Resalta signs energy supply PPP with the Special Psychiatric Hospital “Gornja Toponica”

The hospital was founded in 1927 in Gornja Toponica, 13 km from the southern Serbian city of Nis. With a capacity of 800 beds, its service area covers all of Serbia from Belgrade to the Macedonian border. Its current facilities date back to the 1950s. In order to improve the infrastructure as well as employee and patient comfort, the hospital published a public tender for heat supply with heating system renovations and the partial energy retrofit of 10 buildings within the complex.

Resalta won the tender and the contract was signed on July 11th 2019. As private partner, Resalta will fund the entire project, carry out the implementation of all works and ensure operations and maintenance for the duration of the 15-year contract.

10 of the hospital buildings will receive entirely new thermal envelopes which will improve insulation and reduce heating costs. In addition to this, Resalta will build two new boiler rooms. The first will have a 3.2 MW natural gas boiler which will provide heating to all buildings currently connected to two existing boiler rooms (“Drvara” and “Clinic”). The boiler room will also be equipped with a steam boiler of nominal steam production of 1,100 kg/h for domestic hot water production as well as laundry. All necessary mechanical and electrical equipment for the proper functioning of the newly designed boilers, including pumps, auxiliary fittings, chemical water preparation and more will be included.

A second boiler room will replace the boiler room adjacent to the hospital kitchen. It will feature a 560 kW natural gas boiler that will provide heating to all facilities covered by the existing kitchen boiler room, as well as a steam boiler of 1,400kg/h capacity that will be used to heat sanitary water and for the kitchen. As the facilities connected to the existing kitchen boiler room have used steam heating thus far, the existing steam pipelines will be replaced with hot water pipelines and all secondary installations will be changed from steam to hot water (new radiators, pipe divisions and associated hot water fittings will be installed).

In order to maximize efficiency and the benefits from the new boiler rooms, pipelines between the two existing “Drvara” and “Clinic” boiler rooms will be entirely retrofitted, as will the hot water pipes between the “Clinic” and several hospital buildings, in order to ensure a more efficient distribution of thermal energy.

Public-private partnerships enable cities, municipalities and state institutions to partner with private companies in order to improve their energy efficiency through various measures. The private partner finances the entire project, and the public partner repays the investment from achieved savings over the course of the contract, during which the private partner provides operations and maintenance services. The public partner has zero expenditure on these projects and immediately benefits from savings.

Resalta has implemented some of the first public private partnerships in energy efficiency in Serbia, including lighting in the cities of Kruševac, Petrovac na Mlavi, among others, and the first PPP for heat supply for four elementary schools in the city of Pirot. Resalta is also part of the consortium that has carried out the energy retrofit of 49 buildings in the City of Ljubljana, the largest such project in Southeast Europe, and is currently working on the second energy retrofit of Ljubljana.