Israel will soon require all new non-residential buildings to have rooftop solar panels to help it meet renewable energy targets and the electricity demands of a fast-growing population.

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Although drenched in sunshine, Israel is too small to rely on traditional, land-intensive photovoltaic power plants. It is also unsuitable for wind power and lacks water for hydropower.

Ron Eifer, who heads the Energy Ministry's sustainable energy division, said Israel stands apart as a developed country in its dependency on sun as a renewable source, while lacking land for solar farms.

It has fallen behind schedule on its goal to get 30% of electricity from renewables by 2030.

"We have to take some dramatic steps," Eifer said.

When passing the state budget last month, the government ordered regulation to be in place within 180 days to require new non-residential buildings to be topped with solar panels.

For residential buildings, the roof must be fully equipped for easy installation of panels later on.

The country had success with a similar initiative decades ago when it required residents to use sun-powered water heaters. Today those heaters dominate the rooftop landscape in cities and without them, Israel would need to produce 8% more electricity.

Most of Israel's commercial solar fields have been built in the southern Negev desert, or remote areas to the north, far from the biggest cities.

"Beyond the problem of electricity getting lost in long-distance transit to the center of the country, it is important to maintain open spaces. You can't just cover the entire Negev desert in solar panels," Eifer said.

"So we need a mix of ground-based solar, which is cheapest and can be built en masse, and dual-use, which can be built on rooftops directly where there is demand for electricity."

Roughly 60% will eventually be dual-use, he said, referring to solar panels that serve as roofing as well as to generate power.

Environmental campaigners have criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government over ecologically harmful decisions this year, including repealing a tax on disposable plastics and attempts to curtail clean air regulation.

They welcomed the new solar policy, although they said more action was required.

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Amit Bracha, executive director of the environmental watchdog Adam Teva V'din, said the mandate was "important news, even if still a drop in the ocean as an incentive for putting photovoltaic installations on roofs."

He said that developed countries often offer broader economic support, like loans and green bonds to promote renewable energy.

Israel's government incentives include permit exemptions, tax benefits and small producers are paid a premium for electricity.

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Dubai opened the doors Friday to an architecturally stunning building housing the new Museum of the Future, a seven-story structure that envisions a dreamlike world powered by solar energy and the Gulf Arab state's frenetic quest to develop.

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The torus-shaped museum is a design marvel that forgoes support columns, relying instead on a network of diagonal beams. It is enveloped in windows carved by Arabic calligraphy, adding another eye-popping design element to Dubai's piercingly modern skyline that shimmers with the world's tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa.

The Museum of the Future projects Dubai's ambitions and its desire to be seen as a modern, inclusive city even as its political system remains rooted in hereditary rule and hard limits exist on the types of expression permitted. It is the latest in a stream of feats for Dubai, which is the first country in the Middle East to host the World's Fair.

The museum envisions what the world could look like 50 years from today. It's a vision that crystalizes the United Arab Emirates' own 50-year transformation from a pearl-diving backwater to a global interconnected hub fueled by oil and gas wealth.

"It was an imperative requirement to develop so fast because we needed to catch up with the rest of the world," said Sarah Al-Amiri, UAE minister of state for advanced technology and chair of the UAE Space Agency. "Prior to 1971, [we had] no basic road networks, no basic education, electricity network and so on."

The UAE last year announced it would join a growing list of nations cutting greenhouse gas emissions, shifting away at least domestically from the fossil fuels that still drive the Arabian Peninsula's growth, clout and influence.

However, the museum's focus on a sustainable future brings to the forefront the inherent tension between the push by Gulf Arab states to keep pumping oil and gas and global pledges to cut down on carbon emissions, including the UAE's 2050 net-zero pledge.

Moreover, the museum invites visitors to reconnect with their senses and disconnect from their phones, but digital screens and experiences flow throughout its installations. The museum also encourages visitors to think about the planet's health and biodiversity in a city that celebrates consumption, luxury and consumerism.

Al-Amiri said the museum's ethos is that the drive toward a sustainable future and healthy planet should not prohibit progress and economic growth.

"It needs to not be prohibitive, but rather an opportunity to create new opportunities out of this challenge that we're all facing," she said.

The museum's creative director, Brendan McGetrick, said addressing climate change "doesn't mean that you have to return to like some hunter gatherer lifestyle."

"You can actually mobilize and continue progressing and continue innovating, but it should be done with an awareness of our relationship to the planet and that we have a lot of work to do," he said.

