Four American-Israeli projects in renewable energy will receive portions of a
$3.5 million budget allocated jointly by the United States Department of Energy
and Israel’s Energy and Water Ministry, under the 2012 Binational Industrial
Research and Development (BIRD) Energy program.
Each project receiving
funding involves one American and one Israeli partner and aims to address energy
challenges that both countries are interested in tackling, BIRD Energy announced
on Sunday. Not only will the money finance research, but it will also serve to
help commercialize clean energy technologies that can improve economic
competitiveness and create jobs, according to BIRD. This is the fourth class of
collaborative BIRD projects to be approved specifically for the energy
sector.
The US and Israeli governments first established BIRD in 1977, in
order to promote cooperation between the two nations in the emerging hi-tech and
start-up sectors, and his since expanded its scope to areas of renewable energy,
life sciences, electronics, optics, software and homeland security, the
organization said.
BIRD finances about 20 projects annually, and the
cumulative sales of products that have resulted from BIRD projects now amount to
over $8 billion. At the onset of a project, BIRD provides up to 50 percent of
each initiative’s budget, and then the companies repay their financial
assistance as royalties from their sales. Should the projects fail to reach
sales stage, BIRD does not demand that the investments be repaid, the
organization said.
The first of the four projects that BIRD has selected
for this round of investments is a Hydrogen- Halogen Regenerative Fuel Cell
initiative between Bromine Compounds of Beersheba and Sustainable Innovations of
Glastonbury, Connecticut. In developing the fuel cell, the two companies hope to
generate a mechanism that can provide low cost, transportable, modular energy
storage capability, according to BIRD.
Also focusing on storage, the
second project will center on developing high-energy, rechargeable magnesium
batteries.
The two firms working on the project, Bar Ilan Research and
Development Company of Ramat Gan and Pellion Technologies of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, claim that the magnesium batteries are superior to lithium-ion
technology in size, weight, lifetime and cost.
B.G. Negev Technologies in
Beersheba will be working with Southwest Solar Technologies from Phoenix,
Arizona, to jointly develop a concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) system that
employs a new type of active cooling module, in the third project, according to
BIRD.
The fourth project will involve Pythagoras Solar of Petah Tikvah
and BISEM of Sacramento, California, and the two companies will be developing
windows capable of efficiently producing electricity from solar energy. The
windows will involve buildingintegrated photovoltaics (BIPV), in which
photovoltaic solar windows with a high level of transparency and insulation
replace the typical windows of a building.
“In a global market which is
becoming increasingly challenging for young renewable energy companies,
partnering is critical to accelerate development and reduce risks,” said Dr.
Eitan Yudilevich, executive director of BIRD. “We are pleased to be able to
support these four promising US-Israel collaborations selected from a highly
competitive group of proposals.”
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