Israel's First High-Tech
Ambassador in Space
January 2003
Israel's first astronaut - Air Force Col.
Ilan Ramon - is scheduled to take part in the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia's next mission.
STS-107 is a 16-day research mission that is slated to be launched on January 16, 2003.
The mission is a multi-discipline microgravity and Earth science research mission with a
multitude of international scientific investigations to be conducted continuously during
the planned 16 days on orbit.
Ilan Ramon: "Being the first Israeli
astronaut - I feel I am representing all Jews and all Israelis. I'm also the son of a
Holocaust survivor - I carry on the suffering of the Holocaust generation, and I'm kind of
proof that despite all the horror they went through, we're going forward."
Ramon, a former F-16 squadron commander and
chief of weapons-system development acquisition for the Israeli air force, has been
training at the Space Center in Houston, representing the Israel Space Agency, since 1998.
His role this time, however, is purely scientific. His main responsibility in space will
be to use a multispectral camera to track dust particles from the sandstorms that blow
from the Sahara over the Mediterranean and Middle East. The study - the Mediterranean
Israeli Dust Experiment, designed at Tel Aviv University - is intended to provide
information on how dust affects rainfall.
Background
On December 11, 1995, US President Bill
Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres announced that they had agreed "to
proceed with space-based experiments in sustainable water use and environmental
protection" and that, as a part of this effort, the United States "will also
train Israeli astronauts to participate in these programs." It was also decided that
the astronaut would be a payload specialist for an Israeli scientific experiment to be
decided by the Israeli Space Agency (ISA) with the approval of NASA.
The ISA-developed cooperative payload,
entitled Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment (MEIDEX), will contain ultraviolet,
visible, and near infrared array-detector cameras and will be launched aboard the shuttle
to obtain calibrated images of desert and transported pollution aerosols over land and
sea. The experiment will provide sound scientific information about atmospheric aerosols,
as well as complementary data for NASA's Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) and
Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) instruments.
Israel Space Agency
The Israel Space Agency, established in 1982,
is a coordinating body, using consultants and subcontractors for devising and implementing
its policy and programs.
Although Israel is a very small country, both
territorially and in population, it is highly advanced in science and technology and this
is reflected in its activities and achievements in space. It has become a member of a
highly exclusive "club" of countries who have designed, built and launched their
own satellites.
The Israel Space Agency and the Israeli
industry and academia are involved in different stages of research, development or
operations of a series of space and satellite programs, among the most well-known the Ofeq and Amos satellites.
New energy from the power
of the wind
Wind energy: a boom industry. No country
in the world has as many windmills as Germany. Now the first offshore plants are being
planned
By Lucian Haas
The opening of a wind park in Germany is no
longer anything out of the ordinary. However, when the leading representatives of the
entire industry get together for a celebration, as they did in a meadow near the village
of Bimolten in Lower Saxony on August 6th, then there must be something special in the
air. Or 98 metres up in the air to be more precise. That was where the rotors of 14 new
wind turbines started turning, passing a milestone in the history of wind power: with the
commissioning of the new wind park in Lower Saxony in the late summer of 2002, the
installed capacity of all the wind power stations in Germany crossed the 10,000 megawatt
(MW) mark. Federal Environment Minister JÜrgen Trittin, who started up the anniversary
plant by symbolically pressing a button, declared: "We are the world champions."
There are now more than 12,800 windmills in operation between the North Sea and the Alps,
and new ones are being added all the time. Germany generates well over a third of the
world’s wind power. The United States (25 per cent) and Spain (15 per cent) follow
some way behind in second and third place. In the meantime, particularly in the
wind-blessed coastal regions, wind power is providing a perceptible share of the
electricity supply in Germany. In the northernmost Land Schleswig-Holstein, situated
between the North Sea and the Baltic, about a quarter of net electricity consumption is
already met by wind power. The nationwide figure is 3.5 per cent. And if the predictions
of the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) are correct, more than 22,500 megawatts of
wind-power capacity will be installed by 2010. "If we also manage some modest savings
in power consumption, wind power could by then be generating about ten per cent of our
electricity needs," says BWE president Peter Ahmels.
