Israeli experts define air conditioning as critical in the baking summer heat. But not everyone can afford it

Orit (not her real name), 72, lives in Eilat. She subsists on a pension and a monthly supplement from the state, which together come to 3,600 shekels (about $1,044). This is supposed to cover all her needs: food, medicine, and electricity.

In Eilat, when summer temperatures top 40 degrees Celsius, air conditioning is a must. But recent hikes in electricity prices force Orit to think twice before turning it on, even though she has stage-four lung cancer and the heat aggravates her breathing difficulties.

She had been turning on the air conditioner during the hottest hours of the day, until last month, when she was billed 800 shekels for electricity, she says. She hasn’t turned it on since, only the fan. “I can’t tell you what a nightmare it is to live like this. The house is burning hot, and the fan only pushes around hot air,” she says, but she simply can’t afford to use the air conditioner.

Orit chooses not to be identified by her real name (“I’m embarrassed”). Neither is she seeking handouts, just some shelter from the heat. She appealed to the Eilat city welfare department, which helps her with food vouchers and which she avers “goes above and beyond”: but she can’t use her air conditioner.

The elderly living on pensions are in a bad state, she says: “You can take measures against the cold, but against the heat? What can you do? Strip off your skin?”

Many in Israel live in poverty, but the increased cost of power combined with the escalating climate crisis, have created a new type of poverty: energy poverty, a difficulty meeting one’s energy needs, cooling in summer and heating in winter, which has implications for public health.

“If the environmental temperature is higher than 35 degrees Celsius on average, the body amasses heat,” says Prof. Dani Moran of the Ariel University’s School of Health Sciences, and former chief physiologist of the IDF. In high humidity, “heat stress” is harder to bear because the body’s natural cooling mechanism, sweating, doesn’t work: the sweat can’t evaporate and cool the body. So body temperature rises like when sick or suffering from inflammation, he explains, which may result in exhaustion or heat stroke. People with chronic conditions may collapse, as happened during heat waves in the United States and Europe, Moran says.

Sigal, 76 (a friend of Orit’s, who also declined to be named), hopes the government will help the elderly in Eilat pay for power. “I see people sitting at night in the hospital lobby because they don’t have money to turn on an air conditioner,” she says.

She too frets ceaselessly about the electric bill and uses the air conditioner only in one room, which she simply doesn’t leave. “In the evening, I go out for a walk in the shopping mall or sit by the sea in order not to be at home, because it is still hot. On particularly hot nights, before going to sleep I take a cold shower and then I sleep on the cold floor tiles to save electricity.”

Dr. Na’ama Teschner of the Department of Geography and Environmental Development at Ben-Gurion University has spent several years investigating energy poverty, a relatively new concept even in the research realm. She first heard of the term in Europe, among researchers. Being relatively new, the term’s definitions are in flux.

“There is no unilateral definition of energy poverty. In general, it is seen in developed and developing countries,” Teschner says. “In the case of developed countries, it refers to inability to pay for electricity and in developing countries, it means there is no access at all to electricity. But even in developed countries it is not unilateral, as you can see with the Bedouins in Israel’s Negev and in communities of gypsies in Europe.”

Teschner’s research, conducted together with Haneen Shibli and Stav Shapira also of other Ben-Gurion University, focuses on Bedouin residents of recognized settlements of the Negev. Only 64 percent of the residents are connected directly to the national electricity grid; others jerry-rig lines from other customers, or use generators, solar panels and batteries and even burn wood. In the non-recognized villages, only 2 percent are connected to the grid and 65 percent supply themselves with electricity using solar panels and batteries. In other settlements in Arab society, only 73 percent are linked to the national grid.

The 2021 alternative poverty report issued by the Latet nongovernment organization says that 40.4 percent of welfare recipients in Israel have had their electricity or water cut off due to inability to pay the bills. Among the general population, only 3.2 percent experienced being cut off from electricity that year. In January 2022 the High Court of Justice ruled that the Israeli electric company must amend its rules, so it could not cut off power to ailing consumers or the severely poor. Electricity, the court found, is a critical and fundamental service.

Air conditioning aside, electricity is key to patients who need, for instance, oxygen generators or inhalers. The court ruling notwithstanding, consumers unable to pay for power may be hooked up to an electric meter on an advance-payment arrangement, akin to a card with prepaid telephone calls, but they still face a problem in the event of the advance payment running out before the end of the month. Or they are required to cautiously plan ahead their use of electricity. In other words, they cannot really turn on the air conditioner.

In July, the Electricity Authority announced a hearing prior to updating of criteria to prohibit cutting off power to patients who require electricity to operate life-saving devices, or consumers in “wretched poverty.” Yet this won’t help about 100,000 households in Israel, a number that will likely increase as the electricity rates climb.

In certain cities, such as Ramat Gan, the municipal welfare department helps defray the cost of electric bills of needy residents in accordance with an incentive program of the Energy Ministry, but every local authority has its own policy.

The problem is just growing, says Moran: blame climate change, and habit. “It’s true that in the past there were no air conditioners, but today everywhere has them, including schools and workplaces, and the body undergoes a process of acclimatization. The ordinary person gets up in the morning, goes downstairs in the elevator, walks into the parking garage, starts up the air-conditioned car, and then goes outside and feels the heat.” And heatwaves are growing longer, more extreme and harder to handle; some scenarios are apocalyptic. “If our neighbors (Palestinians or refugees from elsewhere in the region fleeing climate crisis) knock on our doors en masse, with millions of people, we have to prepare for that, in all realms. Every government ministry must now prepare a plan for coping with the changes.”

