Resalta enters energy supply phase of public private partnership 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, treating patients from the south, southeast and west of Serbia. 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.

The successful realization of the project was officially marked on July 1 in the presence of Dr. Zoran Radovanović, State Secretary of the Ministry of Health, Ivana Hadži Stošić, State Secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, Dr. Ljubica Mrdaković Todorović from the Republican Health Insurance Fund, and Dr. Milan Stanojkovic, director of the Gornja Toponica hospital, and Resalta's representative, managing director Marko Mrzel.

Within the scope of the public private partnership, Resalta renovated facades for 10 of the hospital buildings, which received entirely new thermal envelopes which improved insulation and reduced heating costs. In addition to this, Resalta built two new boiler rooms. The first has a 3.2 MW natural gas boiler which provides heating to all buildings currently connected to two existing boiler rooms (“Drvara” and “Clinic”). The boiler room is also 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 were included.

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

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

The implemented measures have improved comfort at the hospital by ensuring a more reliable and stable heat supply, reducing energy waste through improved insulation and renovating certain key elements of the complex infrastructure. The special psychiatric hospital benefits from a 10% reduction in thermal energy consumption while the switch to natural gas has reduced CO2 emissions by 850 tons each year.

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 Krusevac, 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.