Ormat Technologies (NYSE: ORA), a leading renewable energy company from Israel specializing in geothermal energy, rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange last week to celebrate its 20th year on the exchange.

Ormat’s CEO, Doron Blachar said: “We are honored to celebrate Ormat’s history as a publicly traded company by ringing the NYSE opening bell. As we reflect on 20 years of trading on the NYSE, I am proud of what we have accomplished, and am particularly proud of the Company’s continued growth in developing and providing geothermal, storage and other renewable resources across the globe.

Since Ormat began trading on the NYSE, the geothermal giant grew revenues from $219 million to over $700 million. They have expanded their portfolio from ten electricity generation and recovered energy projects to 42 complexes including 13 energy storage facilities. Some countries they operate in include the US, Kenya, Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, and Guadeloupe. They provide clean power to companies like eBay and their servers in Utah.

Their energy generating capacity increased from 343 MW to 1.28 GW across geothermal, energy storage, solar PV and recovered energy, which includes 170MW/298MWh of energy storage capacity.While Ormat has been publicly traded for nearly two decades, its long-term goal is to reach our goal of 1.9 to 2.0 GW portfolio by the end of 2025.

Founded in 1965 as a family business, Ormat has been in the business longer than most of us have been alive. The company owns, operates, designs, manufactures, and sells geothermal power plants primarily based on the Ormat Energy Converter – a power generation unit that converts low-, medium- and high-temperature heat into electricity. The Company has engineered, manufactured, and constructed power plants, which it currently owns or has installed for utilities and developers worldwide, totaling approximately 3,200 MW of gross capacity.

Ormat’s current total generating portfolio is 1,277 MW, comprised of a 1,107 MW geothermal and solar generation portfolio that is spread globally in the U.S., Kenya, Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, and Guadeloupe, and a 170 MW energy storage portfolio located in the US.

How does geothermal energy collection work?

Many areas of the world have heat generated from the earth’s core and crust that makes its way to near the surface of earth. In geothermal energy production, a production well is drilled into a known geothermal reservoir and from here water is heated and the steam turns turbines which then drive an electricity generator. Power is then stored or transmitted to power lines.

Tapping into the earth’s crust to extract energy isn’t without its concerns. Remember from our archives the eruption in Indonesia shown not to be linked to Ormat? It’s a good one to read from our archives if you are thinking about investing in this space.

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Ormat Technologies, one of the world’s leading geothermal green energy power plant companies, has already tapped the earth’s geothermal energy sources in Europe,  the USA, Russia, Indonesia, Central and South America, and a 100 Megawatt plant in New Zealand.

The company’s geothermal energy expertise is becoming so accepted that its rising stocks are a boon for Israel’s Geothermal industry.

A new Ormat geothermal plant project, the Don A. Campbell Geothermal Power Plant, has just been completed in Mineral County Nevada in the USA. As reported by Market Watch, the plant is producing 16 Net Megawatts of electric power.

The project is receiving a full payment rate of $99 per megawatt hour with no annual escalation under the terms of a Power Purchase Agreement made with Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA). SCPPA is reselling this power to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), one of California’s largest consumer power entities.

Ormat already has several geothermal power plants operating in the western United States, with three operating in California itself. One of Ormat’s oldest completed geothermal plants is a 5.2 Mega Watt plant operating in Svartsengi Iceland, a location where geothermal power literally “spews out of the ground”.

Ormat’s largest geothermal plant to date is the 100 MW Ngatamariki geothermal power plant in New Zealand.

An even larger geothermal project is planned for the Indonesian island of Sumatra. When completed, it will provide around 330 Megawatts of electric power.

Read more on Ormat geothermal power plant projects:

World’s Biggest 100 MW Geothermal Plant Built by Israel’s Ormat in New Zealand

Ormat to Provide 330 Megawatts of Geothermal Energy in Sumatra Indonesia

Ormat Rising Stocks a Boon for Israel Geothermal

Photo of New Zealand geothermal power plant by Soliclima

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The New York Stock Exchange-traded company Ormat Technologies (NYSE:ORA) has built what’s being cited as the world’s largest geothermal plant. Geothermal plants tap into heat emitted by the earth’s core, turning this otherwise wasted heat into electricity. The 100 MW plant now online in New Zealand is being called the world’s largest: the Ngatamariki geothermal power plant cost $142 million USD to build ($12 million off target) and it is the biggest “singular binary power plant” ever constructed.  