The museum's goal is to inspire people to think about what is possible and to channel that into real world action, he added.

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Visitors to the Museum of the Future are ushered by an artificial intelligence guide named "Aya." She beckons people to experience a future with flying taxis, windfarms and a world powered by a massive structure orbiting Earth that harnesses the sun's energy and beams it to the moon. The so-called "Sol Project" imagines the moon covered by countless solar panels that direct that energy toward nodes on Earth, where humanity thrives and the planet's biodiversity includes innovative plant species resistant to fire.

"What we tried to do is create a sort of compelling vision of what would happen if we imagine space as a shared resource," McGetrick said.

The museum envisions that humanity's collective energy project is directed by a space station called the OSS Hope, the same word in Arabic the UAE named its real-life mission gathering data from Mars' atmosphere. Last year, the UAE became the first Arab country to launch a functioning interplanetary mission.

The museum's imagined future also draws from Islam's past with a mesmerizing display of the planets in our solar system mapped by astrolabes, the complex devices refined by Muslims during the Golden Age of Islam to aid in navigation, time and celestial mapping.

The museum's Arab thumbprint flows throughout, including in a meditation space that is part of a larger sensory experience guided by vibration, light and water. These three elements underpinned life for tribes in the Arabian Peninsula.

The oil-fueled cities of the Gulf that have emerged from the desert over the past few decades unearthed seismic changes in the ways people in the region live, interact and connect with nature.

"It's always important to continue to evolve and develop and understand what parts of the culture actually push development forward," said Al-Amiri. "Creating new norms and new ways of living and new ways of coexisting is OK."

A stunning centerpiece of the museum is a darkened mirrored space illuminated by columns of tiny glass cylinders with the illusory DNA of animals and species that have gone extinct, including the polar bear whose Arctic habitat is currently threatened by warming temperatures. In this dreamscape future, the health of the planet is monitored like a person's pulse, temperature and vitals are.

The Museum of the Future opens to the public Friday with tickets costing the equivalent of $40 a person. An official launch ceremony Monday evening took place in the presence of Dubai ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, whose poetry wraps the building in Arabic calligraphy.

The building was conceptualized by Killa Design, a UAE-based architecture firm. Killa Design says the building, which overlooks Dubai's main thoroughfare, has achieved LEED Platinum status, a worldwide rating reserved for the world's most energy-efficient and environmental designs.

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The southern tip of Israel is a rocky desert where solar panels are abundant and the sun, when shining, is the source of nearly all electricity. Once it sets, however, the grid shifts back to fossil fuels to generate power.

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Renewable energy from solar and wind-powered systems cannot be stored without extra cost – a major obstacle in the world's efforts to tear itself away from polluting fuels and avoid a climate catastrophe.

But at Kibbutz Yahel – a small community not far from the Red Sea where a sweet variety of dates called Medjool is grown – residents have started using a new technology that can store solar energy cheaply and produce power well into the night.

During the day, excess energy from solar panels drives a system where water is used to condense air in underground tanks. After sundown that air is released to power a turbine and generate electricity. And the cycle repeats in the morning.

"Other kibbutzim are waiting and watching to see if this works, and certainly it could become the green energy storage solution for the area," Yossi Amiel, Yahel's business manager, said.

The system was developed by Augwind Energy, a company traded in Tel Aviv with a market cap of 1.2 billion shekels ($386 million).

Unlike above-ground platforms that work with condensed air and require significant real estate, the company says its product – a relatively thin steel tank with a special polymer lining – can be placed right at the power source and at a lower cost.

A range of techniques is being explored to store energy, like pumped-hydro systems that use gravity to generate electricity after hours, lithium-ion batteries like those in electric cars, and storing energy in chemical forms, like hydrogen.

An ideal solution has been elusive, said Gideon Friedman, acting chief scientist at the Energy Ministry. Batteries can be toxic and their cycles are limited, he said, while hydrogen is still early stage and too expensive.

Augwind's AirBattery is about 80% efficient in storing energy, a bit less than batteries, but unlike batteries, it does not degrade over time.

"It's really a matter of cost versus the competition of batteries, whether this system can compete in cost. If they can, we will see, I expect, quite a number of these. Certainly, there are a few projects already planned," Friedman said.

Augwind CEO Or Yogev said the price is on par with lithium-ion batteries, roughly $250 per kilowatt-hour, and that it will drop next year to below $200 as they roll out to more customers. The company has so far raised $60 million from institutional investors, he said.

