The images of the Bazan oil refinery in Haifa with a column of smoke rising through the complex following an Iranian missile strike earlier this month set off alarm bells over Israel’s reliance on its power sources.
Throughout the five week war, Iran targeted Israel’s critical infrastructure points, including the power stations in Haifa and Hadera, often in retaliation for Israeli and US strikes on Iranian energy facilities. And with the battle over the Strait of Hormuz pushing up natural gas prices worldwide, the debate over power resilience, especially in Israel, is now front and center.
In a February report on Israel’s energy sector, State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman noted that when Israel launched its offensive after the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, the government had failed to address the need to create emergency diesel reserves, which are the key to powering Israel’s energy plants without relying on natural gas.
Energy independence
Veteran industrialist Avi Brenmiller says that for Israel, with its limited natural resources, the problem is even deeper. The main crisis in Israel’s energy sector stems from an overreliance on foreign actors.
“You don’t want to depend on others. You want each country to be available with the sun, with the wind, and not to be dependent on others,” he told The Jerusalem Report, adding that the core need to achieve energy independence is to invest in infrastructure and production and to establish manufacturing facilities to produce, store, and transport energy throughout the country.
For this to work, Brenmiller said there is a need for energy-industry hardware, machinery, and electrical devices used to generate, transmit, distribute, and store power, including renewable systems, oil exploration, and gas pipelines. Such systems guarantee both economic independence and national security.
Brenmiller, who has spent the last 50 years working for top energy companies worldwide, including LUZ, an Israeli-American company responsible for establishing the first solar panel fields in the US, and Israeli solar company Solel, where, as CEO, he led the development of Israel’s Ashalim power station, is already working to create technology that will help solve overreliance on other states.
Together with his son, Nir, the family’s Bren Energy company has begun developing thermal energy storage, a technology that captures thermal energy by heating or cooling elements such as water, ice, or molten salt.
Such systems are already used in Europe, where locally produced solutions are favored over imports from countries such as India or China, Nir.
“The European Union’s main objective today is supporting the electrification of heat for industrial applications,” Nir, CEO of Bren, told the Report.
For Israel to ensure energy security, it needs a diversified mix of natural gas, renewable energy, and backup fuels such as coal, rather than relying too heavily on any single source. The younger Brenmiller says that one way to achieve this is by adopting the European model of incentivizing the local production of critical energy assets.
Enough natural gas
Leon Kraversky, director of Israeli start-up Soltell Systems and an energy-tech specialist, said that while Israel is still heavily dependent on diesel and petrol motors, the country has enough natural gas in its offshore fields for up to 25 years of energy and even longer if the fields slated to be developed together with nearby countries such as Cyprus go ahead.
This means that Israel will be able to keep its power plants going for at least the next two decades, he said, pointing out that there is momentum towards electric power that depends almost entirely on natural gas plants, which produce about 75% of the country’s electricity.
Alternative energies such as solar and thermal are used to produce around 18% of the country’s power, with the remaining coming from coal generators, which are scheduled to be shuttered in the near future.
“Israel aims to rely on natural gas for the next two and a half decades,” said Kraversky. “It is a strategic decision by the government that makes sense geopolitically, financially, and environmentally, with gas being relatively less polluting than other options like coal.”
Security risks
However, for climate-tech entrepreneur David Waimann, the location of Israel’s gas sources, near the Mediterranean coastal cities of Haifa and Ashkelon, carries both a security risk and some infrastructure challenges.
“A problem that Israel might face in the future is centered on the fact that, as the country grows richer, the energy consumption also grows and requires constant maintenance and upgrades,” he told the Report.
The country will need to find a way to transport the energy from where it’s being produced to where it’s needed, from the periphery to the major urban centers, Waimann explained.
“There are big projects to produce renewable energy both in the Negev and the Golan, but the main challenge will be to bring the electricity generated to Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem,” he said.
“To do that, there is a need to build high-voltage power lines, which people don’t like to have near where they live, and the state is hesitant to invest in because they are really expensive.”
Waimann said that Israel was developing several energy generation innovations, including modular nuclear reactors that can produce energy locally, geothermal technology, which involves drilling into the ground to harvest heat, and the burning of waste to produce electricity.
For Brenmiller, the vulnerabilities that have been revealed lately are an opportunity for the public and private sectors to work together and help Israel move from the “Start-Up Nation” to being a real player in the energy industry.
“If the government wants to have energy independence... they should support the industry by giving some guarantees, by giving some safety net to the first installations. Because as a first-of-a-kind, you always have a higher risk, and someone needs to help the industrialist to take this risk,” he said.
The government has already made some moves, including the Energy Ministry investing NIS 1 billion in a program aimed at accelerated protective measures such as the procurement of spare parts and equipment upgrades, including what it described as a 30% increase in strategic diesel reserves.
While there is still a long way to go, Kraversky said the current rate of adoption, even without accomplishing the objectives, was still high enough to believe that gas will eventually be replaced by alternative energies.
“The most realistic scenario is that Israel manages to go from the current 75% gas and 20% renewables to a 70-30 model by the mid-2030s, with the country reaching a 50-50 split by the 2040s,” he said.
So, it seems that Israel’s future will be greener regardless, even if the government is not doing enough to achieve it.■