Ormat says its energy converters are fed by a high temperature (380°F / 193°C) geothermal fluid. But until now only steam turbines or a hybrid combination using steam (and water) were in use. This new plant doesn’t use water, thereby keeping underground water reservoirs intact, and emissions low, the company reports.

The plant was built in two years and will reach an annual output of 700 GWH, about enough energy to power 80,000 homes in New Zealand. 

Active over decades in Israel, Ormat has installed a total of about 350 MW of geothermal energy power plants in 14 sites in New Zealand already. Around the world, its sum total of geothermally-produced energy is about 1600 MW.

Ormat officially based in the US, but with its operations and R&D in Israel. It has benefitted from Solyndra loans, offered by the US government to create clean energy in Nevada.

Read more on geothermal energy:
Ormat Set to Release Alaska’s Geothermal Energy Potential
Ormat Lands Its Largest Geothermal Deal in New Zealand
Utility-Scale Solar Projects Become a Casualty of Republican Hostage-Taking 
Despite Solyndra Bankruptcy, Solar Grew 69% From Obama Policy

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A big congratulations to Ormat technologies of Yavne, Israel for signing a $254 million deal for providing geothermal energy in Indonesia! The first phase of the 330-megawatt Sarulla geothermal power station in Sumatra is due to begin operating in 2016.

Sumatra lies in one of the most geologically active parts of the Pacific ring of fire and is known for numerous active volcanoes. The nearby volcano of Krakatoa was responsible for the largest eruption in recorded history and Sumatra’s Toba volcano was responsible for earth’s largest volcanic eruption in the past two million years. 

It was about 5000 times more powerful than Mount Saint Helen’s 1980 eruption. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the threat of tsunamis are unfortunate facts of life for the people of Indonesia.

Now for the good news, Indonesia has 40 percent of the world’s exploitable geothermal energy potential. It has been estimated that as much as 28 billion watts of geothermal energy potential is available there or the equivalent of 12 billion barrels of oil. It has been a long slow process tapping into this energy.

The government of Indonesia set rules for geothermal energy more than a decade ago and there has been some controversy about plans to tap into geothermal energy here. So currently only 1.2 billion geothermal watts are being exploited in Indonesia.

According to their press release, Ormat will deploy their modular geothermal generating technology in three phases, each consisting of 110 megawatts of generating capacity.

One important consideration for this project is Ormat’s technology which allows nearly 100% of the geothermal fluid to be recycled and which utilizes the extracted brine. This will both increase the efficiency of this geothermal project and reduce the emissions of unwanted volcanic gasses.

Ormat (NYSE: ORA), expects to complete financing and begin construction in one year. The Sarulla geothermal power project is among the world’s largest single-contract geothermal power plants and is an important step towards Indonesia’s planned ten billion watt geothermal expansion.

Photograph of boat and erupting Indonesian volcano by Byelikova Oksana via Shutterstock

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Eureka! Yafa Energy has become the first Arab-Israeli company to win a prestigious European Union EUREKA (Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration) grant. Awarded through Israel’s Prime Minister’s office, Yafa was named as the best technological initiative from an Israeli minority community. Created as an intergovernmental initiative in 1985, EUREKA aims to enhance industrial competitiveness by supporting businesses, research centers and universities that carry out pan-European projects to develop innovative products, processes and services.

Yafa Energy was founded by Salih Manasra, a mechanical engineer from the auto industry who decided to devote a new chapter of his life to doing something good for society and the planet. The two-year-old company was previously recognized by the World Bank for developing an essential solar thermal technology to heat steam for industrial processes that currently consume an enormous amount of polluting and unprocessed fuel.

