Renewable Energy Lab

Tanzania Project : Potable Water and Solar Energy for the People of Minjingu

Tel Aviv University Branch of Engineers Without Borders

Supported by Boris Mints Institute

The project is supported by BMI, the TAU Renewable Energy Center and the Institute for Water Research.

Project Goals:

• Provide power supply using an off grid photo-voltaic system to Medical Center in the province of Nkaiti.

• Supply clean drinking water to the medical center Nkaiti .

• Supply clean drinking water to one high school in the Nkaiti province.

Development of a Method for Extracting Spatial Photon Recycling
Efficiency of Solar Energy Conversion Devices

Tamir Yeshurun, BMI Fellow

Academic Advisor: Dr. Gideon Segev, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Physical Electronics
Department

This research focuses on extracting the photon external luminescence efficiency for characterizing materials and devices for solar energy conversion. A photoluminescence quantum yield measuring system was constructed and performed the incident wavelength dependent photoluminescence quantum yield of an InP wafer was measured. Over the next year, an optical model will be built, simulated, and compared the spatial photon external luminescence efficiency extracted from measurements for different materials and various solar devices. This year there will also be a collaboration with Prof. Ziv Hameiri’s group at the University of New South Wales, Australia, with the purpose of expanding possible experiments using various characterization techniques.

Water Treatments with Ratchet Based Ionic Pumps (RBIPs)

Alon Herman, BMI Fellow

Academic Advisor: Dr. Gideon Segev, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Physical Electronics
Department

Estimates show that about two thirds of the world’s population experience severe water scarcity at least one month every year. Water desalination is already in widespread use in many parts of the world, however current industrialized technologies require extensive capital and energetic costs, making them impractical in the developing world where access to clean drinking water is most needed. Pollution of ground and wastewater is also a major source of scarcity, for example heavy metal ions pollution (such as zinc, nickel, lead, etc.) due to advanced industrialization, or Arsenic pollution in developing countries. Therefore, In the face of ever-growing demand, the need for small-scale, low cost and reliable water treatment technologies is of great importance. The project focuses on developing a Ratchet-based Ionic Pump in order to tackle this challenge.

The Role of Institution in Renewable Energy Growth

Eyal Sasson, BMI Fellow

Academic Advisor: Prof. Itai Sened

From its beginning, electricity markets were dominated by a single electricity utility, which controlled all components of electricity supply – generation, transmission, distribution, and retail supply. The high infrastructural costs require a vast initial investment and create a unique costs structure yielding a natural monopoly–a single company that supplies the entire demand. The growing market of renewable energy provides a window of opportunities for the privatization of electricity generation. Transforming electricity markets into efficient and competitive markets would increase production efficiency, reduce electricity prices and improve service quality alongside reducing negative externalities and climate mitigation. While there is a plethora of empirical literature that tries to estimate the effect of market structure on electricity prices, less attention has been given to investigate what role institutions have in the privatization of the electricity market and how institutional quality stimulates renewable energy penetration more successfully.

This research extends the understanding of the pre-conditions underlying the creation of new markets and contributes to a better understanding of the role of institutional quality in the context of emerging markets. To empirically investigate the theory, the research exploits panel data of annual state-level variables covering 47 countries from 1996 through 2019, to explore the effects of institutional quality (e.g., efficient regulatory, well-defined and secured property rights, and sophisticated financial systems) on renewable energy growth. Panel data sets are better able to study cross-sections dynamic changes over time. So far - the research points to that total electricity production is growing more rapidly than electricity production from renewables. Once we normalize by the population size, electricity production per capita is roughly constant over the past ten years, while there is a significant trend upwards in electricity production from renewables per capita. These trends make ground for optimism, indicating that while total electricity production is growing at the same rates as population growth, electricity production from renewables is growing much faster than population.