Nostalgia Sunday – Israel Electric

February 14, 2010 - 8:35 PM by Rachel Neiman

Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) is amongst our country’s most hated monopolies, and today we got another dose of why that is. According to a World Bank report reported by Globes, “Salaries at Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22) are among the highest among utilities in the world…”

“IEC commissioned the report in an effort to prove that Israel’s electricity tariffs are low. While the utility got the answer it sought, it also received an unsolicited sting about its employees’ high salaries.” (Full story available here).

It’s very nice to find out that we pay lower tariffs… right now. (Despite the recent price cuts, the World Bank believes that is going to have to change). But it doesn’t make up for decades of abuse at the hands of surly overpaid technicians and clerks who for many years — and I’m not sure the World Bank knew about this one — also got their electricity for next to nothing.

The free electricity thing was so out of control that back in the Seventies, when our family would go visit cousin Sasha, a veteran IEC employee, we would count the number of unnecessarily electrified appliances he had, such as wall clocks, stove top cookers (Israelis usually have gas ranges) and the occasional extension cord trailing out of a window — just to help out the neighbors.

At a certain point, sometime after the other hated monopoly, Israel’s phone company, was privatized, IEC got wise and started behaving more like a service provider, less like a price gouging monolith. And you have to give IEC credit where it’s due: in the span of some 80 years, it has created a modern power infrastructure serving the entire country.

It is also one of the only companies in the world capable of providing complete turnkey service, from building power stations to providing billing services.

IEC has also made public a good number of pictures from their archive, on view at the PikiWiki site. Here are a few nice ones, for starters. This is a picture of Israel’s first power station, in Haifa.

Electric company workers laying high-tension wires.

The next time they built a power station in Haifa, it was bigger…

An interior shot…

And some might recognize this location, the mouth of the Yarkon river near the Reading power plant and the Tel Aviv port.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , • Category: Business, Environment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday 

Comments

2 Comments on Nostalgia Sunday – Israel Electric

  1. Nicky on Mon, Feb 15th 2010 9:58 AM

    2. Cool story, and what a great pic of the camel train in Tel Aviv.
    It’s completely unthinkable today.

  2. Foto Friday – Elyssa Frank has a TLV secret | ISRAELITY on Fri, May 28th 2010 7:54 PM

    3. [...] it’s easy to spot a few landmarks, like the old lighthouse… and the running path by the Israel Electric Corporation’s Reading power station pretty much gives it [...]

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