Professor David Faiman was born in Amersham, a town just outside of London, during World War 2 and survived to become a successful physicist. He obtained physics degrees in the UK and the US and a post-doctorate at Oxford University. He worked for CERN – the European Organisation for Nuclear Research as a specialist in nuclear physics.
Around the age of 30, when he married his wife Ofra, they decided to immigrate to Israel where he began work at the Weizmann Institute. This was just before the Yom Kippur War and the Arab Oil boycott that followed made him rethink his research in light of national needs. It was around this time that Faiman became certain that Israel must find a solar solution because of the country’s continuing population growth and energy requirements.
Israel announced a target of 10 per cent renewable by 2020. That’s 10 per cent out of a projected total of 80 billion, which means 0.8 billion kilowatts produced every year. This is a tall order and in practical terms would mean building PV plants every year, 4 to 5 times as large as the largest ever built.
Faiman drew several conclusions from these statistics. Firstly, although collection surfaces need to be large, the wafers that are used to convert the solar rays to electricity needn’t be. Therefore, Faiman’s model bends the panel into a parabolic dish. This allows all the sun’s rays to be focused on a receiver that’s only one-thousandth the size of the dish, minimising the one component that’s the most expensive.
The next challenge Faiman faced was to stop the converter from burning out – as would normally be the case when focusing so much solar energy onto such a small area. He found that by running liquid over the solar converter the radiated surface could be cooled sufficiently. Furthermore, the heat energy absorbed by the liquid can then be transferred to water stored in tanks, so it becomes unnecessary to use electricity or burn fossil fuels in order to acquire running hot water.
The Israeli company Zenith Solar have been putting Faiman’s ideas to good use since 2009. The CEO of Zenith, Roy Segev, claims that by using this Combined Heat and Power (CHP) technology the panels are able to reach an efficiency of 70 per cent plus – a huge improvement on the 10 and 15 per cent efficiencies that are standard.
As for production waste, 99 per cent is recyclable. This means far less land fill space is required than for other technologies, an all important factor when preserving precious land resources.