Yafa’s business strategy is based on the notion that in much of the world’s industrial-heavy zones, such as Africa and the Middle East, there is an abundance of solar heat and a huge deficit in the use of renewable energy. Countries producing cement, glass, beverages and textiles need energy the most, yet have the least access to it.

Beautiful sunny energy

Yafa (which means “beautiful”) offers an all-in-one, standalone system that provides heating, cooling and electricity for energy-intensive industrial processes. Part of the technology refines the organic Rankine Cycle – which produces electricity from low-temperature heat — upon which an estimated 250 power plants are built today. A prototype of this system was first built by Israeli solar engineers Harry Zvi Tabor and Lucien Bronicki of Ormat, in the early 1960s.

Taking their experiences from the automotive industry, Yafa’s engineers found new ways to maximize the power from this cycle, making it up to 15 percent more efficient, says Manasra.

The heat generated is expected to be used in direct processes onsite, while the extra electricity created in the process could be used by the factory or sold back to the grid. Theoretically, the energy produced by the system could be stored for use when the sun isn’t shining.

Yafa’s product could make the air cleaner, reduce carbon footprints, make desalination plants viable in poorer countries, and severely cut energy bills. In some cases the cost for heating industrial boilers adds up to more than the employees’ salaries. This extra income could go back to the people, or help the business grow in new directions.

Bright news for the Arab community

Manasra tells ISRAEL21c that many industries in the Arab world need this technology, and Yafa could provide the bridge to get it from Israel to neighbors with which the country has no diplomatic ties. To circumvent political problems that Arabs encounter while working with Israelis, Yafa will set up a London office.

The young company is establishing a channel with Jordan through the International Financing Committee of the World Bank. Other countries on the short list of potential customers are Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.

Manasra has a lot at stake. Like in the Jewish community, Arab-Israeli mothers dream for their sons to be doctors or lawyers. Recently, engineering has won new mother-approved status in the Arab community, he relates.

“The weight put on education is skyrocketing. Arab-Israelis come to the market today with the highest academic rates, and they are trying to go further,” says the newlywed. He remarks that Arabs graduating from Israeli universities with engineering degrees often get stuck in blue-collar construction jobs.

His you-can-do-it-too attitude appeals to Israeli Jewish high-tech leaders, who include Manasra in their circles in the hope that his example will rub off on other young Arab-Israeli engineers.

But it will take a little more inspiration and capital beyond Yafa’s startup cache of $200,000 to get a working prototype of the concept going within the next one to two years. Yafa, founded in 2010, seeks an additional $1 million in financing to build that prototype as a model for how the sun can be made to shine for the working world.

::Yafa Energy

This story is reprinted from ISRAEL21c – www.israel21c.org

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Israeli cleantech has long been present in the American market. Companies like Ormat have been developing geothermal resources in the US for decades. Now Israeli companies may be getting support to expand to developing countries as well. A senior official from the International Finance Corp (IFC)–a member of the World Bank, with a portfolio of $12 billion, which actively supports investment in developing countries–said the group was looking to invest tens of millions in Israeli cleantech companies that could expand operations to developing countries, Reuters reported on May 17.

The World Bank generally invests in the companies of developed countries, with the agreement that the money will be used in “emerging markets,” Ruzgar Barisik, a senior IFC investment officer, told Reuters. Since 1974, the IFC has invested nearly $200 million in 18 Israeli developments in 14 countries. Some of those commitments include supporting a Home Center in Russia (a Home Depot like store), supporting the expansion of engineering firm Ashtrom’s in Jamaica’s Sangster International Airport and a 24 MW geothermal plant of Ormat‘s in Guatemala.

In recent years, IFC has been investing more in cleantech around the world, but primarily in India and China where industrial and commercian growth has outpaced progress of green technology. Since 1999, the World Bank has launched 10 Kyoto funds (to purchase carcon credits) and facilities capitalized at just over $2 billion, as well as five post-2012 carbon initiatives for which the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region has been a beneficiary. In terms of cleantech, the World Bank approved a loan of $1.2 billion Egyptian pounds in August 2010 to develop wind power in Egypt.

