Israel’s reservoirs provide solar energy through ‘dual use’
The sunlight glints off a geometric shape across the glassy surface of a reservoir in the Golan Heights. This is a solar array, with panels mounted on floating pontoons, and anchored to the banks, rising and falling with the water level. The innovation of “dual use” reservoirs — providing water storage on the one hand, and “green” energy on the other — is just the latest advance pioneered by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which manages Israel’s forests and farmland. … California has not seen a major reservoir built since the late 1970s, but Israel built hundreds of small reservoirs from 1990 to 2010, after a water crisis in the 1970s and 1980s prompted the government to expand the system’s capacity.