Marin Petrovic is part of Enova. His teams are have been recently visiting ComActivate’s sites in Bulgaria, Hungary and Lithuania to work on the technical development of each neighborhood’s energy sufficiency roadmaps . We were interested in how he got involved in energy efficiency within the built environment. On the day we interviewed him, he had just returned from a trip to Mongolia.

LE – Today you’re back in Europe – how was your trip?

MP – Yeah, I came back I think last week either Friday or Saturday. One day in Bosnia and then I came to the coast. The trip was really interesting, it took three weeks. I took Trans-Siberian from Moscow to all the way to Mongolia. It was difficult to get into Russia, we spent about 12 hours at the border. They were checking everything very carefully. But apart from that, everything in Russia was really good. People are so nice.

LE – And what did you do in Mongolia?

I just went for one week, to Ulaanbaatar, then I went to a couple of national parks. I didn’t have time to go further into the desert. But yeah, it’s a nightmare to transfer from place to place in Mongolia because they have basically no roads.

LE – Did you have to get on a horse?

Yes, at some parts!

LE – Could you tell us a bit about where you’re from and how you got into this line of work? Where did you study, for example?

MP – I come from a small town in central Bosnia, 30 kilometers north of Sarajevo. I finished my primary and secondary school in that town, and then I went to study in Sarajevo. When I finished that, I went to Dublin for my PhD.

LE – And what was your specialization when you did the PhD?

I did a PhD in fracture mechanics. I’m working in the University of Sarajevo in mechanical engineering faculty. I’m head of department for mechanics and my specialty is fracture mechanics. During the PhD, I was looking into the energies needed to achieve fracture in industrial diamond. And apart from that, I’m also working in the field of energy or energy efficiency for about, I think, 13 or 14 years together with Enova.

I’m leading a few of their big projects at the moment and one of them is Comactivate.

People don’t know about the savings and all the benefits they get from renovation!

LE – What drew you towards energy efficiency?

MP – There’s many things, but one of the major things I started working on energy efficiency was at the small town I come from, we still have a huge problem with pollution, especially during the winter months because people use coal and wood to heat their properties. The buildings from former Yugoslavia are quite poor quality. You remember all those concrete communist buildings? So we have a big problem with the pollution. So I started to work with Enova, to start trying to find solutions to overcome that.

LE – So, could you tell us a bit about what you’re doing this summer, which sites you’re visiting and what you’re going to be doing, observing or measuring?

MP- I’ve got a couple of teams that work with me and and we have three target neighborhoods so in Hungary, in Lithuania and Bulgaria. They just finished the neighborhood in Budapest and at the moment they’re in Lithuania. So they’re basically measuring the dimensions of the building and they’re looking into the heat sources – what people use to heat their buildings, what’s the quality of the walls, what’s the constitution of the walls of the apartment?

What they do in Comactivate is a walkthrough. So there’s just looking at the building from outside and they usually just talk to a couple of the tenants inside the building just to see, to get a sense of what they use for heating. Ideally, they should get one of the heating bills just to see the exact price of the energy. However in Budapest, and it’s the same in Lithuania also, the whole neighborhood is usually using the district heating.

When they finish in Lithuania, they go to Bulgaria.

LE – Is there any special technology that you’re using, anything that’s cutting edge for this?

MP – Yeah, there’s a lot of available special technologies, but we don’t use it because there are some special drones that you can use to just to record the buildings and neighborhoods. But when you use that, there’s an issue with accuracy. It’s not as accurate as when you measure every building. What they use now is just a laser to measure the size of the windows and doors. So it’s quite basic but it gives us much more accurate results than if we use something else.

LE – So you’re looking into the materials.

MP – It’s making a record of what the buildings are built with, the thickness and that will inform what you would suggest for energy saving measures.

LE – Are there any particular challenges for you when you’re on site?

MP – The challenges are mostly related to tenants. Sometimes tenants don’t quite trust us and what we do. Sometimes it happens that they call the police! But when you explain what we do and show we have the contract,  people are very nice. Most people usually invite us for coffee in their apartments.

LE – So will you go yourself to any of the locations or is it just people that are working with you?

MP – Sometimes I go as well. In ComAct I was going to all. We have now four locations. I think I will go to Burgas at the end of August. These teams are working very good. So yeah, I trained them that there’s no need for me. But I might go with them.