The wind-power boom in Germany was triggered
by targeted political promotion, a development that was initiated as early as 1991. The
Power Supply Act passed at that time gave windmill owners a guarantee: that the power
companies must buy the wind-generated electricity from them at fixed and relatively high
prices. This made wind power a lucrative investment. The "Renewable Energies
Act" (EEG) tabled by the redgreen federal government has been in force since April
2000. It promotes all kinds of electricity generated in a regenerative way. Since then,
the price for a kilowatt-hour of wind power is about nine euro cents.
At particularly windy locations the price falls slightly to six cents after a plant has
been in operation for five years. Under these conditions, you can make money in Germany by
generating electricity from wind energy. A rate of return of ten per cent per annum is no
exception for windmill operators. Investment funds specializing in wind parks are regarded
as a lucrative investment.
Following the recent elections to the
Bundestag, the redgreen government is continuing to push wind energy which, it is hoped,
will help Germany meet the obligations on climate protection it undertook under the Kyoto-Protocol: i.e. to achieve
a 21 per cent reduction in the 1990 level of carbon dioxide emissions by 2012. In the
spring of 2003 an international conference on renewable energies will be staged in Bonn at
the invitation of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Furthermore, the federal government is
working on the creation of an International Energy Agency for Renewable Energies.
Wind power as a job generator
Compared to electricity production using
fossil fuels such as coal or oil, wind-power stations are already saving about 600 grams
of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of power produced. That adds up to more than twelve
million tons of carbon dioxide a year, which corresponds to about five per cent of the
reduction target. By 2010, the government plans to almost double the percentage of power
generated by renewable energies to 12.5 per cent. Wind power will make the biggest
contribution: almost half of this amount. Even in times of weak economic activity, the
wind-power industry thus works like a well-oiled job generator. The number of people
employed by manufacturers and component suppliers in this sector has doubled to over
35,000 since 1998. The industry’s turnover grows at about 40 per cent a year, and the
BWE estimates that it will pass the 3.5 billion euro in 2002. There are currently just
under a dozen manufacturers of wind power stations in Germany. The market leader is
Enercon from Aurich with a market share of about 43 per cent. The other manufacturers
include Vestas Deutschland GmbH from Husum (14.3 per cent), GE Wind Energy GmbH from
Salzbergen (13.6 per cent), Nordex AG from Norderstedt (8.1 per cent), REpower Systems AG
from Hamburg (6.2 per cent) and AN Windenergie GmbH from Bremen (6.1 per cent).
The wind-power boom seems set to continue,
the only difference being that the number of new windmill locations is likely to grow less
rapidly, because most of the windiest locations, both on the coasts and inland, are
already in use. Planners are finding it increasingly difficult to find suitable places,
especially since there is growing resistance among the population in some regions. Critics
complain about the huge "asparagus plantations" sprouting all over the
landscape, with windmill masts shooting up into the sky, filling the horizon faster than
trees in the forest. The German wind-power industry’s plans for growth are therefore
focusing on three new markets. One is upgrading older rotors at existing locations.
"Repowering," as it is called, replaces smaller plants with a capacity of, say,
300 kilowatts by new, high-performance windmills in the one to two-megawatt class. These
systems can generate a lot more power from the same amount of wind. "We see enormous
growth potential in repowering, particularly for plants in the multi-megawatt class,"
says Fritz Vahrenholt, chairman of the board of REpower Systems AG. The second market of
the future is exports. Windmills "made in Germany" are already in use on all the
continents of the world. About a sixth of the plants built here are exported, and the aim
is to increase this figure further. "We are expecting the amount of wind-power
capacity installed worldwide to more than triple in the next five years from about 25,000
megawatts today to over 75,000 megawatts," says Andreas Eichler, spokesperson of
Vestas Deutschland GmbH.
The future lies in the sea
The third market of the future for windmills
is at sea, for wind power plants can also be built offshore. This has several advantages.
