Startup Rents Roofs For Solar Panels, Sells Owners Cheap Power

For decades, the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) has enjoyed a monopoly on power supply in the country. But in the last five years Israel has moved to end this monopoly, and allow other companies to enter the field. 

And for one innovative solar energy firm, this means a real opportunity to make the country more environmentally friendly when it comes to power consumption.  

E.D.I Energy believes its solar power – thanks to the innovative way it is generated – can keep the lights on for up to one third of Israeli consumers. 

The company’s business plan is simple: rent space on roofs and other high-up places to place photovoltaic panels, collect the solar energy produced and sells it to the owners of the roofs – at a reduced rate – and to the IEC. 

“Our vision is to reduce the global footprint,” E.D.I founder Danielle Biton tells NoCamels. 

“We actually do something about it, not just going and telling other people what to do, like to reduce the electricity usage. We actually sell the electricity to the local grid. And I think making it happen was one of my main goals, not just talking about it.” 

The Israeli government in 2018 authorized reforms to the electricity sector, opening the market up to competition. The objective is to allow private companies to supply power to both businesses and households, cutting the IEC’s share of the market to just 30 percent. And E.D.I wants to claim a chunk of the market, eventually matching the IEC for market share. 

While just a fraction of Israel’s power comes from solar energy, the country is aiming to double its capacity by 2025 and plans to provide up to 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.  

Biton founded E.D.I in 2020, and credits the company’s CEO Adi Levi with giving her inspiration to do something to preserve the environment. 

She was working in the high-tech industry when the two met and says she was impressed by his impact in the green energy field in which he already worked, while feeling that she herself was achieving little. This, she says, gave her the desire “to create something with value.”  

So in 2020, Biton created E.D.I Energy. And the initial period of fundraising was rocky, given her youth (she was 23 at the time) and her inexperience in the business world. 

Finding the money was not so straightforward, and according to Biton, her appearance – petite blonde – as well as her age were “a huge barrier” at first.  

Biton says she won the investors over with slow and steady growth, initially earning their trust with “small successes” rather than immediately asking for two million shekels (approx. $550,000) for a massive solar farm. 

And sticking to what she was certain was the right path ultimately paid off. 

“It was a lot of self-belief. I didn’t really have a lot of money or a rich banking past. It was my belief that it could happen,” she says. “I grew when they saw that I can actually repay their [loan] for the system.” 

Today E.D.I is headquartered at Karmia, a moshav in southern Israel close to the Gaza Strip, and operates in more than 100 locations in Israel. It also has a number of solar farms in the US, where it sells electricity to the local power companies.

And while E.D.I has scaled up in the past three years, the actual business remains the same: placing solar panels atop existing buildings in order to maximize the space in a country that is just 22,145 km². The United Kingdom, by comparison, is 243,610 km² while the US is a vast 9.834 million km².  

“We actually try to do as many dual solar systems as we can – on top of rooftops rather than on land,” she says. 

“Because when you take the land you cannot build any more buildings and kind of takes the edge of the dual usage. So we put them on rooftops.” 

Biton has her eye on expansion, but says lack of infrastructure in Israel is hindering E.D.I’s growth.

Other companies also rent space for solar panels, such as Teralight, which is paying for the use of land from a collective of farmers in the north, and Be Energy, which pays for the use of individual roofs from building owners. But no other Israeli company follows EDI’s rental-reduced cost plan.

Among the places that E.D.I rents roofs from is Hadassah-Neurim, a village for at-risk youths overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in central Israel. The company’s solar panels grace the roofs of the village and in return it receives discounted power.  

“We save them a lot of money,” Biton says. “We’re not only generating green electricity and providing them with this green electricity, we also reduced the amount of money that they pay.” 

Those who do buy power from E.D.I have access to a control panel that shows them exactly how much they are benefiting the environment by using renewable energy. This means E.D.I customers can see the harm they have avoided to the environment per day, in terms of the amount of coal they saved from being used for energy and the amount of CO2 that they prevented from being released into the atmosphere.

Today, the company is looking to expand its range of locations to place the solar panels, even using the spaces over the plants in vineyards and on top of greenhouses. The next stage, Biton says, is to work out how much of this space they can use without damaging the produce growing underneath. 

Beyond solar power, the company is also considering a move into hydroelectricity, although Biton tells NoCamels that the licenses for this form of energy generation have yet to be issued.

So, for now, Biton is satisfied with the company’s progression – and the positive impact that it is making on the environment today. 

“I think we have a nice business model,” she says. 

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