LE – Are there any interesting technologies that you can see can be applied in some of the locations in terms of the insulation or how that’s specified or designed?

MP – I can’t say now, but we will come up with something when we finish all the analysis,

LE – That would be very interesting to hear about, how this work then informs

the next steps, definitely.

MP – Yes. Now it has become vital, to analyze the potential for renewable energy sources. So we will have to see at all three locations what we can use in terms of renewables.

LE – That sounds exciting, so you said you do speak with some of the owners. Do you go inside the properties?

MP – Yes, and if somebody else is going to do the measures, to take the measures, they also talk to the tenants. We did many locations in Bosnia where we had to go into every single apartment to get their answers. I was doing that as well.

LE – Is that because they’re owners and they’re decision makers in the projects?

MP –  It’s about the owners, sometimes you need to explain basic things, what energy efficiency is. They don’t know about the benefits of the project. So you need to keep it very simple, to explain it to them in a very basic way.

LE – That must be a real skill to be able to take your technical knowledge and then be able to make that relatable to somebody who’s just living in one of the apartment buildings.

MP – Well, it’s usually the best to explain something using money. When you explain something in terms of money.

LE –  Do you have any example of how you’ve got over that resistance to renovation with somebody?

It’s the best when people see something from their neighbours and then they start trusting it.

MP – There’s one quite picturesque example. We had a project in northeast Bosnia, one of the towns where we were doing the analysis of the building stock, and after we did the analysis, we did the presentations in the municipality, we invited all the owners and tenants to hear it.

And I remember there were five identical buildings in one of the neighborhoods, like one to each other. And the people from one building, they wanted to go into it because they were getting, I think it was 15 or 20% co-financing from the municipality and the same amount from the county. So they were getting basically 30 to 40% co-financing.

So they were really interested in that. And the people from the other four buildings, they were laughing to them, like, „you’re putting your own money in?, after some time they will refurbish your building anyway!“.

But they did it! They finished all the refurbishments and they got a huge savings during the winter season, the heating season. And then the next year, the next summer, people from three other buildings, they did the refurbishment works on their own without any co-financing. When they saw how much these people saved, they did everything on their own!

It’s the best when people see something from their neighbours and then they start trusting it.

LE – That’s really interesting, thank you! Are you doing any formal occupant surveys, like that, where you sort of standardize the information from the owners?

CDU – Yes, I was wondering, when you go to a multi-family apartment building is it really different to going to a single family building or is it pretty much the same kind of thing just in a bigger sense?

MP – It just takes much more time to go into every single apartment in multi-family buildings. So for just a normal house, you take the measurements from outside and you go inside to see all the appliances they use. But when we go to see the multifamily apartment buildings, we need to do it for every single apartment, if it’s detailed as you would. If it’s not, it’s basically the same. It’s just larger dimensions. We do the measurements from outside and that’s it.

CDU – So for Comactivate it will be very similar? 

MP – yeah, it just might be a little bit complicated if there’s more heat sources in the buildings. It’s like if different departments are using different energy sources for heating, for houses you have just like usually just one source and that’s it. But if there’s like 30 different apartments, so we need to check in every single apartment what they use. Yeah, yeah. But in terms of electric appliances, we don’t go into details.

LE – Okay. Do you have a particularly memorable experience from either your work on Comactivate or Comact about working with the multifamily apartment buildings with the residents?

MP – Yeah, there’s a lot of funny situations that we come across when we go on the road. I remember we were in one of the buildings and we were talking to the tenants in every apartment to see if they agree to perform energy efficiency measures. And one of the tenants, he asked about his neighbor. I don’t remember his name, but let’s call him Nick.

He asked, does Nick agree to do the renovation? I said, yes. Then he said, no, I don’t want to.

So sometimes you can see like inter-neighbour relations.

But there’s many funny things that happen, like people usually don’t know what is energy efficiency, so when we ask them, they usually say of course we know, and then when you ask them what is energy efficiency, they usually say, oh we want our building to be nicer – they don’t know much about the savings and all the benefits they get.

LE – Perhaps we could come back to you when you get to the next stages when you’re working on how these findings will be used or what suggestions will be made for each project?

MP – Good. Yeah.

LE – Perfect thank you.

Okay, I’m here in Croatia another two days and then I go back to Bosnia. I have a week there and then I’m trying to climb Mont Blanc.

CDU – Oh wow, a very impressive summer!