BusinessWeek covers "Israel's Cleantech Pioneers"

Israel's cleantech industry is the focus of an article in the current issue of BusinessWeek.

A feature article, titled "Israel's Clean Technology Pioneers," includes coverage of companies and venture capital funds including Ormat Technologies, BrightSource Industries, Netafim, and Israel Cleantech Ventures. It also includes a quote from the author of this blog.


Highlights of the article include:

• Yavne, a hazy industrial corridor in central Israel, seems at first glance an improbable haven for geothermal technology. Its largely barren environs offer no geysers or volcanoes, the essential raw materials for geothermal energy. Yet this small city of 32,000 is home to Ormat Technologies, a $2 billion multinational listed on the New York Stock Exchange that builds geothermal power plants around the world, from Colorado to Kenya.

• Israel's siege mentality is driving its six-decade quest to coax more from the soil, water, air, and sunlight than do most other nations on earth.... "The world is now realizing it has to deal with things that Israel has had to tackle for 50 years," says Jacques Benkoski, a venture capitalist with Silicon Valley-based U.S. Venture Partners. "Doing more with less is becoming the standard."

• Google co-founder Sergey Brin and several U.S. politicians have paid visits to Israel recently to learn about water- and energy-conservation technologies. "We can't rely on others for our safety and security," says Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, who is looking to import Israeli solar expertise.

• Israel is a nation of contradictions, socialist in many ways but laissez-faire when it comes to the economy. The national equivalent of a startup, it was founded by people willing to make a go of it in a swath of land dominated by desert.

• "The cleantech economy here hums independently, on market forces and innovation, despite the political situation," complains Glen I.A. Schwaber, 39, a founding partner at $75 million Israel Cleantech Ventures, a VC firm that he runs with Harvard classmate Jack S. Levy.

• Today Hatzerim and two affiliated kibbutzes remain majority owners of the company that has grown into Netafim, a $500 million high-tech drip-irrigation giant employing 2,600 people in 110 countries.
  

• BrightSource's technology seems right out of science fiction. As the van traverses the final mile to a test center in Dimona, what looks like a burning oil rig looms in the distance. Inside the maximum-security complex, passengers present their passports and don protective boots to guard their feet from the scorching sands. A semicircular array of 1,641 mechanized coffee-table-size mirrors pivot to reflect the desert sun's rays onto the boiler atop the rig, which BrightSource calls a "power tower." The company's power towers produce superheated steam for turbines. They "offer the maximum level of efficiency," says Alan E. Salzman, managing partner of Silicon Valley's VantagePoint, BrightSource's largest investor.

• What if Israel could find the will to harness the power of its drip pipes, power towers, and desert fish farms? "Israel has such a geopolitical vested interest to steer this innovation," says Jonathan Shapira, a corporate attorney in Boston who organizes and blogs about Israeli cleantech. "Innovating around scarcity is increasingly the world's story."

Related Posts:

Israel cleantech venture funds featured in International Herald Tribune

New York Times and Ha'aretz on Israeli cleantech

ZenithSolar featured in BusinessWeek

Cleantech Israel group featured in Globes

Evogene, Orfuel and Leviev Group to establish biodiesel company in Namibia, Africa

Evogene, Orfuel, and the Leviev Group have announced an agreement to establish a biodiesel company in Namibia, Africa.

The new company will be focused on the growth of specialized castor plants for use as feedstock for biodiesel. It will be headquartered in Namibia, with operations in Namibia and possibly other African countries.

Evogene and Orfuel, an Ormat subsidiary, have already been working together since September 2007 on developing non-edible plants for commercial biodiesel production, and the castor plants for the new venture will be selected from varieties being developed in the Evogen-Orfuel collaboration. The collaboration is being funded with a grant from the BIRD Foundation.

Land for the crop growth will come from the Leviev Group, which will also provide logistical infrastructure for the project.

"This collaboration fits well into Evogene's business model in the field of biodiesel, and constitutes an additional stage towards commercialization of the plants developed through the joint project with Orfuel in one of the potential target locations," stated Ofer Haviv, Evogene's president and CEO. "We are convinced that with our extensive capabilities in plants together with the vast experience of the Leviev Group in Africa, we will be able to develop improved feedstock addressing the needs of the alternative fuel industry."

Netafim in negotiations with sugarcane ethanol project in Mozambique

In other news, BioEnergy Africa has raised $15.2 million on the London Stock Exchange to fund development of a 438 million liters per yea sugercane ethanol plant in Mozambique.

The company is in discussions with Tel Aviv, Israel-based Netafim to design, procure, and install a subsurface drip irrigation system for the project’s cane fields. At full capacity, the project will include approximately 60,500 acres of planted sugarcane.

Related Posts:

Monsanto to invest in Evogene, collaborate on plant research

Evogene and Orfuel receive biodiesel grant

Technion forum: Israel can be global biodiesel leader

Bloomberg: "Blooming Deserts Turn Israeli Water Industry Into Money Magnet"

Bloomberg.com recently published a positive article about the prospects for Israel's water industry.

According to Bloomberg, "Some 300 Israeli companies make equipment to deliver water or purify it with lasers or diffusion, putting them in a position to profit as climate change, population growth and food shortages strain supplies. With agriculture accounting for about two-thirds of global water use, the Israeli government predicts overseas sales of the technology will top $10 billion by 2017."

The article mentions Netafim, a world leader in irrigation solutions; Amiad Filtration Systems, which will help manage sewage treatment at the Beijing Olympics; and Desalitech, a Tel Aviv-based startup that has apparently invented a way to take salt out of water using 20 percent less energy than standard reverse osmosis.

The article also includes interviews with Nir Belzer, managing partner at the AquAgro Fund, and Oded Distel, director of NewTech, Israel's national program to promote water technologies.