The Israeli Climate Forum, chaired by former Knesset member Dov Khenin, was formed by President Isaac Herzog to address the climate crisis, including the Israeli public’s ability to withstand extreme heat and cold waves and extreme weather events. One subject taken up by the Forum is energy poverty.

“You have to take a multi-dimensional look at the climatic questions, not only at the direct environmental aspects but at the social and economic aspects, as well,” Khenin says.

Aside from the need to adjust the sources of energy of the country (move away from fossil fuels towards renewables), the Forum also engages in the social ramifications of climate change. Khenin says that on the one hand is the higher price of electricity, which encourages users to reduce usage; “and on the other hand is a genuine problem of inequality - there are some people who need electricity for fundamental existential needs.”

He therefore proposes changing the way that electricity is priced, as has been done with the price of water. Every household would receive a certain quantity of discounted electricity per person, and if there would be any deviation, that household would pay a higher tariff for it.

“Thus, as consumption increases, you raise the price of the electricity and encourage people to use less,” Khenin says. “It sends the correct message, because electricity is a basic consumption product, but you can encourage people to be more economical in their use of it.”

In fact multiple tariff levels are possible, Khenin points out, rendering excessive use of electricity prohibitive. Meanwhile the Forum is searching for ideas to help Israelis cope with extreme weather. Europe and the U.S. for instance already have “heat shelters” to cool down on extremely hot days. Becky Cohen Keshet, of Rabbis for Human Rights and also a member of the Climate Forum, proposes to adopt the model in Israel.

Such shelters could help people under stress use less power and lower the total demand for electricity, she says. But in any case they propose that public places would serve various groups, not only the poor: “The idea is to prepare public structures, such as schools or shelters. They would receive structural and infrastructural adaptation and would be backed up by generators and solar panels, to cope in emergency situations too.” She adds that in July and August, when the schools are shut, they could easily be repurposed.

The ones least able to afford air conditioning are also those who remain at home a great deal: the unemployed, the handicapped, small children and the elderly for whom hanging out at malls is no solution, says Cohen Keshet. “Going into a shopping mall, when there is no money to buy anything, is very unpleasant,” she says. “There isn’t even any cold water to drink there, or enough places to sit, because the malls are built in a way that encourages consumption. By its nature, this is a place that is especially hard for children, because it is a place whose entire essence is to purchase; and these are the families that lack the ability to do so.”

Also, while malls may seem huge, in practice they have limited capacity and in severe heat waves they’ll fill up with shoppers, rather than pose an option for a broad section of the population. There are other public venues such as libraries but they’re small, don’t have room to hang out and aren’t open for enough hours, she adds.

“This is proper environmental thinking: not to create more things, but to change the way we use existing things,” says Khenin. Everyone understands, he says, that in crisis situations, solutions have to be public-oriented. In war there is home-front defense; for the climate crisis, we need to help people with solutions to cope, he says.

“The emphasis should be placed on the social comfort of the heat shelters. We want it to be a place where people will feel at ease. That if there is a heat wave, people can say they’re going to the shelter. As heat waves mount, we will need more and more solutions like this,” he says

The Climate Forum is also looking at another energy poor group cut off from the grid: the Bedouins in the Negev. Through the Al Harumi Initiative, solar panels for the local people are being promoted. They could sell any surplus to the national grid, thereby both preventing energy poverty and helping the state to meet its renewable energy targets, which it hasn’t achieved so far.

“In the unrecognized villages, even though they have no approved urban plan or infrastructure for electricity, sewage and water, there are institutions called essential service centers, such as clinics, schools and police stations. Which means that there are schools operated by the Education Ministry that aren’t connected to the grid,” says Micha Price of the Al Harumi Initiative, who is a member of the Israeli Climate Forum. “Instead, they are hooked up to a diesel generator that provides them with electricity, and constitutes a huge health hazard.”

The generators pollute, and are noisy to boot.

However, the state does not allow residents of unrecognized settlements to build solar systems. “At the bottom line, the law in its current form does not enable equality of opportunities,” says Price: not in competition, not in energy and not in planning. “Through the project, we are trying to say that a macro political problem has evolved: there are unrecognized villages without infrastructure, and that is a problem not being resolved. But there is atrocious poverty of schools and clinics in these places, and we want to set up solar systems in order to get rid of the generators there,” says Price.

“Of course, the best thing would be to regularize the warped relationship between the state and the Bedouins, although the project could move ahead without correcting all the deep issues,” says Khenin. “The state has already set up a basic service center because you need to have clinics and schools, which are also built without permits. In the same way, you can also determine that energy needs are a basic need, like health and education.”

There are other potential solutions to cope with mounting energy poverty. For instance, the Energy Ministry is working on a program to underwrite the cost of replacing energy-hogging electrical devices. The Israeli Climate Forum is spearheading planning changes such as requiring shading for buildings.

Many homes in Israel have shocking insulation, says Teschner. “One major policy tool is grants for people to improve insulation of the home. It is good for heat and for cold.

Meanwhile energy poverty has arrived, and people like Orit suffer from it in a way that has an immediate effect on their health, both physical and psychological. “I don’t buy fruit, because it’s expensive, but for me to give up on air conditioning is more than giving up on food,” says Orit. “I’d like to know: if the parents of members of Knesset were in this situation, would their hearts let the situation continue? It is very painful. If only something would change, but I don’t see that anyone cares.”

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