On a summer-like winter day, I make my way south to Dimona's new and expansive industrial area. Amid peculiar textile factories and endless fields of cacti, beyond a bend and at the end of the road, not far from the excellent "Moshe's Sushi" in the Peretz Center, lies the workshop of the alchemists – albeit with a misleading name.
"Yes, yes, we're at the end of the street. Look for us, don't get confused. On the outside, it says a completely different name, unrelated to us, but we're inside," I'm guided by those knowledgeable about the geology of industrial areas. Layer upon layer of ancient sediments and forgotten companies. That's how I arrive at the place where a company once existed but is no more, a large warehouse that once contained the energy, thought, and sweat of people who assembled a company – and now another company resides there in its place, doing its own thing, producing gold from rock in a new way.
The factory space feels like thousands of industrial spaces, filled with tall, new, and colorful machines. Winding conveyor belts weave between the machines, and among them, people in blue overalls with headphones move about, focusing on one point or another each time, calibrating. Something in the air, the sparkle in the workers' eyes, carries the excitement. Years of effort culminate at this moment when the product transforms from theory to practice.
Outside, iron swords engage in a battle of black storm clouds on the horizon – but inside, a reminder of the essence of our existence lies here. If you follow the conveyor belt path, you can already see all the stages of production and implementation of the new Israeli invention with biblical power. And I'm here to understand what is this alchemic invention, which plans to reach far beyond the textile factories and cacti and burst into the world as a wave of heat from Dimona.
"My father was one of the pioneers of the solar field in the country. He worked for a company called, Luz, an amazing company ahead of its time. Think 1973, the great Arab oil embargo, the oil crisis – the whole world and the Americans were looking for oil alternatives. Israel established a new energy administration to research and find solutions..."
"Now, remember that in the 1980s, the environment was not yet a 'field,' so Luz was established to build solar power plants or fuel cells, but when the great Arab embargo ended and oil prices dropped – there was no need, and Luz went bankrupt, only to reemerge as Solar Installer."
Unlike families, companies only survive when they economically justify themselves. But what happens when the family is also the company? And how did the Yom Kippur War affect all this? The full explanation comes from Nir Brenmiller, vice president of Brenmiller Energy, who begins the story of the current company with the family history, which is also a company's. Together with his father Avi and brother Doron, they form the trio at the head of the energy family, whose story is deeply woven into Israel's solar energy industry and seeks to take it to the next level.
"After Luz, my father was appointed CEO of Solel Solar Systems and led the company to great success until 2009. After Solel built power plants in the style of Ashalim in Europe, Siemens bought the company and my father continued as CEO there as well."
Q: You mean the one most southern passengers call the "Eye of Sauron," which I can see its glowing eye from my balcony in Beersheva, tens of kilometers away?
"Indeed, my father initiated the Ashalim plant, along with Lederman. At the Ashalim plant, there are huge salt tanks that store the heat in a liquid phase, thus operating the turbine for many hours. It was precisely from learning, understanding, and recognizing the complexity that such energy storage creates that we thought if we could bring some patent for heat storage – then we'd hit the jackpot."
Q: Wait – you mean storing electricity? What does heat have to do with it?
Brenmiller smiles with the weariness of someone who has explained things 9 million times: "We're Israelis, and it's never really that cold here. So we think electrically. Go into a home in London or New York in the winter, when it's really cold, and you'll find that 60-70 percent of homes run on heating. In fact, only 17% of the world's energy is electricity, another 25% is transportation, and the rest is heat. Everything you're touching right now, from the coffee to the table – it's all heat! Almost every raw material undergoes a thermal process. Just the boilers in industry are 25% of the energy, in some places even 30%, and it all runs on coal, fuels, and gas. On the other hand, you want reduced emissions too."
Q: So you're creating heat from rocks?
"No, the next stage in the energy market is energy storage. And not electricity storage, but heat storage. And so we store heat in rocks."
Q: Why is it important to store heat?
"Just like today, you use electric cars to reduce emissions from organic fuels. Do you need the battery? So too with heating. The main way to reduce emissions in heating is to use electricity, and then you can heat and consume from the power grid all the time. But that basically means you're buying that energy when you need it. If the wind is blowing and if the sun is shining – it doesn't matter, we've already learned to generate electricity from the sun. We were the first in the world to regulate solar water heaters, but when you want that heat to be available to you 24/7, not just when the sun is shining – that's where we come in. We're producing huge batteries that store heat."