But this is the first major push for investment in Israeli companies for development in other regions.

“The segments we see most opportunities in are in technologies that relate to water – desalination, irrigation, waste and agricultural technologies,” said Barisik, who leads the IFC’s cleantech investments in Europe, Middle East and North Africa. “We are actively looking for (Israeli) businesses we can invest in.”

“Within the next 12 to 18 months we should have committed another $65 million across all sectors which includes cleantech and agricultural technologies,” he said, adding the number could be even larger. “Israeli companies are so strong … in developing new technologies.”

Image of wind in eye from Shutterstock

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For years, the goldmine for Israeli cleantech companies has been the American economy. And as Israel deploys innovative technologies across the Atlantic, it is increasingly breaking ground and gaining profits ahead of American companies.

Just last week, shares of the Reno, Nevada-based unit of Israeli geothermal company, Ormat Technologies (NYSE: ORA), rose more than 2.7 percent to $18.78 in the US stock exchange yesterday, the most since Feb. 24,  Bloomberg Businessweek reported. The rise came from a new $61.2 million engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract the company signed on April 25–for two air-cooled Ormat Energy Converters that will be installed at an unspecified North American geothermal plant–that has traders expecting company earnings per share to jump by 30 cents over 2012 and 2013, according to Avondale Partners LLC, interviewed in the article.

Ormat Technologies, is a US subsidiary of Israel-based Ormat Industries (ORMT)–which owns 60 percent of ORA–and was originally founded in the sleepy Israeli city of Yavne, located south of Tel Aviv, in 1972. For over fourty years, the company has been developing geothermal resources, by tapping the natural resources and also building recovered energy-based power plants nearby. It has also branched out to other cleantech fields, such as rooftop solar power, salt wells developments, waste heat recovery systems, and even spent oil-to-energy systems.

Since then, the company has become internationally renowned, with 80 patents and 1,370 MW of geothermal and recovered energy power plants in 71 countries worldwide. At the end of the three-month financial period ending on December 31, 2011, Ormat reported a 33 percent increased in revenue for a total of $124 million for the period.

Ormat will be reporting its 2012 first-quarter earnings on May 8, with Bloomber estimating that sals will have increased 14 percent to $112 million. The company stock has already increased 4.2 percent this year, sending valuations to 36 times estimated earnings.

But even as international expansion is winning Ormat international private sector partnerships and U.S. government financing, the company is also racking up profit back home in Israel. Ormat Industries rose 0.7 percent to 18.52 shekels in the Tel Aviv stock exchange on April 24, Bloomberg reported.

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It already has an international presence, but Israel’s Ormat Industries (NYSE: ORA) just made its global presence a little brighter: On December 21, Ormat’s US subsidiary Ormat Technologies announced that it will be developing its very first 10 megawatt solar photovoltaic (PV) farm near one of its geothermal plants in California. Ormat is an internationally recognized geothermal company but has already signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for its newest solar plant with the local community-owned utility Imperial Irrigation District.

“While Ormat’s roots in solar energy go back more than 40 years, we have recently reinitiated our development efforts in solar projects as a way to expand our renewable energy portfolio,” said Ormat Technologies President and COO Yoram Bronicki in a statement.

“Developing projects in a cost-effective way and with an acceptable tariff, without the strong dependence on tax incentives, is vital for us to further expand our solar activity in a meaningful way.”

The announcement comes at the same time as other global energy leaders are announcing solar shutdowns. On December 21, BP Solar announced it was shutting down its global solar operations because costs were simply too high for the business to be viable.

But for Ormat, which will not actually be manufacturing the panels but only managing the solar site, the venture may prove profitable. In addition, Bronicki added, the company’s strong presence in the region will allow the company to use existing infrastrucure for the solar plant.

“As the project is being built near the Heber geothermal complex area, it allows for reliance upon a portion of the existing infrastructure, such as the operation facilities,” he said.