"Over the next few years, we're going to have thousands of megawatt-hours installed using the AirBattery technology. That's our prediction," Yogev said. "Even that, when you compare that to the size of the market, it's still pretty small."

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Renewable energy options in Israel are "near zero," and the country will have no alternative to building additional power stations, an economist for the energy sector in the Budget Department of the Finance Ministry Ido Mor said Tuesday.

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Speaking at the 18^th Israel Energy and Business Convention 2021 at the Kfar Maccabiah Hotel in Ramat Gan, Mor said that "Israel was under-performing in terms of renewable energies, but even if we meet the goals we will have no choice other than to plan and build more power stations."

Mor said that the government's goal of transitioning Israel to 20% renewable energy by 2025 would "require a herculean effort, and we need to prepare for the possibility we won't meet it."

"In any case, moving the economy to electricity in the long term is more important than the short term, and we will need to ensure a supply of electricity when we bring a metro, light trains, electric trains, and more on line. All this requires preparation and more power stations," Mor said.

Chen Herzog, chief economist at BDO Israel, sounded more decisive and told the conference that "it is not feasible to meet the government's goal of 20% renewable energies by 2025," and that "so we don't have excuses in 2030, there need to be goals that can be met, rather than utopian ones."

According to Herzog, regulators would have to admit that Israel would not meet its 2025 goal and take steps to reduce emissions rather that focus solely on renewable energies: "For example, accelerating the developing of electric transportation and construction efficient power stations, as well as developing a competitive market for renewable energies."

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Israel's Enlight Renewable Energy has signed an agreement to acquire a portfolio of photovoltaic solar energy projects, in several stages, that are currently under development in Spain, with potential aggregate capacity of approximately 490 Megawatts DC.

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The Spanish government recently increased renewable energy production targets to approximately 74% of total energy consumption by 2030, with most expected to come from solar energy, with an estimated additional capacity of 37,000 MW of solar energy.

The portfolio includes 10 projects in two regions, Andalucía and Valencia, which have some of the best radiation in Spain, and supplements the location of the projects the company is building and developing in Spain, currently in the Castilla La Mancha region. The projects are held through special purpose companies, which at this stage hold most of the rights to the land for construction of the projects and the approvals to connect to the electricity grid.

A consideration will be paid according to milestones based on the development of the projects, which is being handled by Spain's Renovalia Energy Group SLU, with most of the consideration being paid upon completion of the development and after all the permits for construction of the projects have been obtained. The first milestone is for an amount that is not material for the company, and it includes a guarantee for most of the rights to the land and rights to connect to the grid.

The average consideration upon completion of the development is expected to reach 85,000-100,000 euros per MWdc, depending on materialization of the various parameters of the different projects. Enlight estimates that the portfolio projects that materialize will do so gradually, in whole or in part, over a two-year period.

Zafrir Yoeli, senior VP of business development at Enlight, said, "This is another expansion of our portfolio of projects in Spain, which already includes the largest wind farm in Spain which is in advanced stages of construction (Gecama), as well as another 800MWdc in development.

"The new portfolio, which already secured grid connection rights to the national electricity grid, will add significant solar power in high-radiation areas and will diversify our production sources in the Iberian region," Yoeli noted.

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Cellcom, one of Israel's leading telecommunications companies, announced Monday plans to enter the electricity market, essentially kickstarting a revolution in the industry, which has until now been monopolized by the government-owned Israel Electric Corporation.

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As part of "Cellcom Energy," its joint venture with Meshek Energy that works with renewable sources, the company will provide electricity to private customers and businesses. Within a decade, it plans to transform the market, shifting most of the production to private companies, increasing the use of renewable energy, and transitioning to mostly electric or hybrid vehicles.

The project, which is pending approval, requires the installation of special smart meters. As part of a pilot, the IEC has already installed 40,000 such devices, with many more to be installed soon.

According to Cellcom, the cost of electricity would reduce dramatically, saving the average household thousands of shekels a year, and businesses, tens of thousands of shekels a year.

To encourage more customers to join its program, Cellcom is offering a variety of discounts, including at-home charging stations for electric vehicles and renewable power sources, such as solar panels.

Another major telecommunications company, Hot, also announced its plan to enter the electricity market and is expected to hand in a request for a license from the Electric Corporation on Monday.

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Israel has a new energy efficiency goal: a new plan from the Energy Ministry, presented Monday, has set a target of reducing carbon emissions by 7.5% by 2030.