For one thing, the wind blows more strongly and constantly over water, and this increases
the energy yield. Moreover, the plants can be installed so far out to sea that they
disappear from the view of the coastal inhabitants and thus no longer disturb anyone. On
the other hand, wind-power plants on the high seas are an option with many unknown
quantities. The technical difficulties are enormous. Even today, nobody knows whether they
can be mastered at all – or at least in a way which ensures that offshore plants can
ultimately be run at a profit: large foundations need to be anchored on the sea bed at a
depth of up to 30 metres to make sure that the plants can survive storms and heavy seas.
The gear systems and electronics have to be protected from the corrosive seawater.
Kilometres of submarine cables need to be laid to connect up with the electricity mains
onshore. Maintenance crews need floating platforms so that they can stay overnight at sea.
Such demands push up costs. The planners are therefore pinning their hopes on size. The
experts’ view is that the only profitable way to go about it is to install hundreds
of windmills with a capacity of at least four to five megawatts each. Since a wind-power
plant currently costs about a million euros per megawatt, investing in such a large
offshore wind park would cost billions, so that financing represents a whole new
challenge.
Yet there are many optimists and visionaries
who consider all this feasible. "The question is no longer whether offshore plants
will be built, but how," says Environment Minister JÜrgen Trittin. In a strategy
paper on the use of wind power at sea, the government expects that between 20,000 and
25,000 MW of wind-power capacity could be installed by 2030 in the German part of the
North Sea and the Baltic. The wind parks would cover a total area of 2500 square
kilometres of the sea – an area the size of the south-west German Land Saarland. That
would be enough to generate 70 to 87 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.
Offshore wind power would then account for 15 per cent of the German power supply.
"New era of climate-protection
policy"
Up to now, the Federal Office of Maritime
Shipping and Hydrography (BSH) has received 29 licence applications for wind parks in the
North Sea and the Baltic. If they were all built, the result would be a total power
capacity of 60,000 megawatts – more than twice as much power as all Germany’s
atomic power stations currently deliver. The BSH already gave the goahead for the first
plant at the end of 2001: "Borkum West" will be the first North Sea wind park
outside the twelve-nauticalmile zone. "We have pushed open the door to a new era of
climate protection and energy policy," BSH president Peter Ehlers announced at the
time. Starting in 2003, the planning company Prokon
Nord from Leer in Lower Saxony now intends to build twelve four-to-five megawatt
turbines 45 kilometres northwest of the island of Borkum. Following a pilot phase, the aim
is to expand the wind park to 208 windmills with a total capacity of 1000 MW starting in
2007.
One person who is currently following all
this offshore enthusiasm with a certain amount of professional scepticism is Aloys Wobben,
founder and CEO of Enercon, Germany’s leading manufacturer of wind power plants:
"Offshore plants might turn out to be a real flop." He fears that the first wind
parks at sea are being built in too much of a rush. In the view of this wind-power
pioneer, who was awarded the environmental prize of the German Environment Foundation two
years ago, "This development needs more time." He doesn’t expect the
technical difficulties of building large, marine windmills to be solved satisfactorily
before 2006.
Nevertheless, Enercon is still working
feverishly on the offshore boom, albeit only with tests on dry land for the time being. In
September, the firm built its first "E112" wind power plant near Magdeburg. With
a capacity of 4.5 megawatts, it is predestined for use at sea. This turbine is currently
the biggest wind-power plant in the world and shows how far the windpower engineers are
able to go in the meantime. Each of the three rotor blades, which are made of
fibre-glass-reinforced plastic, is 52 metres long, six metres wide and weighs 20 tons. The
nacelle, which houses the axle, generator and the windmill mounting, itself weighs 440
tons. There are not many special cranes that can heave this load onto a 120-metre tower.
Even so, the "E112" is unlikely to mark the end of size growth. Other wind-power
firms are already planning to top its capacity soon. REpower Systems, for example, is
developing rotors that are 125 metres in diameter. Nordex AG is planning its N-115 range
with a capacity of 5 MW. Their rotor blades are expected to be made of novel, especially
light carbon fibres. It looks very much like there will soon be more records to celebrate. |
