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Trenčín, a city of around 60,000 residents in the western part of the Slovak Republic, is aiming to become the country’s unofficial capital of energy efficiency. Over the next few years, it is hoping to make biomass its main source of heat production instead of gas, thereby cutting fuel costs for residents and reducing carbon emissions.
At the Liptovska plant owned by district heating company Služby pre bývanie (Services for Living), two biomass boilers use straw, corn cobs and woodchips as fuel. These different forms of bio crop come from local farms within a radius of 30 kilometres and can be varied to generate different energy outputs according to the plant’s energy needs.
The biomass boilers, which have an output of 4 megawatts each, were financed largely by the EBRD and provide heating and hot water for some 3,000 households in the city. Služby pre bývanie is one of the largest private energy utilities companies in the Slovak Republic and oversees more than 20 power plants, including the city’s first biomass power plant in Trenčín.
Seventy per cent biomass
The company’s Managing Director Jozef Greňo, whose company supplies heating to the whole city, says that “our aim is to ensure that in a couple of years, heat production will be 70 per cent based on biomass and 30 per cent based on natural gas production for the whole city of Trenčín.”
“No doubt, it is easier to burn gas at the boiler plant,” says Mr Greňo. “But taking into consideration its price, the future is with the biomass-fuelled boilers. The change was significant and we needed some effort and time to undertake this strategic shift.”
The gain in energy efficiency expected from the change means the company can lower heat and energy production costs, which amount to around a third of those for conventional gas boilers. This saves customers around 10-15 per cent on their heating bills and leads to carbon dioxide emissions reductions of 8,600 tons per year, thanks to the drop in natural gas consumption.
The introduction of biomass boilers at the Liptovska plant took place thanks to a €2.25 million indirect loan from the EBRD under the Slovak Sustainable Energy Finance Facility (SlovSEFF) and €650,000 from the energy utility company, with an EU-funded incentive payment of 15 per cent of the total loan amount. The loan will be repaid within eight years and, in the meantime, further biomass boilers are planned on a new site.
SlovSEFF: Making cosier homes
The Trenčín project formed part of phase one of SlovSEFF. The scheme funded around 300 projects and improved the lives of about 50,000 residents across Slovakia. Annual energy savings amounted to 282,613 MWh of electricity, equivalent to the production of a 100 MW wind farm, and carbon emissions reductions of 63,564 tons a year, equivalent to taking over 28,000 cars off the road.
In residential building sector SlovSEFF has managed to achieve the most outstanding gains, which make the Slovak Republic a model for other countries receiving the EBRD’s support.
According to Jan Pejter, Senior Consultant at ENVIROS, a Czech energy and environmental consultancy providing local expertise to SlovSEFF, households in the Slovak Republic can achieve 30-40 per cent energy savings just by changing their windows and installing insulation.
The SlovSEFF phase one private sector energy investment projects across the country support the idea that residential buildings have a vast potential for undertaking energy efficiency improvements.
Out of the 293 SlovSEFF projects, 250 initiatives (over 85 per cent) were funded in the private residential sector. As a result, 46,350 people across the country slashed their energy bills by an average of 32 per cent. At the same time they improved living conditions by making their homes warmer and healthier.
The EBRD contributed €60 million to the first phase of SlovSEFF, which launched in 2007 and ended in November 2011, a figure which has risen to €90 million in phase two.
The success of the scheme was partly dependent on partnerships with local banks Slovenska Sporitelna (Erste Bank Group), VUB Banka (Intesa Sanpaolo Group), Tatra Banka (Raiffeisen International), Dexia Banka Slovensko, UniCredit and ČSOB Stavebna Sporitelna.
The SlovSEFF mechanism differs from those offered by other organisations due to its combination of loans, grants and technical assistance, says EBRD Energy Efficiency Analyst Daniella Diedrich-Ristič.
“These loans are provided to commercially viable clients at competitive market rates. They are usually combined with free technical assistance and incentive payments of around 10-15 per cent of the total loan amount. All this makes the mechanism attractive to our clients, so demand is rising,” Ms Diedrich-Ristič explains.
SlovSEFF is only one example of the many successful sustainable energy finance programmes that the EBRD has already established in 16 countries, ranging from Poland to Kazakhstan.
By Sergiy Grytsenko
Last updated 12 December 2011
Energy efficiency in the Slovak Republic
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