Danielle Biton from Kibbutz Carmia is an entrepreneur in the field of renewable energy. At 27, she is a partner and owner in EDI Energy company and manages solar projects that produce energy worth hundreds of millions of shekels a year. “And this is just the beginning”, she says.
It all started by chance. Danielle was working at Intel when she met Adi Levy, later her partner and VP at Synergy company, during her master’s studies. “I was invited to one of the meetings of the energy company where he worked”, she recounts. “After the meeting, I thought we could establish our own renewable energy company ourselves. Adi had experience in the field, I had experience in project management, and with a not so large sum of money we simply set out.
“The beginning was very difficult. Adi left his job, and I stayed in a part-time position so we would have some money to live on. After months of leg work between farmers, moshavs, and kibbutzim, I realized that something wasn’t taking off. Customers found it difficult to invest millions of shekels in a system they didn’t fully understand. Out of this difficulty, I built a model where the customer doesn’t invest money – the company finances, sets up, and maintains the project, and sells the electricity to the electricity company for 25 years, while the customer enjoys rent for the roof.
“Along the way, I managed to raise funding for projects of more than 100 million shekels, but there were tough crises on the way. One of them was a loss of more than 18 million shekels following the cancellation of the company’s flagship project – a floating solar system on a water reservoir.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked with planning and construction bodies, traveled to government offices in Jerusalem to convince the Water Authority, Electricity Authority, Ministry of Agriculture, and other bodies to approve a building permit for me. After receiving the permit, I paid for the land to the Israel Land Authority (ILA). In the economically hardest period Israel has known, I started working on the project against all odds. But then it turned out that the ILA had mistakenly approved the same area for a real estate company as well. The battle in court required economic and mental coping from me, and despite the difficulty, I didn’t give up until I achieved the goal”.
On October 7, Danielle, who lived in Kibbutz Carmia near the Gaza strip which was attacked, had to leave her home for central Israel. “From that moment, I decided I’m going to another front – the advocacy front”, she says. “I was interviewed for media outlets in Russia, the U.S., Britain, South Africa, and more. I initiated, together with investors, a conference in New York to raise donations for the army and my kibbutz that suffered severe damage”.
