History
Zenith Solar was founded in 2006 by Roy Segev, David Faiman and Bob Whelen.
In 2007, David Faiman, director of the Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center, announced that the Center had entered into a project with Zenith to create a home solar energy system that uses a 10 square meter reflector dish. Zenith bought the rights to solar technology from Ben-Gurion University and Germany's Fraunhofer Institute to create solar energy using mirrors and lenses that magnify and focus the sun's rays. In testing, the concentrated solar technology proved to be up to five times more efficient than standard flat photovoltaic silicon panels, which would make it almost as cheap as oil and natural gas. A prototype ready for commercialization achieved a concentration of solar energy that was more than 1,000 times greater than standard flat panels. According to Faiman, who led the Israeli team that developed the technology, 10% of Israel’s energy needs (1,000 megawatts) could be met from 12 square kilometres of land.
Since 2009, Zenith Solar has been assembling solar panel kits at its factory in Kiryat Gat. The company uses CHP (combined heat and power) technology which reaches efficiencies of over 70%, compared to 10-15% for conventional PV panels. In addition to harvesting more energy from a smaller space, less landfill is produced from their waste. The materials are mirrors, plastic and metals, which are 99% recyclable.
Read more about this topic: Zenith Solar
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)