It’s chilly in Gaza
January 23rd, 2008
A few weeks ago left-wing protestors went around Tel Aviv putting up these mock leaflets from the Israeli electric company, which announce power stoppages “because the headquarters of an army that harms citizens in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and carries out war crimes is operating in your city”, and inform the residents that “for humanitarian reasons the stoppages will not be total, leaving you the decision on whether to distribute the allocated supplies to hospitals, heating systems, sewage or private homes.”
It hit home a little harder this week, when large parts of Gaza were plunged into darkness after Israel suspended fuel supplies for the power station. And as I lay in bed this morning summoning up the strength to dash across the frozen floor and switch on the heating, I reflected on the story I wrote yesterday about the outages and realised how extraordinarily little electricity Gaza actually uses.
Assuming 1.4m people live in Gaza (some say 1.5m), and that its peak wintertime electricity consumption — ie, when Israel isn’t cutting off the fuel — is 250MW (UN figures, though 240MW has also been reported), then that’s 180W per person, or a couple of light bulbs. If they used all their electricity on standard 2kW electric heaters, there would be one heater per 11 people.
Israel’s peak demand, which it has been hitting (Hebrew) thanks to the cold snap in recent days, is around 10,000MW, or 1.5kW per person, over eight times as much as Gaza’s.
Remarkably, that’s a higher rate than Britain, which uses something over 62,000MW in winter, or only a little over 1kW per capita (maybe the Brits use more natural gas). In the US, needless to say, the peak rate is well over 2kW per capita.
Al Gore — you got some visiting to do. Maybe you should recommend Islamism to the world as a way to cut carbon emissions.