Oded Rosenberg, CEO of Apollo, with a solar sheet at the factory in Kneam (Photo: Photo: Rami Zenger)
Just this week we were informed that the increase in electricity prices in Israel will be steeper than we thought.
Many are already fighting this cut by installing solar cells on roofs, which generate electricity from sunlight and feed it back into the grid, leading to a credit on the electricity bill.
However, the field of solar energy has been undergoing a kind of mini-revolution in recent years, moving to flexible solar cells instead of the traditional hard ones, which allows them to be folded and shaped into almost any exposed surface.
But recently we reviewed here headphones whose headband is coated with a photoelectric material called Powerfoyle and which are charged directly by sunlight, while yesterday (Tuesday) a factory that produces flexible solar cells in sheets of the Israeli company Apollo Power was inaugurated here, in Ne'am.
The products we saw literally filled our hearts with pride in Israeli technology: Apollo Power, established in 2014, is already known to customers and has collaborations, for example in the automotive sector, where it integrated its flexible solar cells, for example, in the roof of a future Audi electric vehicle, and has collaborations A similar operation with Hyundai - where the solar cells integrated in the parts of the vehicle exposed to the sun turn the light into electricity that charges the batteries, increasing the driving range of the electric cars.
Quite exciting.
Apollo Power's solar panels are integrated into a Hyundai model (Photo: Apollo Power)
Another development that has already been sold to Amazon and installed in the company's huge warehouses in France is solar sidewalks, which are made from recycled tires (97% of the body).
These are "tiles" that turn sunlight into electricity and transfer it to storage in a nearby battery.
From this battery, you can, for example, charge electric bicycles or motorized scooters, and this is exactly what Amazon is doing in its facility in France with the Israeli Apollo product.
Other developments of the company, which will be produced here at the plant in Kneam, include light sheets containing solar cells, which can be installed on ordinary roofs and even light roofs such as warehouses (which is not possible with traditional solar cells due to their weight), or floating on water reservoirs.
Another cute and clever part is that the sheets are easily attached to each other with... a zipper (of course, more massive than a pants zipper, but still a zipper), and require almost zero chassis to install.
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Other developments of the company, which will be produced here at the factory in Kneam, include light sheets containing solar cells, which can be installed on ordinary roofs (Photo: Walla! Technology, Niv Lilian)
The factory, which, although most of it is automatic and robotic, employs about 100 workers, and whose construction cost is 100 million shekels, entered its start-up phase yesterday (Tuesday), and will produce sheets at full capacity that provide 190 megawatts per year, equivalent to an annual electricity consumption of between 35 and 40 thousand households.
@nivlilien A new factory for the production of flexible solar cells of the Apollo Power company was inaugurated in Bikneam and I came to see the cool things they produce.
#solar #solarpower #solarenergy #technology #theconnection #theuplink ♬ original sound - nivli
The CEO of Apollo Power, Oded Rosenberg, said: "For the past year and a half, we have worked to establish the innovative and automatic factory for the production of flexible solar panels, based on the groundbreaking technology we developed, in order to realize our vision of generating electricity from any surface exposed to the sun.
We are excited and proud to open the first factory of its kind in the world here in our home, in Israel, and in particular in the north of the country.
Our breakthrough technology is particularly suitable for installation on light roofs and water reservoirs as well as suitable for the automotive market.
The potential is endless and the green gospel we are putting out into the world is more significant than ever," concluded Rosenberg.
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