The municipality of Constanța has started a program to rehabilitate the public heating agent distribution system; it hopes that the city’s population will reconnect to the heating grid.
“In the past, the heating agent supply service had 88,000 apartments connected, and currently their number has decreased to 32-34,000 apartments,” said Bogdan Orozan, thermotechnical director at Termoficare Constanța, during the event “Energy efficiency for energy transition” organized in Constanța by Energynomics together with the Romanian Fund for Efficiency Energy – FREE and the Directorate for Energy Efficiency within the Ministry of Energy.
In total, 21 kilometers of pipeline have been upgraded, and as a result of the investments the company expects a sharp decrease in network losses and costs for customers. According to Orozan, following this investment, there is a slight interest in returning to the centralized heating system from the customers. Investments will continue including in 2024.
Constanța Heating Company took over the thermal energy transport network in the city on January 1, 2020, when the technological addition (adjacent volume of water injected into the network to compensate for network losses) was 392 tons of hot water per hour. After 1,800 interventions were carried out on the network in the last three years, the amount of water added to the system has almost halved, to 200 tons per hour.
“Everyone is looking at this technical addition, at the losses produced by sealings, in Romanian at the water put into the ground at the Romanians’ expense. But the transfer losses were 83% of the technological losses, and only 18% the hot water we were putting into the ground. These 40-year-old pipes were no longer thermally insulated,” added Orozan.
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At the same time, the municipality aims to attract 742 million lei through PNRR for the construction of a new CET in the city.
The conference in Constanța was the third of a series of 5 scheduled by the Energynomics communication platform, the Romanian Fund for Energy Efficiency – FREE and the Directorate for Energy Efficiency within the Ministry of Energy. The project is financed by Norwegian Grants 2014-2021. The next conferences are scheduled in Iași, on October 19 and 20, and in Bucharest, on November 16 and 17.