Eli Feinerman

Benefits from Groundwater Management: Magnitude, Sensitivity, and Distribution

Empirical estimates of benefits from groundwater management are reported for an area in California with heavy reliance on groundwater supplies. Benefits are quite sensitive to the water demand schedule and interest rate but less sensitive to other parameters. However, in all cases considered the increases in welfare from groundwater management are less than ten percent. Tax revenues received under a system of pump taxes are four to five times as large as the benefits from management. Thus, groundwater users gain under a system of quotas but may suffer substantial welfare losses under pump taxes.

Uncertainty and Split Nitrogen Application in Corn Production

Investigates the split application of nitrogen for rainfed corn in the Midwest using two-stage decision model. Ex post analysis of late nitrogen application; Ex ante analysis of preplant nitrogen application: Use of information from the Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC); Implications for regulating nitrogen use; Empirical results for Nashua, Iowa nitrogen application.

Potential of solar desalination in Israel and in its close vicinity

Recent studies dealing with the potential of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) for desalination along the Mediterranean Coast and in the Middle East choose to use RES to generate electricity first, and then use this electricity to power desalination. The present work eliminates the phase of electricity generation by using solar thermal energy directly for distillation by evaporation. Saving the thermal to mechanical conversion losses allows the proposed Multi Effect Distillation (MED) process to compete economically with Reverse Osmosis (RO) process of significantly lower energy consumption. The new opportunity to revive direct thermal evaporation, arises from a new collector technology developed by Solel Solar Systems, that is coupled to the familiar MED process modified by IDE Technologies to match the solar steam characteristics. Solel has applied its unique technique of selective coating to demonstrate a very efficient solar radiation collection, achieving high temperatures with relatively low installation costs. While the generated steam is not sufficient for efficient generation of electrical power to be used for RO — its quality far exceeds the minimum necessary for the existing methods of steam powered desalination by evaporation. Our analysis shows that a combination of a large number of effects of evaporation, together with high pressure saturated steam available for recycling, yields a dramatic improvement in the production rate of water desalination, accompanied by relatively modest increase in the desalination installation cost. For the specific case analyzed in detail, replacing the commonly used low temperature MED with the new combination, increases the Economic Ratio (ER) from 7 to 16 — a factor of 2.3, while the installation costs grew by only 60%. This implies that the distillate production costs are significantly lower with the new proposed combination. The cost increase is mainly due to the higher costs for the expansion of the desalination system, with relatively low additional costs for producing the high temperature solar steam. A basic assumption, drawn from economic considerations and technological constraints, is that the desalination system would operate continuously, while the solar system, which is limited to daytime operation, would feed a steam generator combined with a storage tank. Therefore utilization of solar energy requires either large and expensive heat storage capacity or fossil fuel backup — a hybrid plant. The effects of storage and fuel cost are presented. The paper refers to three levels of desalination capacity: 1) A small 1000m3/d plant, typical for plants serving small settlements or industries at rural locations, isolated from fresh water and grid power sources. Applying the present model distillate cost for such a solar powered plant along the Red Sea coast is about

On A Political Solution to the NIMBY Conflict

1.2/m3 for solar-only plant with large capacity steam storage, and

Groundwater management: Efficiency and equity considerations

1.1/m3 for hybrid plant using

Crop Insurance as a Mechanism for Reducing Pesticide Usage: A Representative Farm Analysis

0.18/kg diesel oil when solar-steam is not available. Where brackish water are available for mixing, these costs decline approximately by 30%; 2) The medium size 10,000m3/d plant is of the scale actually required for the town of Eilat. Here the Solar-MED plant would produce distillate at

Factors affecting uniformity and optimal water management with furrow irrigation

0.92/m3 and by blending with brackish water available on site, the cost would decline to

Recycled Effluent: Should the Polluter Pay?

0.74/m3; 3) On the other extreme we evaluated a large 100,000m3/d plant, on the scale of a national water supply plant. Here the distillate cost is about

Optimal Scheduling of Nitrogen Fertilization and Irrigation

0.69/m3 for hybrid plant (including land cost) at an available site close to the southern end of Israels Mediterranean shore. These preliminary results suggest a competitive distillate cost as compared to grid-powered RO, when electricity cost is about ¢6.5/kWh. To conclude: Solar-powered desalination is conceivable in Israel at a reasonable cost, and has even broader economic potential along the Red Sea and similar sites.

The value of information on the response function of crops to soil salinity

Scale economy in the construction and operation of public facilities, such as landfills, calls for cooperation among communities to build a common facility (Arthur O’Sullivan, 1993). Such a facility is a mixture of a public good and a private bad and, hence, leads to strong opposition by communities to locate it in their vicinity (Bruno S. Frey et al., 1996). This is one of the most serious environmental concerns of recent years, and is known as NIMBY: “not in my backyard.” In this paper we study the hypothesis that a democratic political process creates an adequate mechanism for the resolution of the NIMBY conflict. The intuitive explanation is simple. A NIMBY conflict is likely to induce lobbying and symmetric pressures by all threatened communities in the relevant region. As is well known (Gene M. Grossman and Elhanan Helpman, 1994), when subject to symmetric pressures, politicians stick firmly to principles and function most efficiently. The existing literature on the siting of noxious facilities focuses mainly on normative issues, such as welfare-maximizing siting via decentralized community-based mechanisms (e.g., Howard Kunreuther and Paul R. Kleindorfer, 1986; Robert C. Mitchell and Richard T. Carson, 1986; and Deborah Minehart and Zvika Neeman, 2002). Evidently, however, such mechanisms have seldom been practiced (e.g., Stephen K. Swallow et al., 1992). The current study adopts a positive approach, integrating a political-economic framework with a model of a competitive real estate market. In the theoretical section, a government of a linear two-city economy determines the location of a noxious facility, which affects the equilibrium in the real estate market and induces the spatial distributions of price and population. The government is subject to political pressures by city-level lobbies of landowners (both landlords and home owners). In general, the political equilibrium and the socially optimal siting differ. However, the more equitable the distribution of landownership in the region, the smaller the difference. At the limit, when property distribution is perfectly equitable and all cities participate in the political arena, the government locates the facility at the socially optimal site. The analysis proceeds by identifying additional conditions under which the political equilibrium siting coincides with the socially optimal location and, with an empirical analysis. In the empirical section, the theoretical framework is extended to account for a multiple-city region, and is calibrated to assess the prospects of the political system for resolving the NIMBY conflict in the context of landfill-siting in Israel. It is shown that if all cities in the region form political lobbies and the politicians are not extremely corrupt, the political siting is close geographically to the socially optimal location, and the difference entails a less than 0.1 percent reduction in social welfare. Moreover, even if the formation of lobbying in the region is incomplete, as long as the weight the politicians assign to social welfare is larger than 0.7, the proximity of the politically and socially optimal locations is preserved. We interpret the above results as supportive of the hypothesis of an effective political solution to the NIMBY conflict.