It's cold, it's vast, and it's abundant in energy resources like oil and gas. So when it comes to heating the homes of some 140 million people, it would seem that Russia, for once, is in luck: it might be frigid, but at least there's no lack of fuel... or is there? Add vastness - Russia occupies one sixth of the world's landmass - and a history of nationalized economy into the picture. And, during the Soviet Union's industrial leap, energy conservation dangled at the bottom of the agenda. All things considered, it's no surprise that heating one of the coldest places on earth is extremely inefficient.
In Moscow, winter weather has already begun. The Regional Development Ministry has announced that the country was "99 percent ready" for winter. Radiators are pumping away. In some Moscow apartments, it's warm enough for beachwear. But while the heating system has made remarkable leaps in the last 10 years, every winter poor infrastructure still leaves thousands of people across the country out in the cold.
Your Radiator
Russia has one of the most extensive and developed centralized or district heating systems in the world, in place since 1938, making it also one of the oldest of its kind. Combined heat and power plants (CHP's), fueled by either oil, coal, or gas, use excess heat from electricity generation to heat water, which is then sent through a network of pipes right to your building. Inside an apartment building, hot water travels through smaller pipes and into radiators in every room.
For suburban Americans and some other Westerners accustomed to local boilers as close as their basements, being at the mercy of a huge CHP miles away can be unnerving - but that's how it works in Russia's cities and even in a large part of its sparsely-populated towns. With 70 percent of the population living in urban settings, district heating is the norm. But given the country's size, both the advantages and the shortcomings of centralized heating are multiplied.
From the point of view of the consumer, the advantage is not having to maintain your own boiler in the basement (if you live in a private home), nor having to deal with the super if you live in an apartment building. The downsides include the notorious three weeks of cold showers during the summer - precious summer time used by engineers to play catch-up with deteriorating heat supply infrastructure. In some regions, it's a losing game: Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, Siberia and other names from the vastness of the North and the Far East.
While you're loafing around half-naked in your cozy Moscow flat, hundreds of residents in the Irkutsk region have been sleeping in their fur coats since last month. That's because, despite no reports of any accidents in the heat supply network of this South Siberian region, the radiators are barely warm, struggling to maintain a temperature of 13 degrees Celsius with a deep freeze outside. And it's a story that repeats year in, year out: national television showing babushkas with layers of sweaters and coats sitting by the stoves of their dilapidated flats or storming the regional bureaucrat's office.
It would be wrong, however, to lump the poor quality of the heat supply with other problems like inefficiency and lack of accountability. Moreover, in order to appreciate the fact that there are a lot fewer babushkas bundled up next to their gas stoves (if they have one) than there used to be, we need to take a sober look at the problems each ray of warmth encounters as it tries to make its way inside your home.
Conquering the Numbers
For a number of reasons, Russia uses its heat inefficiently. The combined energy intensity per GDP is about 3.5 times that of developed countries - 6 times that of Japan, according to statistics from Russia's Ministry of Energy and Industry. Roughly, this means that a lot of energy goes into producing something - be it heat or Kamaz trucks. Meanwhile, as much as 50 percent of Russia's total energy consumption goes towards heating - five times that of electricity.
The reasons are so manifold that even the experts sigh. "Traditionally, no one was interested in rationally consuming the heat produced by power plants, through the entire chain," Vitaly Papushkin, one of the directors at VNIPIenergoprom, a state-run institute on energy management, said.
But technically speaking, it's because Russia's centralized heating systems are simultaneously very efficient and progressive (as Moscow illustrates), but also a recipe for decay and dilapidation.
On the one hand, Moscow boasts the largest heat supply system in the world. And, ironically, it is also the least energy-intensive - a good thing in terms of heat supply efficiency. On the other hand, "in the rest of Russia, things are a lot worse," Papushkin sighs. "In Moscow, the whole system was planned right - and funded generously." But beyond the capital, engineers developed a method to save on metals for pipes by using the same pipe systems both for hot tap water and hot water filling the radiators. "Apart from the CIS, you will not find this kind of open system in the entire world," he says. "It was simply because we didn't have the money - metal was being used to build tanks." The initial rationale was that northern Russian rivers have very ‘soft' water, leaving less mineral deposits on the inside of the pipe. But this kind of "open system," as opposed to a sealed system, wears out pipes a lot faster.
