputes over determining maritime boundaries. Territory still plays a very important role.’
Renewable energy creates a distributed energy world, so it should have advantages in such a situation.
“True, decentralization increases survival and decreases the vulnerability of the electrical system. If a solar field is damaged in a war, then it does not paralyze the entire country. But not everything is green, and renewables are not a panacea that will solve all geopolitical problems. The change in the weight of the countries that today control the ‘shard’ of gas and oil can also have significance. A significant part of the income of the Gulf countries, for example, relies on the export of natural resources. If revenues fall, they may have less of a global impact, but they can be destabilized internally. If Russia begins to disintegrate, this is also something that will undermine regional stability. We see that the Gulf countries understand that the tune needs to be changed and today are investing more in renewables at the same time as the production of gas and oil. Unlike Russia, these are countries where the state is a ‘family business’, and there is an interest for the children to remain in power for many years. Russia is ruled by someone who thinks the flood is after him, so let’s get as much as we can today.
“It is worth remembering that the world of renewables also depends on rare natural resources such as cobalt, silicon and lithium. This brings us back to a situation similar to that of oil and gas because even here these resources are not distributed in a balanced way in the world. We see for example that the Chinese say they will impose export restrictions on silicon, this can also be a geopolitical weapon. We see cobalt mining leading to slavery in the Congo. We still depend on minerals, even in a world of renewables. We couldn’t get out of it. It’s no coincidence, for example, that in Israel they started stealing car exhausts, because they contain cobalt.’