City halls that wait for a funding call before thinking through their projects lose money and quality, while those that have the studies and technical designs ready when a programme opens apply with an advantage, said Horațiu Pop, energy manager for localities at Servelect, at the Leaders in Energy Transition North-West Region conference, organised by Energynomics.
“The most important thing is to know as early as possible which calls are coming and to be prepared in good time. If the 2028-2034 regional programme is being prepared now, you have to know, as a mayor, which projects you want to fund, do the feasibility studies and technical designs, make them as mature as possible, so that when the funding appears you submit a mature, high-quality project,” said Horațiu Pop, who works with about 30 cities, answering the question of what he would do as mayor for a day.
Haste, underbudgeting and a contractor who pushes the cost down
The problem, he explained, begins when the project is written after the call. “A funding line appears, and City Hall has to submit the funding application within two weeks. A feasibility study is done very quickly, perhaps no technical expertise or very detailed geotechnical study is carried out, and from there very large and unforeseen costs can arise.”
The mistakes chain together. Investments come out underbudgeted from the DALI phase (preliminary design documentation), because the work is done fast and not every detail is taken into account, and then comes poor communication between the parties. “Poor communication between the beneficiary, the designer and the contractor. The contractor will always pull down, to keep costs to a minimum.”
The beneficiary, as a rule, has no way to correct this. It knows it wants an nZEB building, but lacks the expertise to check the designer and the contractor, and the result can be a building with much higher consumption than intended, with non-compliant execution and extra spending.
For city halls, Horațiu Pop also pointed to a few funding lines, which he presented as open or about to open: the Modernisation Fund for photovoltaic panels and the Norwegian grants, scheduled for the end of the year.
Renovation lowers consumption, not necessarily the bill
The second part of his address concerns what happens after the work is done. Consumption falls, and the expectation is that bills will fall too, but practice shows otherwise. “In reality, the bill may still be there or may even be a bit higher, because we renovated for energy efficiency, but we also added some extra consumers,” he said, giving the examples of heat pumps, ventilation solutions and LED lighting.
Moreover, technology does not save energy on its own. “We installed BMS systems. Let us train the people who use them, because the school administrator does not know how to use a BMS. You cannot even replace a light bulb any more, because it has to be programmed into the system.” And a remote management system left unsupervised, he added, may not work at all: “at the first error it runs at 100% and we make no reduction any more.”
The same logic applies to photovoltaic parks sized for public lighting. “We see that there is no correlation between them. The panels produce in summer, lighting consumes the most in winter. The panels produce during the day, lighting runs at night.” For city halls, the lesson is that an investment is not judged only by the equipment installed, but also by who uses it and how much of the energy produced actually reaches the place where it is consumed.
Leaders in Energy Transition North-West Region was organised by Energynomics, with the support of our partners: Elektra Renewable Support, Big Store, Electroalfa, ELNOS, EnergoBit, KSTAR, MBK Power Energy, SAJ Electric. Strategic partners ALEA, FREE, SAMER.