According to Papushkin, efforts to rebuild this system are headed "in the right direction," but there shouldn't be any illusions about how long such a massive overhaul could take.
Where Winter Hits Hardest
Regional Development Minister Dmitri Kozak, appointed in the latest government reshuffle, announced last week that Russia was ready for winter, but there were exceptions. "Less than five percent of old heat supply networks were planned to be replaced, and there is a whole series of regions that did not make preparing for winter their priorities," Kozak was quoted as saying. These are the usual suspects, notorious for their harsh climates and general remoteness - the Khabarovsk and Primorsky regions in the Far East, the Murmansk region in the north, but also a few places in central Russia like the Voronezh, Tula, and Vologda regions.
In terms of minimizing the occurrence of heat outages, the problem is not only in remoteness and climate, but in finances. Igor Bashmakov, who directs the Moscow-based Center for Energy Efficiency, says that the most vulnerable regions are in the north and Far East, in remote residential areas where coal and oil are predominantly used for heating. "Just bringing in the fuel is every expensive," he says. "There's no railroads, so trucks are used. Because the equipment is in such a bad condition, there's often nowhere to store the coal. It's stored under an open sky, and the wind spreads these gray coal particles all over the village - I've seen it in Kolyma, Sakhalin...."
These areas are vulnerable not just because they are remote, but because their residents make a lot less money - hence there is less to tax. "Because heat is so expensive there and incomes are so low, even when the regional administration tries to lower the prices of heating, even with subsidies... people just can't pay. Heat supply companies can't collect payments. There's no money to fix things."
A lot of heat, meanwhile, is lost in bad pipes that are meant to transport the hot water to the residential areas. This problem is particularly acute in Siberia's permafrost, where pipes are laid above-ground. "I've seen people break the wooden casing and wrap the pipes in deer hide because they don't have anything better to insulate them with," Bashmakov says.
But with new awareness and more funding, the situation has improved remarkably in the last 10 years, Bashmakov says.
All Eyes on Moscow
If Russia has one of the highest energy intensity per GDP rates in the world, Moscow, with a huge heat supply system, has one of the lowest, says Papushkin. Part of this is because heavy industry - which eats a lot of energy - can't afford the rent within city limits and has moved out. But it's also because several aggressive measures have been taken to make heat consumption more efficient.
"It used to be thought that you could use cheap energy to heat poorly-built homes," Papushkin said. "But it's important that within a relatively short time some considerable measures were taken - sure, they were administrative, but they worked - to make enterprises more energy-efficient." In particular, new building regulations passed by the city in 2000 are bringing building standards on par in terms of heat conservation with those of Europe.
The key isn't even in building new heat supply systems as it is in raising awareness in the population.
"It takes just $30 to replace a window and make it conserve more heat," says Bashmakov. "People just don't know how to insulate their windows - babushkas still use cotton and paper."
But there is also another problem, and that is accountability. Papushkin and Bashmakov, who have worked together in helping develop the country's energy and heat supply policies in remote areas like the Khanty-Mansiysk region, agree that it's hard to be energy efficient with a tradition of not counting the amount of heat that's being consumed.
"By 1990 we reached a situation when heat consumption simply wasn't being measured," Papushkin said. "It was a social function of the [Soviet] government: keep the amount of heat on a low level because the salaries were low. We're all the same, so we pay equally for our heat supply."
To Moscow's credit, however, the number of heat counters is growing rapidly, while the amount of heat consumed is decreasing - in part, thanks to industrial plants moving out.
Nationwide, however, measuring heat consumption is a greater challenge. "We have a very poor information base documenting how much energy we consume," says Bashmakov. "Because there are few heat counters, we can't really keep track of how much fuel is used to generate heat. Ask how much heat energy is being generated in Russia, and no one will give you a clear answer, because there are numerous statistics and no unified database."
On the other hand, Moscow, which introduced new building standards and took some of the first steps in heat conservation, could serve as a beacon not just to the rest of Russia, but internationally. While a lot of remote regions are still using coal and oil, 97 percent of Moscow's heat generating plants are fueled by natural gas. "The world has been talking more and more about CHP's," says Papushkin. "Moscow has been using them since 1938."
By Anna Arutunyan
