21–26 of 26 posts
There is one country that might have the greatest ability to generate solar power, yet it's still not used, Algeria has one of the biggest deserts in the world and the power generated from there could be enough to get rid of a lot of oil generated power.
> “Everything is connected by WiFi instead of by cables. The tower and its boiler are also designed to reduce costs. Everything is done to pursue profitability.” Is WiFi really cheaper than running cables?
I was wondering the same. If Wifi meant no cables needed at all, I could see it (because of lower maintenance costs). But the electricity needed for Wifi and the motors in the mirrors requires cables anyway.
Wifi also allows technicians to connect to which ever devices that they are monitoring more easily and if they will have wifi for easy onsite access they might just as well pull everything over wifi.
It's quite common these days to pretty much run industrial monitoring over wifi it reduces quite a bit of costs as the technicians can just come with a smartphone or a tablet and connect to the web interface or use some dedicated diagnostic app it's much cheaper than sending them out with laptops and connecting directly or having them to use even more expensive dedicated diagnostic equipment.
Israel has also been a long-time user of solar water heaters. According to this article, about 1 million households for a population of 8 million use them. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-03-26/at-the-zen...
These heaters have been used since the 50's it's nothing more than a few pipes running through a sheet metal frame with a glass cover to force a greenhouse effect they are highly effective and extremely cheap to produce those panels cost near nothing and were implemented very early on when Israel had very little access to overseas fuel sources.
Israel didn't had access to regional oil until the the Iranian coup in 1953, it lost its access to Iranian oil in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, however the same year Israel and Egypt signed the camp david accords and Egypt started supplying Israel with Oil starting January of 1980.
Ironically the Iranian revolution quite likely had quite a positive effect on Israel as it quite likely pushed them to finalize the negotiations with Egypt and to sign an agreement as fast as possible in order regain some access to a regional oil source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When hospitals stop being rocket bases.
According to the UN, during the 2014 conflict there were 5 Israeli civilian deaths and 1500 Palestinian civilians killed. Seems pretty justified to me!
Classic typical misleading statistics in this article. Energy is 1% of Israel's gross capacity plus this is solar so it only provides daytime loads which makes the economics worse. Google's major investment in solar thermal has already gone bust. This is a small financial disaster. The economics of solar thermal are crap. Mirrors break or stop tracking well a lot in high winds of a dessert. Any problems with a steam…
The big advantage of this type of solar over photovoltaics is that they continue producing electricity after the sun sets, so can act as base load stations. Typically, the bigger the tower, the longer it can generate, hence the need for big projects and investments.
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How does this contribute to the discussion at hand? This is not reddit.
I like to rile up the Mossad reputation management folks ever since I found them copy-pasting the same "please no simplified propaganda" retorts from multiple accounts on HN a while back. Edit: To see the obvious sockpuppetry I'm referring to, look at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=please%20no%20simplified%20pro... Edit 2: Yep, keep the downvotes coming. It doesn't matter that I have hard evidence of Israeli nationali…