The ministry also recommended an interim goal of improved energy efficiency by 11% by 2025, compared to 2015 (which would work out to an average 1.2% improvement per year), and an 18% improvement in energy efficiency by 2030 compared to 2015.

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"The new goal links energy consumption to the amount of products and services in the country," the Energy Ministry explained in a statement.

"It is appropriate for Israel, where the population growth rate and economic growth are among the highest in OECD nations. In addition, these criteria allow us to compare ourselves to other countries," the ministry said.

"Implementing these policy steps are expected to reduce consumption of some 6 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which account for about 7.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions [projected for] Israel in 2030. This is in addition to implementing the government's decision to transition to 0% renewable energy sources by 2030.

The plan to cut Israel's carbon emissions also calls to stop sales of polluting cars starting in 2030 through the establishment of a viable infrastructure for electric vehicles.

According to Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, "The global climate crisis demands that we make major changes in our living habits, especially the ways in which we produce and consume energy. Through groundbreaking plans, we not only reduce the rise in energy demand, we also make Israel into a nexus of development and implementation of advanced technologies and methods that will allow Israeli companies to break into new markets all over the world."

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The Björnberget has a total capacity of 372 megawatts. Permits have been obtained for construction, which is slated to include 60 wind turbines that utilize Siemens Gamesa 5.X technology.

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Enlight's share in the project will be 55%-61%, and the rest will be held by the European Prime Green Energy Investment Fund, which specializes in investments in wind energy in the Nordic market.

Enlight and the PGEIF have also agreed to partner on strategic development to promote  additional renewable energy projects in the Nordic region.

As part of the transaction, Enlight will be allocated a share of about 20% in the PGEIF and will invest up to 50 million euros in the fund, which will be used for more renewable energy projects.

According to projections, once the Björnberget project is up and running, its electricity sales will amount to some €30 million in the first year, and around €60 million per year on average for the operating period.

Enlight co-founder and CEO Gilad Yavetz said that "especially at this challenging time for the Israeli economy, we are very proud to complete this important deal."

"This is Enlight's second large-scale project in the Nordic market, the biggest, most developed and liquid energy market in Europe," Yavetz said.

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CEO of OPC Energy Giora Almogi said Wednesday that OPC has recognized the potential of the US electricity market, with an emphasis on expanding operations into the field of renewable energy.

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According to Amogi, the US Energy Information Administration expects that coal-fired power plants and power stations based on fuel oil and diesel that produce some 130,000 MW will close by 2030, but that wind and solar-based power stations will be constructed that will produce over 230,000 MW of energy.

"There is growing momentum for increased development of renewable energy and a focus on a lower carbon approach to electricity supply," Almogi explained, adding that the US energy market was also modernizing its electricity grid and replacing coal and uneconomic nuclear assets with "efficient, highly flexible natural gas power plants."

Almogi said that CPV was a "pioneering company in its field" and operated in the biggest electricity markets in the US. Almogi also noted that since it was founded, CPV has constructed power plants with a total installed capacity of approximately 14,800 megawatts (MW), including approximately 9,950 MW of conventional stations in several markets, and wind-based power plants with a total capacity of approximately 4,850 MW.

"The deal also puts OPC directly into the areas of green energy, and especially into the areas of solar energy and wind energy," Almogi said.

OPC could obtain a holding in CPV of about 70%, and intends to bring in a number of Israeli capital investors. The company said it was negotiating with Migdal, Clal and Poalim Capital Markets.

The deal is pending regulatory approval.

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The Israel Meteorological Service registered temperatures including 42°C (107.6°F) in Eilat, 38°C (100.4°F) in Jerusalem, 47°C (116.6°F) in Tiberias and 33°C (91.4°F) in Haifa.

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Despite the heat, the Health Ministry has issued a statement calling on the public to wear face masks and adhere to social distancing guidelines.

The ministry warned Israelis, especially senior citizens and those who suffer from chronic health conditions, to "avoid exposure to heat and sun, as well as unnecessary physical exertion, while drinking water and residing in air-conditioned places as much as possible."

The Israel Nature and Parks Authority has banned hiking on certain routes, including in the Judean Desert, until temperatures go down.

On Sunday afternoon, electricity consumption in Israel hit an all-time national record of 14,089 megawatts (MW), topping by 135 MW the previous record set earlier this year during an unusual heatwave in May.

During the May heatwave, the Health Ministry temporarily waived the requirement to wear face masks in public.

This article was originally published by i24NEWS.

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