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EU helps Russian small businesses cut energy waste
Loans, advice, energy audits available via Tatarstan’s SpurtBank
An EBRD donor-backed initiative to encourage businesses to cut energy waste,
costs and their impact on the environment has been extended to small
businesses in Russia.
The EBRD has lengthy experience in helping large-scale energy users in the
region, particularly power companies and energy intensive industries, to
reduce energy waste and related greenhouse gas emissions. Donor-funded energy
audits highlight opportunities to drastically reduce energy use; the potential
energy efficiency improvements, financed with loans backed by the EBRD,
quickly pay for themselves and thus are readily undertaken by the firms in
question.
In Russia the existing €500,000 EBRD energy audit programme funded by the
European Union's TACIS (technical assistance for the Commonwealth of
Independent States) initiative has now been extended to small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) via Spurt Bank of Tatarstan. The EBRD recently provided a
280 million rouble credit line (US$10 million equivalent) to Spurt Bank to
finance SMEs, the first time the EBRD has arranged small business financing in
local currency in Russia. The funds may be loaned to clients for energy
efficiency improvements, among other things.
Spurt Bank will encourage its clients to use the TACIS-funded consultants to
conduct energy audits, for which there is no charge.
“Through the energy audits, businesses are amazed to discover they can
dramatically raise their profits by improving their energy efficiency,” says
Jacquelin Ligot, Director of the Energy Efficiency Team. “Often it has greater
impact than adding a new production line, for example, or other more typical
means of improving profitability.
“Spurt Bank’s interest is in financing energy efficiency improvements – a new
revenue stream for the bank – that will raise their clients’ bottom line
profitability and thus their reliability as borrowers,” he adds.
Energy waste is a legacy of central planning in countries in transition to
market economies, particularly the CIS. It can take up to three times as much
energy to produce a unit of GDP in Russia in comparison with western Europe.
Energy efficiency is increasingly important in Russia because energy prices
are rising as subsidies are being phased out.
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