How much do we pay for district heating? How much money is necessary to keep the kindergartens warm? What about decorative public lighting? Organizations gathered in the Network of Good Energy provide us with the instruction on how to find some of the answers.
There are many people who can’t cope with the heat, so they are dreaming about good old cold days. It seems that Belgrade city authorities decided to give their own kind contribution and at least try summoning winter a few months earlier, by conducting a public procurement for decorative public lighting in the middle of summer. How big is their contribution? No less than 300 million dinars. They claim that decorative public lighting is the very reason why many tourists visited Belgrade last year, especially during holidays. Besides being lavish, they were also very creative, which is something you can see if you take a closer look in sketches of decorations within the public procurement offer. There’s a little bit of everything really, including dolphins and mandolins. You can already paint the picture: while we are now dreaming of winter in the midst of summer, we’ll do the opposite during winter: dreaming of summer days while gazing at dolphins and mandolins hanging from our street lights.
While the relation between festive decorations on increasing number of tourists is something which can hardly be proven as directly related, we can beyond any doubt say that festive decoration expenditures are increasing day by day. What we can also say is that public lighting can hardly be regarded as festive, since it stays up for most of the year, from mid-autumn until mid-spring. That may be nice to someone, but it’s costly for everyone, since electricity consumption is increasing. That’s an electricity bill we all share.
Investments in festive decorative lighting, dolphins and mandolins are just one of the many images of local energy sector in Serbia. However, there are many other images as well, and those are not as bright and shiny. Sometimes their colors depend on the season, but they are all equally worrying. Damaged thermal insulation, ramshackle and feeble windows, heavy smoke surrounding our hospitals and schools during the heating season – you can guess: they use fossil fuels for heating…Since there’s so much smoke, it has to be super warm inside, right? Well, not really, since our health centers and offices are not so warm and cozy during winter, to say the least. What about asthma? Maybe it has something to do with the smoke, too?
In quest for hidden parts of the equation
Local energy policy in Serbia is like an equation with many unknown variables. Although we often fail to focus on all of the elements, we never miss the end result, since it’s directly affecting our quality of life. Festive decorations hanging around in March, cold classroom, health issues – that’s all nothing else but a result of our equation – the result of our local energy policy. Since we are talking about math now, we can translate all of that into numbers. The only element we are familiar with are expenditures that we, as citizens, pay into budgets of our towns and municipalities, expecting to get quality service in return, such as quality health care, warm classrooms and hospital rooms, public lighting and reliable public transport.
There are many elements we don’t know.
What fuels does our plant use? How are these goods procured? Is our plant profitable or does it rely on budget support? How is public transport organized?
How much do we pay for district heating? How much does heating in kindergartens cost our local budget? What about festive decorations, how much do we pay for that?
If we remain ignorant towards these elements, the equation will result with poor quality of life of all citizens, cold apartments and classrooms, polluted air and empty budgets of our local governments.
In terms of quality: we are not going to be pleased. Talking in numbers – it will be well below zero, in every possible way.
How do we solve this equation?
We’ve got to start from somewhere.
How much do you, as citizens, pay for public lighting, public transport, and energy consumption in public facilities? How big is the energy consumption? Does the energy sector affect the environment in any way? Most importantly: how do you find relevant information?
Organizations gathered in the Network of Good Energy have decided to give it a try and developed a manual on how to solve the equation of local energy policy in Serbia. If you want to join us, take a look at this link.
We were trying to answer the most important questions in the right order:
1. What are the elements of local energy sector?
2. What information do I want to discover?
3. What is the source of the information?
4. Where do I find it?
Let’s go back to the beginning of our story and try to learn more about festive decorations. Public lighting is a significant energy consumer, and a costly one as well. Let’s try to learn more about it by focusing on festive decorations in Belgrade. Where can we learn more about this subject?
Since there’s a public enterprise, established by the City of Belgrade, to manage public lighting system, that could be a good place to start from. By visiting the website of this enterprise (https://www.bg-osvetljenje.rs/), we see that they have separate section for conducted public procurements. By browsing through this section, we can find the documentation on public procurement for the same purpose, conducted during the last year. By browsing through this section, we can find a document (serial number OPD-9/17), in which we see that the price of the decoration for the last year was 203.934.000 dinars. One more rewind to the beginning of the story, where we saw that the price for this year is 340.000.000 dinars. We don’t need to be that good in math to see that we’re about to spend tremendously larger amount of money this year.
These decorations are just one of the elements covered by our manual. Check out for other elements as well: district heating, energy sources, air pollution. Join us in solving the equation by following four simple steps:
1. Pick one information that you want to know;
2. Check the list of documents that may contain the information;
3. Learn more about how to search through that document;
4. Start digging.
Don’t be too upset if you take a few wrong turns in this labyrinth of documents and give us a call. We’ll be happy to navigate you on your way out. It’s in our best interest to tackle the equation together, since the result will be the same for all of us.
Ognjan Pantić, Belgrade Open School