Nostalgia Sunday – Israel Electric

February 14, 2010 - 8:35 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Business, Environment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday 

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.

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Hassidism at Boombamela

March 30, 2009 - 4:05 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Environment, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, Profiles, Religion 

Michael GolombA long-time disciple of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and a seasoned grassroots organizer, Michael Golomb used to spend his efforts marching against the Vietnam War. But since moving to Israel along with many of Carlebach’s Hassidim as part of that community’s mid-Seventies exodus from Haight-Ashbury, Golomb has busied himself with spreading a message of love at gatherings, encounter events and festivals – even mainstream, teenybopper-y ones like Boombamela, Shantipi and Beresheet.

Golomb and his crew have helped to organize Tents of Love and Prayer at several of these festivals, with the sub-camp serving as a festival within a festival for many party-goers. According to a statement released this week by director Guy Peleg, Boombalema’s planners love Carlebach-style Judaism because of its emphasis on happiness and love of mankind, making Golomb’s contributions key elements to the eye-opening, pan-spiritualist experience Peleg is trying to forge.

At the festivals, the Tent of Love and Prayer offers kosher food (which is even harder to come by during Passover), prayer services, meditation sessions, low-impact lectures and the like.

But it’s not always easy to keep one’s mind on lofty ideas when corporate sponsorship banners are flying high and scantily clad perky young ones are doing the same. And the mainstream festival circuit has received plenty of criticism in recent years about these trends from the hippie hardcore populace that first provided their critical mass about a decade ago. But Carlebach-style outreach was never afraid of “elevating the sparks” (as the Hassidic masters might have put it) out from the ditches. As The Chicago Tribune did put it back in 2007:

…Carlebach was one of the first emissaries of the Lubavitcher movement, a Hasidic group that pioneered outreach to disaffected Jews in the 1950s. Carlebach found himself particularly drawn to lost souls: drug addicts, runaway young people, the homeless.

Golomb carries this torch proudly, dancing while carrying a Torah scroll into the throngs of drum circle, sunset-hailing revelers at the opening evening of each festival. And it’s nice to see Boombalema’s leadership, which essentially represents the ultimate in the crossroads between mainstream pop culture and new-age (which usually means post-Jewish) spiritualism, appreciating his efforts.

This year’s three-day Boombamela Festival on Nitzanim Beach is set to kick off on April 9, with plans for this year including utilization of solar energy to cut down on electricity waste by half.

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Safed coffee factory runs on coffee

February 3, 2009 - 8:28 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Environment, General, Technology 

Coffee power!Coffee-inspired energy is only becoming increasingly fashionable. Back in June, a team at the University of Leeds experimented with the same process used for roasting coffee beans as a method of releasing energy from a host of other crops, including wheat straw and certain types of grasses. The study concluded that this method has the potential boost the energy output of biomass power by up to 20%.

But what about using coffee itself? The concept of using coffee to obtain energy is hardly a new one, and here in Israel, where new energy sources are always an especially welcome discovery, coffee – especially the iconic Elite-brand instant – is a way of life.

Recently, Strauss Elite’s 1956-inaugurated instant coffee plant in Safed implemented a series of green measures, at an estimated expenditure of NIS 10 million, Haaretz reports. The measures include extending the height of the mill’s smokestack and upgrading filtration systems, with estimated efficiency increases resulting from the measures expected to pay for themselves within four years. But perhaps the most remarkable measure is that now the factory uses coffee regs to power itself:

At the beginning of this week, large furnaces were installed to burn the coffee beans at high temperatures to create steam. According to Strauss vice president Pini Kamari, the move will cut the factory’s shale consumption in half.

“This creates a direct connection between being ‘green’ and being efficient,” Kamari explained. “Motivation for the change came from our desire to cut costs, reducing energy costs and transportation costs for both the shale and the waste. At the same time, emissions will be much lower, both from the smokestacks and from the trucks [formerly needed to bring in fuel]. We will create less waste and need to bury less garbage. Noise will also be reduced.”

Image of Israeli coffee beans courtesy gkamin from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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