The company’s plan for what it calls the world’s ‘highest-performing, lowest-cost’ sun-energy system is being tested in Israel. By Richard Boudreaux Los Angeles Times Staff Writer DIMONA, ISRAEL – On the scorched floor of Israel’s Negev Desert blooms a field of 1,640 robotic mirrors that behave like sunflowers. Slightly larger than pingpong tables and guided by a computer, they turn imperceptibly to follow the sun and focus its rays on the pinnacle of a 200-foot tower, where a water boiler will soon start producing high-pressure steam. This futuristic assembly is Arnold Goldman’s scale model and testing ground for five larger solar fields his company plans to build in the Mojave Desert to supply up to 900 megawatts of clean energy to California in the next decade. Goldman is a UCLA- and USC-schooled Israeli entrepreneur who built the world’s leading solar thermal power company, Luz International, in the 1980s, then watched it go bankrupt in 1991 as oil prices dropped and California decided not to renew property tax credits for solar producers. Now he’s a player again, and his comeback illustrates the extent to which solar thermal power is regaining favor with policymakers and […]