A PV installation built by Prime Energy in Israel.Image: Prime Energy

The Finance Ministry and the Environmental Protection Ministry of Israel are currently in conflict with each other about the amount of land that should be devoted to the deployment of utility scale solar power plants.

“There is a constant debate on land allocation in our country,” the director of Israel's Green Energy Association, Eitan Parnass, told pv magazine. “Israel is a small country and the voices of land preservation activists are effective, allowing our zoning authority legitimacy to block ground-mounted solar. But the national renewable energy goals of Israel make it an impossible mission to preserve all land. We will need a few more megawatt-sized solar parks and much more land allocations. As this debate has reached the boiling point, we believe that compromise will be reached in 2022, allowing the market to grow.”

According to Israeli media outlet Haaretz, the country's National Planning and Building Council decided, last week, to postpone the decision on how much land to allocate for ground-mounted PV projects until the end of this year. The article reveals that the Israeli authorities have already allocated 11,600 acres (4,693 hectares) for solar plants, and that another 9,000 acres is what is at stake in the conflict between the two ministries.