Green in the valley: Israel’s abandoned fishponds are turning into a solar goldmine |
Even when there’s less-than-perfect visibility, the view from the eastern slope of Mount Gilboa is breathtaking. From the foot of the mountain to the Jordan River stretches a rural landscape of kibbutzim, villages, agricultural plots, and bodies of water.
Not for nothing is the area’s regional council called Emek HaMaayanot, Hebrew for the Valley of Springs.
The area’s original name was the Beit She’an Valley, but in 2008, the council decided it would be better to be associated with streams of water than with a drab peripheral city. Ironically, the city of Beit She’an is now a full partner in the unusual project currently being advanced in the valley, and in the profits the initiative is expected to generate.
The council’s territory is rich in springs and streams. The best known – such as Nahal HaKibbutzim and Ein Shokek – are concentrated in a popular local park. But in fact, most of the water that’s visible from the mountain lookout belongs to fishponds.
Eighty-five percent of Israel’s fishpond industry is located in this small regional council, which counts about 17,000 residents living in 25 communities. Israeli-raised fish once constituted an empire, but times have changed.
Many of the area’s fishponds have dried up, but nature abhors a vacuum: instead of carp and tilapia, the floors of the ponds will soon be carpeted by solar panels.
One of the officials spearheading the project is Itamar Matiash, who helms the regional council. The 49-year-old, elected to the position two years ago, lives in the religious kibbutz of Tirat Zvi, though he has a mixed religious-secular household and does not himself wear a kippah.
Matiash came to the world of local government after many years in education and work with at-risk populations. A battalion commander in the military reserves, he is far removed from the wheeler-dealer profile that characterizes some other Israeli elected officials.
He speaks passionately about the council he runs and his dreams for it. One of his biggest dreams, called “Tapuz” — a Hebrew acronym for “Regional Photovoltaic Corporation” – is beginning to come true.
The high evaporation rate and the cost of water severely hurt the economic viability of fishponds, and so thousands of acres of ponds were shut down.
The high evaporation rate and the cost of water severely hurt the economic viability of fishponds, and so thousands of acres of ponds were shut down.
“The amendment to the Water Law hit the valley hard,” said Matiash, referring to a legislative measure passed nine years ago that ended up indirectly spurring the solar project.
“They created a uniform water tariff across the country,” he explained. “But this is the hottest place in Israel, with the possible exception of Gilgal,” a small community located deep in the scorching Jordan Valley, considered the hottest spot in Israel.
“Because of the heat and evaporation, growing an acre of bananas here costs four times as much as it does in Emek Hefer” on the Mediterranean coast, he said. “The high evaporation rate and the cost of water severely hurt the economic viability of fishponds, so thousands of acres of ponds were shut down.”
With the fish gone, the question of what to do with all those ponds festered.
“Near Kibbutz Mesilot, there was a pond that caught fire because they had turned it into a junkyard,” Matiash recounted. “These lands absorbed chemicals and salts, so they are not suitable for returning to agricultural cultivation.”
For some time, the ponds just stood there, scattered across the valley, some gradually becoming overgrown with weeds, creating a scenic blight and, moreover, wasting land.
The proposal to repurpose the pond areas took shape gradually. When Matiash was elected to office, he found a brilliant idea struggling to make its way through an obstacle course of bureaucracy and competing interests.
According to the NIS 1.5 billion ($500 million) proposal, approximately 1,000 acres of abandoned fishponds will be filled with solar panels that will generate 500 megawatts of clean electricity, equivalent to the output of one of Israel’s largest power plants. Another 500 acres will undergo rewilding – a process of returning land to nature.
The economy will benefit from clean and cheap energy; the natural habitat – at whose expense the fishponds were originally built – will benefit from bodies of water that will serve migrating birds; and the regional council’s communities, located in one of the country’s most economically challenging locales, will take in a handsome passive income from sales of electricity to the grid.
Among the project’s beneficiaries are local fish farmers, who will receive funding and support to establish technologically advanced facilities for their industry that are expected to be up to 100 times more efficient than the ponds.
But in Israel, the fact that everyone stands to profit from something doesn’t mean it will happen.
“For four or five years, this was caught in the mud because not everyone was really benefiting and not everyone was talking to each other,” said Matiash.
The holdup stemmed from a disparity created in Israel’s early years, when pioneers at kibbutzim were allocated prime land and water rights, while later waves of immigrants – mostly from Middle Eastern and North African countries – were sent to lower-income towns like Beit She’an as well as moshavim, or agricultural communities, with far fewer resources.
In our council, we have everything: secular and religious kibbutzim, moshavim, right-wingers, and left-wingers.
In our council, we have everything: secular and religious kibbutzim, moshavim, right-wingers, and left-wingers.
“There has been a bleeding wound here since the founding of the state. In our council, we have everything: secular and religious kibbutzim, moshavim, right-wingers, and left-wingers,” he explained.
“When immigrants came to the moshavim in the 50s and 60s, most of the land had already been allocated to the kibbutzim, the means of production had been allocated, the water had been allocated. The water association belonged only to the kibbutzim. For years and years, the moshavim lived with a feeling of discrimination, and rightly so.”
