Aug 29 - Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

Israel's first solar power station is up and running in the south desert Negev, which is expected to provide 220,000 shekels (about 61,452 U.S.dollars) of electricity a year to the national power grid.

The plant is built by Moshe Tenne on his Negev farm for 1.3 million shekels, local daily Ha'aretz reported Thursday.

Tenne inaugurated his 50-kilowatt solar array this week. It will provide two-thirds of the needs of his central Negev farm, a sophisticated dairy barn with 70 cows producing about 800,000 liters of milk a year.

Tenne's power plant has thin-film solar panels on 600 square meters of the cowshed's roof. He also installed another array of multicrystal silicon solar cells, a different technology. These are mounted on systems that track the sun during the day and are spread out over about a dunam of his farmland, about a quarter acre.

Israel announced the state incentives on July 1 to allow home and industrial customers to install solar power panels and receive 2.01 shekels per kilowatt hour for the electricity they produce compared with the 0.50 shekels per kilowatt hour they pay the Israel Electric Corporation(IEC).

The new agreement is for photovoltaic cell array technology, and the power produced is intended for the producer's use, while any extra power may be sold to the IEC. The state limits household power plants to 15 kilowatts, and business customers to 50 kilowatts.

"With the introduction of the new regulations, the project became economically worthwhile," Tenne was quoted as saying. "If electricity prices rise, the IEC's prices will already meet the cost of solar energy in 2016. That's another reason the project is worthwhile." (One U.S.dollar=3.58 shekels)

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