By Nir Shadmi, CEO, Contel Smart Energy
Israel’s renewable energy story is usually told through one number: we’re at roughly 17% today, quite far from the target of 30% set for 2030. Although the main reasons lay at network insufficient transmission lines and regulatory hassles, that gap gets read as a construction issue; building more sites, connecting more panels, installing more batteries. And yes, we need to keep building.
But sitting at the control and energy management layer of the country’s largest and most complex renewable sites, I see a different, quieter shift happening underneath that headline number. The market is starting to ask a better question than “how much can we generate?” It’s starting to ask: how well can we use what we’ve already built?
The product is changing, not just the mix
For years, the renewable energy business was mostly about selling maximum volume (raw megawatts). Today, the value has shifted to selling “flexibility”, delivering power the exact moment the grid requires it (through ancillary services like fast frequency response, reserves, and arbitrage). Grid operators no longer just pay for raw volume, they are looking for responsiveness.
You can see this in how projects are being built: standalone battery storage, storage retrofitted onto existing solar sites, and greenfield hybrid PV+Storage, which is now the default tender rather than the exception. Standalone PV, on its own, is no longer the norm.
We recently got a concrete look at what this shift demands technically. As part of an FFR pilot issued by NOGA (the Israeli TSO) at one of our Hybrid (PV + Storage) sites, we hit a response time of roughly 145 milliseconds from meter to inverter. The requirement was 500 milliseconds. This is proof that the hardware and the controls are ready for a much more demanding grid than the one we currently operate.
The bottleneck isn’t the technology
Which brings me to the real point I’d want any policymaker, investor, or fellow operator to sit with: the technology is the easy part. Well, it is not that easy but it is solvable. We’ve proven the hardware and the controls work. What’s missing is the market design around them.
That starts with a sharper allocation of tasks. The regulator’s job should be to set the boundaries: the energy targets, the required ancillary services, the safety, stability, and cybersecurity rules that the grid must never compromise on. But inside those boundaries, the operational calls belong to the market players: which sites to activate, which services to offer, when to charge or discharge.
Aggregators and asset owners are the ones positioned to optimize in real time, and if the rules let them, they’ll squeeze real value out of every asset, including stacking multiple revenue streams from the same site.
None of that works, though, unless the revenue is predictable and tradable. Ancillary services can’t just be technically possible; they have to be real, financeable products that a developer can build a business case around.
What Israel should borrow from Europe
I’ll say plainly what’s often left unsaid. Israel is well behind Europe on implementing ancillary services. So, let’s learn from faster-moving markets: define products clearly, build open standardized frameworks, and don’t over-engineer rules to the point deployment stalls. Clarity and speed of market design, more than perfection of it, are what bring flexibility.
Ten years from now
The last decade was about erecting capacity. The next one is about operating and trading what we’ve already built, with flexibility as a normal, liquid product and the control layer as the gateway to that trading layer.
My hope about how Israel closes the gap with Europe is how fast the market moves to use it. Get the market design right, and in ten years we won’t be the ones catching up. We’ll be the case study other markets point to.