Founders of the Arava Power Company in Israel have started a new firm that will focus on bringing renewable energy to countries in the developing world. Whilst Arava has made concrete inroads in their home country, with a 40MW photovoltaic solar farm on Kibbutz Ketura just north of Eilat among their most recent projects, Energiya Global Capital will have a much larger reach.
With President and co-founder Yosef Abramowitz at the helm, Energiya plans to spend $20 billion by 2020 on building 10,000MW of solar capacity in countries as far afield as Rwanda and Romania.
“We have a moral and strategic interest to end the burning of oil for electricity production worldwide by harnessing solar energy while also improving the lives of tens of millions of people,” he said.
So far a 59MW plant is underway, another 250MW plant is in the intermediate stages and Memorandum of Understandings are being forged in preparation to develop a 1,500 MW plant, according to PV Tech.
“Energiya Global is developing the first utility-scale solar PV project in Rwanda,” the company announced on their website. “Our local partner is the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village for orphans of the Rwandan genocide.”
The company is also developing the first solar field in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador in addition to two projects in the Ialomita region of Romania. Construction of an 8 MW project broke ground in May 2012.
Author: Tafline Laylin
As a tour leader who led “eco-friendly” camping trips throughout North America, Tafline soon realized that she was instead leaving behind a trail of gas fumes, plastic bottles and Pringles. In fact, wherever she traveled – whether it was Viet Nam or South Africa or England – it became clear how inefficiently the mandate to re-think our consumer culture is reaching the general public. Born in Iran, raised in South Africa and the United States, she currently splits her time between Africa and the Middle East. Tafline can be reached at tafline (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
Happily, Israel continues to help the environment, but tragically it is way too late, since global warming cannot be stopped and will flood all coastal cities and towns and drive millions inland. If people could have been persuaded to safely recycle 100% of all human-generated waste materials and peacefully reduce the human population with family planning education, that might have made a difference, but we’ll never know.