Ormat’s venture into the solar sector may not be limited to the US California project. Bronicki said Ormat will be developing an additional 10-15 megawatts of solar PV power globally in the coming years.

The CA plant is expected to begin operating within 18 months with an annual production of 24,500 megawatt-hours of energy production.

Read more on Israel and solar:
Suntech To Sell Home Solar Panels In Israel
7 Solar Innovators From Israel That Could Fuel Our Planet

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Geothermal heats up in New Zealand: Ormat has told the Israeli business newspaper Globes that it has developed its biggest deal yet in the geothermal industry – one which uses heat from the earth’s crust to generate power. Our kiwi friends in New Zealand have just ordered an Ormat power plant for $130 million USD. It will be called the Ngatamariki geothermal project.

The contract was signed with the geothermal company, Mighty River Power and the construction phase will take about 2 years. The Maori run, Maori Trust group has a stake in the project. According to Globes, the government owned Mighty River Power is one of the most experienced geothermal operators in the world.

The completion of this power plant will bring the total installed capacity of Ormat’s technology in New Zealand to approximately 350 megawatts in 14 plants.

Ormat Technologies chairman and CTO Lucien Bronicki said: “New Zealand is one of the early pioneers in geothermal energy development. For the past forty years, it has been the country with the most consistent policy of support for geothermal energy and has developed advanced expertise in drilling, geophysics, reservoir engineering, as well as operations.

“New Zealand consulting firms assisted many developing countries such as the Philippines, Kenya and Indonesia in geothermal development. Because of their extensive knowledge, New Zealand companies recognized very early, some 25 years ago, the value of Ormat’s technology and experience in optimizing resource utilization.”

On the announcement, Ormat’s shares price rose 1.7% in New York yesterday to $20.95. Its shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) rose by more than 8 percent.

Read more on Ormat:

Ormat Technologies Secures US Funds For Geothermal Plants
Ormat Set to Release Alaska’s Geothermal Energy Potential
Ormat Subsidiary Joins Geothermal Rush to Supply Chile’s New Renewable Energy Program

::Globes

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Saudi Arabia has set a staggering national goal to have 20 GW (20,000MW) of solar generation installed over the next twenty years, according to Saudi officials speaking to CSP Today. Although there have been increasing noises from the reticent Kingdom in recent years about adding more renewable power, this is the first mention of hard numbers. These are huge. This would mean installing an average of 1 GW (1,000MW) of solar for each of the next twenty years.

This would make the Kingdom a bigger market than that of the current world leader, Germany.

With an averaged value of solar insolation in Medina in June that equals 7.83 kWh per sq meter per day Saudi Arabian is much more suited to solar than Germany.  The deserts of Saudi Arabia are comparable with those in Southern California that are now sprouting utility-scale solar plants, thanks to funding subsidies in the Obama administration Recovery Act in the US that have escaped cuts with the new congress.

‘Solar is an exciting time in MENA, we are where the oil industry used to be in the 1940’s and 50’s’ said Vahid Fouthi, Director of North Africa & Middle East at BP Solar. He should know. Although the oil industry is raking in huge profits now, the future of oil production in Saudi Arabia is extremely uncertain.

Many of the oil-producing countries are starting to test out solar, even in some cases, marrying solar with oil production itself, swapping solar for the gas used to extract the last drops of dying oil fields. (See Successful Ormat Waste Heat Recovery Test Could Green Dying Oil Fields) Saudi Arabia must be becoming confident of the results, that it is making such a strong statement.

The announcement is sure to drive new visitors to MENASOL 2011,  which is to be held on May 4th and 5th in Casablanca. A two-day conference during the event has been added “to provide senior level executives with critical market intelligence and valuable contacts that will assist businesses to successfully finance develop and build solar projects in MENA to exploit regional and European opportunities.”

Read more on solar power:
Has Saudi Arabia Seen The Renewable Energy Light?
Could Saudi Arabia Become the Saudi Arabia of Solar?
Saudi Arabia to Replace Oil with Sun Power for Desalination Plants

Image of Arabian sun from Shutterstock

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