Kibbutz Ketura and its Arava Power Company based in Israel’s southern Negev desert plans to build a 2-4MW photo voltaic power generation plant as a commercial prototype to a planned 500MW distributed plant in the years ahead assuming certain hurdles can be cleared, whereby one of the company’s main customers, Israel Electric Company is not offering a high enough price for the power produced to justify a rapid start to Arava Power’s project. As such, lobbying is currently underway. Furthermore, Israel’s only government solar power program is capped at 50 MW for seven years and hence only attractive to individual homeowners.

Further reading:
7 April 2008 - Renewable Energy Comes to Israel’s Valley of the Sun
4 March 2008 - Arava to get $2.5b solar station