This document describes comprehensively and in detail the energy sector in Israel.
Continuing with a “business as usual†approach to fossil fuel use can lead to a catastrophe of global proportions. The price that we, as a society, actually pay for energy is significantly higher than the amount that appears in our monthly bills, because all use of conventional energy engenders external, long term costs related to environmental, economic and social damage. There is a critical need to include these external costs in the price of energy, both for correct pricing of energy use, and as a tool to stimulate development and use of alternative energy sources which are less damaging to the environment.
There are several ways to diverge from the “business as usual†approach:
First and foremost is saving energy. The estimations outlined in this section point to the possibility of saving over 20% in electric energy consumption through simple savings and efficiency-increasing operations. Solutions that are more basic include increasing the use of renewable energy sources. Electricity can be produced by harnessing the wind, a system that is used extensively in different countries and is hardly employed in Israel. Moreover, the exploitation of solar energy, both directly and indirectly, can be vastly expanded from its present level. In this section, a comprehensive survey of different systems is presented, with an emphasis on the system of Energy Towers, a system developed by the section’s author, Professor Dan Zaslavski.