“We began to fix that,” Matiash continued. “Today, the water association is owned by all the communities. The senior citizens’ association is owned by everyone. We decided that in the case of Tapuz, we would take the 4,000 dunams [1,000 acres] and treat them as if they were 4,000 shares.
“Each moshav will get 280 shares, and each kibbutz will get 170. That means that over the next 25 years, a moshav will receive NIS 1 million shekels [$332,000] in passive income every year, and a kibbutz something like 600,000 shekels [$200,000].”
Matiash said the kibbutzim agreed to the arrangement. He added, “And the moshavim signed that they have no further claims against the kibbutzim.”
The next nut to crack was Beit She’an, the city surrounded by the largely rural council. For years, there has been ongoing, highly charged friction between the city’s residents and the members of nearby Kibbutz Nir David over the right to access to the Asi Stream, which flows directly between the kibbutz’s homes.
That dispute birthed the “Free the Asi” movement, a massive national social justice campaign that came to epitomize Israel’s ethnic and class divide, pitting the working-class – predominantly Mizrahi residents of Beit She’an – against the wealthier, predominantly Ashkenazi kibbutz members.
Matiash understood that if Beit She’an did not enjoy the fruits of the Tapuz project, there would be no project to speak of. Justice had to be done – and it needed to be apparent to everyone.
“Noam Jumaa, the mayor of Beit She’an, is a friend,” said Matiash. “We talk about everything, we air everything out; sometimes we disagree, but in the end, we reach understandings.”
“Together we went up to Yanki Quint, the outgoing head of the Israel Land Authority, and told him how important it was for us to advance the project,” he recounted. “He said he wanted to dictate the way the revenue would be divided between us. We told him, ‘Don’t interfere.’ We built a mechanism under which, of every shekel that comes into the council, half goes to Beit She’an.”
“The state tells us it wants to strengthen the eastern frontier, but pushes us to fight with each other. We decided not to fight. In the end, everyone recognized that this was a unique national framework,” he said.
“At first, the Israel Land Authority planted boulders in the middle of the road that made it impossible to move forward, but what started as a major row turned into a real friendship with Ruth Afriat, head of the [authority’s] business division, who has just recently completed her term, and this project became her baby,” Matiash added. “We understand that if Beit She’an isn’t strong, the valley won’t be strong, and in Beit She’an, they understand the same about us.”
Later, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, the country’s leading environmental group, also came into the picture.
“When they started building the fishponds in the middle of the last century,” said Assaf Zanzuri, the environmental organization’s planning director, “they were built over natural wetland areas, and wiped them out. Still, they served as an artificial substitute for the wet habitats that had existed here in the past.”
Our concern was that these alternative water sources, which provided some response to the needs of migratory birds and wildlife, would also dry up.
Our concern was that these alternative water sources, which provided some response to the needs of migratory birds and wildlife, would also dry up.
“When we realized that the ponds were gradually going to disappear because of the state of the industry, our concern was that these alternative water sources, which provided some response to the needs of migratory birds and wildlife, would also dry up,” Zanzuri explained.
“When we understood that an agreement had been signed to dry out 1,000 acres of fishponds for solar development, we raised our concerns with all the relevant parties,” he added. “We studied the marshes and wet habitats that used to exist here and how they could be rehabilitated and restored to nature.”
Dan Alon, CEO of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, spent many hours in Matiash’s office before reaching an agreement: Alongside 1,000 acres of ponds whose floors will be covered with panels, 500 acres will be returned to nature. The rewilding and its maintenance, will be funded by the project’s developers.
The Beit She’an Valley is part of the Syrian-African Rift Valley, one of the most critical migratory pathways on the planet, serving as a bottleneck for millions of birds traveling between Europe, Asia and Africa twice a year.
“The restored nature will support millions of migratory birds,” said Alon. “This is a model that transforms reality. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first project of its kind in the world.”
The Society for the Protection of Nature’s buy-in created a rare situation. It isn’t every day that an Israeli project receives everyone’s blessing: the national government (including the Energy, Agriculture, Finance, and Environmental Protection ministries), the local government, institutions (including the Israel Land Authority and the Planning Administration), and green activists. Talk about a New Middle East.
This project, Matiash hopes, will function as a locomotive to which more carriages can be attached, giving the region added momentum. The expected reservoir of megawatts is already drawing interest from major data centers, he said, and he hopes to use the restored water bodies to boost the council’s tourism sector, where he admitted the area is “badly lagging behind.”
But looking out from the slope of Gilboa, he also knows that one of the project’s greatest challenges involves the landscape: namely, how to ensure that rows of solar panels don’t taint a region famous for its vistas of water and sky.
“The planners were instructed to place the panels only on the pond floors, not on the embankments,” he explained. “That way, from the side, you won’t see them at all. And from above, it will look like a pond full of water.”
“Not to worry,” he added, “I won’t let the Valley of Springs turn into a valley of mirrors.”
Translated from the original Hebrew on ToI’s Hebrew sister site Zman Yisrael.
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