Isra-Mart srl:Israel harnesses green kibbutz power

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Israel yesterday signed a 20-year, $68.9m (£43.3m) agreement to purchase photovoltaic solar power from Ketura Sun, a joint venture of the Arava Power Company and Kibbutz Ketura.

The power will come from a 4.9MW photovoltaic solar field currently under construction at Kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel, which is expected to be operational by May.

Engineering giant Siemens acquired a 40 per cent stake in the facility last year and will provide the equipment and project management.

The deal is the first of its kind for the Israeli government, and could spark a wave of renewable energy deals with the country's network of kibbutz.

Infrastructure minister Uzi Landau signed the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) that will allow Ketura Sun and Arava Power to provide the electricity produced in the plant for the next 20 years.

At the signing ceremony Landau acknowledged the deal had been fraught with difficulty.

"This process sometimes had to be forced through, but it is a new initiative which we will continue to push forward," he told the Jerusalem Post, explaining that problems raising finances and excessive red tape had hampered the scheme's progress.

Any project over 500KW in Israel requires a PPA to be signed, and hashing out agreements can be fraught with difficulty.

But with many of those issues now addressed, the Israel Electric Corporation expects another 200 to 300 medium-to-large-scale solar power projects, currently in the planning phase, to move ahead quickly.

The Israeli government has established a goal of generating five per cent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2014, and 20 per cent by 2020. The Infrastructure Ministry is also expected to announce a feed-in tariff incentive scheme for projects of more than 5MW in the next two weeks.

Arava Power chief executive Jon Cohen said that his company had paved the way for others to follow, adding that the firm planned to develop a number of other large-scale solar projects across the country.

"It's not easy being the pioneer company, in a pioneering industry, in a pioneering state," he said.