Q: So you've essentially invented a giant battery made of rocks?
"Yes. A heat battery, if you will. An average factory consumes 20% of its energy in electricity and 80% in heat. Factories need much more heat than electricity. We give them the ability to charge their heat batteries when energy is cheap and use the battery when energy is expensive. At the end of the day, we're producing a giant thermos. There are heating elements inside that heat a rock bed in the simplest process there is, but inside the heat is very well insulated. I only lose a few percent per day because it's an excellent thermos. The moment you open the battery tap, you discharge steam or hot air, and that steam goes on to produce medicines, pasta, spin a turbine at a power plant, or heat a building like New York University."
I admit to Brenmiller that I'm a little disappointed because I had hoped to hear about some ultra-sophisticated scientific process that squeezes primordial energy in a neo-atomic way from the rocks of our existence and turns it into new energy that will propel us into outer space – and in the end, what he's telling me is that they created a rock thermos. You're like the "SodaStream" of the energy field, I tell him.
Brenmiller laughs: "There are so many layers of physics and science here to heat and discharge efficiently without losing heat. There's a lot of advanced engineering in the efficiency of heat transfer: how to compress the rocks, turn them into the material inside, and what materials to use. A metallic material expands and contracts with heat, and you need to know very well how to make a battery that accordion-like but doesn't break. Beyond that, there's an entire envelope with layers of software and hardware, when to buy the energy, and how to charge the battery. You're touching so many fields here to produce something so meaningful for clean energy." Like any concerned father, Brenmiller jumps to defend the righteousness of his offspring: "Gas is on its way to becoming a religion here. Around the world people are trying to wean themselves off gas, and only here in Israel are they trying to get addicted to it."
With a mixture of frustration and distrust, he continues: "Gas pollutes, a lot, and only in Israel have they painted it green. True, its respiratory damage is less than coal, but it's killing planet Earth. It produces a lot of methane, which is a devastating greenhouse gas much worse than CO2. Moreover, the price of gas is very low because the market is not very open. But what will happen when the market opens up and the first contracts expire? Gas prices for the industry will rise significantly, making the whole supply chain more expensive. It's better to sell the gas abroad, and with the profits subsidize clean technologies. We've been sitting on the halo of the solar water heater for 70 years now, far too long."
Q: Time Magazine chose you as one of the world's most important inventions last year, but in Israel fewer people know about you. Is it because you're hiding all your secrets in Dimona?
Brenmiller is amused: "We set up the factory in Dimona because we are 'accidental' Zionists, and because we had a vision that there would be a lot of projectional activity here in Israel, with the research and development facility near Dimona and with projects we initiated. We believe in our product. We started with this 12 years ago, and over the years we've brought in more than 120 million shekels from home to develop it. And now, we're about to start installing batteries at Wolfson Hospital, and at the Tempo company in Italy and Spain. Israel is not our target market, we operate here out of Zionism and the fact that we live here. But we're built to manufacture for any market, because the vision of heat batteries is being realized now, and in our estimation, it will give a big boost to the energy market."
Q: And yet, it seems the main global focus right now is on solar and gas. Why do you think the use of heat batteries will increase in the future?
"The Americans passed a 50% subsidy on heat batteries this year. Why? For years the Chinese subsidized solar panels and broke the competition, and today they hold the world in their hands. The energy axis is central to everything happening today in the geopolitical
sphere. The West has woken up, and the Europeans and Americans are pushing hard to bring renewable energy supply chains home. It's no coincidence Bill Gates is cutting checks for all the American clean-tech companies. But in Israel, there's a lot of cynicism towards us and the field. We often feel like we're the pioneers entering the jungle with a machete and paving the way. That's the meaning of being first."
I part ways with Brenmiller, who rushes off to a meeting with Benny Biton, the mayor of Dimona. Even grand visions have to pay property taxes. On the way out, I notice two workers on a bench outside, smoking in the overly warm winter sun. On their phones, they scroll through new photos and videos posted from the massacre events. They notice me. "Say, is this going to be in the newspaper now, with all the war?" "What do you think," I ask, "is it important to make energy from rocks in the desert?" "Sure, it's very important," they reply, "this work is our life." And all the way home, their response echoes in my ears.
