There are no good guys or bad guys in this performance, there are only just dreamers and realists. The dreamers are fighting for us to immediately shift to solar energy; the realists remind us that isn't a possibility just yet. The dreamers say Israel is lagging behind Northern Europe and other Western states; the realists remind the dreamers those countries have rivers that produce hydraulic energy 24 hours a day, as well as strong winds that also produce energy a majority of the day. There is no real comparison to our green solar energy. We want peace and we want green energy, too, but that's just not possible now.
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The push for solar energy is a real threat. The dreamers are trying to skip over several stages in their path to achieving our shared vision, thereby delaying its realization. Environmental groups that stalled the natural gas reforms are the reason we continue to burn coal, which provides a quarter of the energy Israel uses to make electricity, today.
From both an environmental and economic perspective, Israel should move to quickly shift to natural gas. Of all the fossil fuels – petroleum, natural gas, coal, shale, and the like – natural gas is considered the cleanest. Beyond that, ours is blue and white. Many of the dreamers like the idea of blue and white energy, but they can't connect that to the most precious resource our country has to offer: natural gas. Had we developed this resource quicker, at the same time as we moved to power plants that run on natural gas, the air would be cleaner today and we would be less dependent on energy imports.
The shift to solar energy cannot happen as quickly as the previous government had planned, and it certainly can't happen quicker than that. The provision of a few hours of energy a day is not enough to make traditional power stations redundant. Until we learn to store energy, these power stations should serve as charging stations for electric vehicles, as a Chinese company is planning to do. These stations will ease the load on power stations and immediately launch the revolution we all are waiting for.
Just give it time. Preaching to the public won't make it happen any faster, but the technological developments that allow it to store energy in greater quantities will.
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