Energy developer Ofer Yanai is convinced renewable energy is the light of the future, and he’s got his bank account to prove it

Photos: Reuven Kupitinsky, Maxim Goldberg, Flash 90

A few weeks after the Israel Electric Corporation announced a hike in tariffs, Ofer Yanai, founder and CEO of Nofar Energy, doesn’t actually say the words, “I told you so,” but his message is pretty clear.

“Today everyone understands that the only solution to the rising price of electricity is renewable energy,” he says.

He plays a clip of an interview he gave in 2018, in which he’s standing next to the first floating solar panel system in Israel and declaring that soon floating solar projects will be a multi-billion-dollar market. At the time his was a lone voice in the wilderness, but today, with the floating solar panel industry in Israel valued at around a billion dollars, of which Yanai’s company alone controls about a third, it’s time to admit that he was right.

Ofer Yanai is the rags-to-riches model of how to start a multi-million-dollar company without a shekel of investment capital, but with a good idea and a lot of forward-thinking.

But his path to success was filled with potholes, and while growing up, quite unimaginable as well. He was born in 1975, the second of eight children, to parents who’d immigrated as children from North Africa and lived in the freezing, leaky transit camps of the 1950s. But Mordechai and Tuni Yanai were an energetic couple who valued education, and moved to the struggling development town of Yavneh, built on the ruins of the ancient city, where they ramped up the level of education and helped make the town the thriving place it is today. For years, Mordechai Yanai was principal of the city’s dati high school (before that he worked as a blacksmith), and his wife, with a PhD in Early Education, was the superintendent of all the city’s kindergartens.

Ofer went through the dati education system, and spent his teenage years at the Nechalim yeshivah high school. He learned for a short time at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav and then transferred to Yeshivat Har Etzion for hesder, where he did his army service in the tank corps. He then picked up a degree in a combination of physics, mathematics, and computer science.

Ofer might have had big dreams, but admits that he never believed he could actually fulfill them.

“I had never really believed in myself,” Ofer says. “I grew up in a development town and in yeshivah and then the army, I was always comparing myself to the ‘city’ kids — although today I see how the challenges of my childhood actually helped me to develop creativity and independent thinking. Still, my self-esteem fell further when I started working in high-tech and the dot-com bubble burst. The company I had joined only half a year earlier shut down, leaving me unemployed.”