"Even Gaza is ahead of us in renewable energy"
"Even Gaza is ahead of us in renewable energy"
Dr. Lior Herman, an expert in energy and political economy, says that Gaza may already be producing 25% of its electricity using solar panels while Israel is lagging far behind at 10%
"Even if renewable energies have their own problems, the damage of fossil energies including, coal, oil and gas, is the biggest contributor to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and the climate crisis and require us to take a different direction," says Dr. Lior Herman, an expert in energy and political economy. "Today it is also much cheaper to generate electricity with solar and wind energy than with fossil fuels. Of course, there are construction and maintenance costs for each facility, but you don't pay for the fuel, and the price doesn't depend on the same fluctuations as in the oil, gas and coal markets, like what we saw following the war in Ukraine. The world will not soon switch to 100% renewables, but they will occupy a significant share.”
What is the situation in Israel?
"It's pretty amazing. We are at the forefront of technological development in these areas, but not in their application. Less than 10% of the electricity in Israel is produced with renewable energy. Israel has goals that can hardly be called ambitious and we are not doing enough to reach them and lag behind countries whose capabilities are lower than our own, even in our 'neighborhood.’
"I am very disturbed by the knowledge that the government allocates so much money to so many areas but not to [renewable energies] which affects our entire existence. 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 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 issues at the beginning was the lack of interest of the Israeli Electrical Corporation. They did not want there to be competition with 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 gas sector depended on securing deals with the gas companies, and this conflicts with establishing solar infrastructures. The discovery of the gas contributed to delaying the issue. There are many additional barriers, especially with regard to complicated and slow regulations and 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.”
You specialize in geopolitics. What's going on with our neighbors?
"We are in one of the areas known as a 'hotspot' of climate change. The situation in the Mediterranean basin is catastrophic in terms of the impact of the climate crisis. Arab countries around us have not progressed too much, but some of them are progressing more than Israel even though our level of development and wealth is much greater. Jordan - a very poor country that has to import all of its energy - has more than 20% of renewable energy, mainly solar and wind. In Egypt there is a huge demand for electricity and they also have access to the large gas deposits in the Mediterranean basin, more than 12% of their energy is renewable. Lebanon, a country that is in a tremendous crisis in all respects, including 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) has 6% renewable energies, but this is increasing. In Syria, the renewables are at zero, maybe 3%."
Your interesting research shows a success story in a surprising place.
"The most inspiring story in the region is the story of Gaza. In the research I did two years ago together with Lioz David and Itai Fishhandler we realized that something is happening in Gaza. Gaza has a diesel-based power generation facility that cannot satisfy all the needs of its residents, and several power lines from Egypt that are not operational. Most of the electricity comes from Israel. After disengaging from Gaza, Israel pledged to supply electricity as long as Gaza paid, but this situation changed after the rise of Hamas. Israel continues to supply electricity, but very minimally for humanitarian reasons. 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 realized that people started installing solar panels on their roofs for their own use. Since it is a conflict zone, it is difficult to check what is happening there, so we used remote sensing and analyzed satellite photos over a decade. We saw that in 2012 there were 12 small solar sites in Gaza (a single panel or a cluster of panels) in the Gaza City area. Two years later, this amount jumped to 84 and a year after that there were almost 600 sites, in all urban areas. In 2018 we saw over 3,500 sites, and in 2019 the numbers reached almost 9,000 sites. In the calculations we made, we discovered that the solar electricity in 2019 accounted for 25% of all electricity produced in Gaza. I wouldn't be surprised if today the numbers are significantly higher.
"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. There is a renewable energy revolution here that happened paradoxically because of the conflict. In the West Bank it is a different story. In the research I carried out with Oshri Mitzvah and Itai 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 area receive more permits. They say that where there is electricity there is sovereignty, perhaps this is partly why the sector is stuck in the West Bank.
"Even in Bedouin communities there is almost no community 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. People manage to become electrically autonomous and replace polluting diesel generators. This improves their quality of life - it 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 U.S., the government is investing billions in the transition to renewable energy, and the same goes for Europe and China. These are rich countries, but there are also poorer countries that have initiated this process too.
"A country that stands out as a success story is actually Vietnam. It produces 40% of its electricity with renewable energy and is only increasing that figure. Their appetite for regeneration is large and impressive, even though Vietnam has coal and oil deposits. Also Morocco, which produces more than 20% of its 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 there is little movement. It's just an agreement, and there are plenty of agreements. 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 there is lack of trust between the countries, and continuous conflicts with 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 gas for Europe. We are not ready to make a gas pipeline through Turkey despite the Turkish desire. That is why they are thinking of building a pipeline that has no precedent in the world from an engineering and economic point of view - the EastMed. 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 they will have advanced with renewable energy.”
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 fuels as a weapon.
"We depend on energy for everything, so it plays a big role in geopolitics. The transition to renewables 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 shift in balance of the countries that today control oil and gas may also be significant.
"A large part of the revenues of 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 they need to adapt and today they are investing more in renewables while also continuing the production of oil and gas. 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.
"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 these resources are not distributed in a balanced way in the world. For example, China says they will impose export restrictions on silicon, which 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 can’t get out of it.”
