Despot Stefan Street at noon. Warm, sunny day, northeast wind blowing. That is why, in the most polluted street in Belgrade, the air is of excellent quality.
The devices show that only the values of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide emitted by vehicles have increased.
When the heating season begins, the suspended particles PM 2.5 and PM 10 will multiply.
The biggest culprits, experts say, are individual fireplaces, but some other pollutants also contribute.
“According to the latest report of the Environmental Protection Agency, which came out recently, ten days ago, the share of small combustion plants in the emissions of suspended particles PM 2.5 and PM 10 is above 75 percent. Estimates say, when the air is red – it is during the winter when we have industrial emissions of suspended particles, a very small contribution of primary emissions from the thermal energy sector, up to 10 percent of the contribution from traffic, and then on top of all that comes the emission of pollutants, primarily suspended particles from small and medium-sized furnaces”, indicates Dejan Lekić, a member of the expert council of the National Ecological Association.
How much pollution varies in different parts of the city
Andrej Šoštarić from the City Institute for Public Health says that in winter the situation can be such that in suburban municipalities, where individual fireplaces dominate, the air quality is worse than in central city municipalities.
“But, overall, there are different types of emission sources in different municipalities, so roughly speaking, they are very similar,” says Šoštarić.
According to the latest census, around 185,000 households are heated by stoves or other devices. The most of them are on Palilula and in Zemun, and the least on Savski Venec and in Stari Grad.
Last winter, the most polluted air was on February 1. We can’t wait for the warm weather when there is no heating with wood, coal or fuel oil, so that we can breathe, but more and more often the air is very polluted and in summer, as it was on July 6.
What causes pollution levels to rise during the summer?
Andrej Šoštarić says that this is most often due to tropospheric ozone, the so-called summer pollutant and it is formed in photochemical reactions between oxides, nitrogen and easily volatile organic compounds originating from traffic.
“We had several episodes when particle concentrations were increased due to the transport of sand from the Sahara, this happened five, six or seven times this year where we have an increase, and applications and meters show elevated concentrations of PM particles – and that is very fine dust” , notes Dejan Lekić.
It would be best if as many households and institutions as possible were connected to the remote system of the Belgrade power plants or gas was introduced.
This decision is only influenced by the price of the connection and the heating bill, as well as the City’s plan to shut down fuel oil boilers.
How is it possible that we cannot change the way of heating in Belgrade for so long, that we still have so many individual fireplaces?
Dušan Rakić: Individual fireplaces are the biggest polluters
Dušan Rakić, city secretary for energy, said, in a guest appearance in the Belgrade Chronicle, that a large number of large boiler rooms in public buildings have been shut down and switched to a district heating system.
“More than 1,500 of those large boiler houses have been shut down so far. The city of Belgrade, together with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, has a plan to use the funds from the EBRD to put the last large boiler plants in the program and to shut them down,” Rakić notes.
According to him, the biggest outcry was about the large boiler rooms, because they are the most noticeable.
He points out that private houses “burn everything”, when they don’t have wood, they also burn plastic and rubber, and that individual fireplaces are actually the biggest polluters.
“We appeal to citizens to take advantage of the opportunity that the Ministry of Energy has now provided, together with the municipalities in Serbia, 137 municipalities in Serbia currently have signed contracts with the Ministry of Energy, 12 of which are in Belgrade,” says Rakić.
All municipalities have detailed information on how citizens can register and apply for shutting down their boiler houses, in addition to replacing the carpentry, there are many citizens who are already starting to think about installing heat pumps, so that process is going on, adds Rakić.
However, he notes that these are individuals, so more animation, such as television shows, is needed for people to start changing the energy they use more significantly.
Do people warm themselves to what is cheapest for them?
“According to statistical data, since the last census, we have a fairly large number of people who are still heating with electricity. However, in any case, the state will have to see to it that certain positive measures influence people to stop using electricity for heating and to use electricity for other things,” underlined Rakić.
There were households that switched to gas at one point. However, it turned out that it was not exactly the cheapest solution for them, i.e. that gas is quite expensive.
“We are witnessing a gas shock due to the gas supply crisis in Europe, so it was a peak. “Gas prices will return to normal, so gas is one of the acceptable energy sources,” said the city’s energy secretary.
The best solution for the city of Belgrade
Answering the question of how to reduce the number of individual fire pits, Rakić points out that what is the policy of the city of Belgrade and what will be certain in all strategies is connection to the remote system, to the Belgrade power plants.
“We will see that the method of connection and the costs of connecting the buildings to the remote heating system are acceptable, and we will encourage people to connect to the remote heating system,” concluded Rakić.
Source: RTS
Source: energetskiportal.rs
