
29 Nov Interview with Bojan Kumer, Minister of Infrastructure, Republic of Slovenia
Slovenia acts as a gateway between Europe, the Adriatic Sea and the Balkans. Its energy and electricity infrastructure is among the strongest in the region, with new investment announced last year with the launch of the Next Generation EU funds. What were the major challenges your ministry has had to face over the past years? Which achievements would you highlight that the ministry has faced over the course of the pandemic? And as the new Minister of Infrastructure, could you tell us a little bit about your agenda in the upcoming months?
I would start by mentioning that this mechanism for recovery and resilience is of key importance for us and it is the only source of finance of energy infrastructure investments. Slovenia received $1.8 billion in direct funds and $700 million in loans from the EU funds within this Next Generation mechanism. It is extremely important for us.
Our main priorities of all these investments are green transition, digitalization and, of course, recovery after the Covid virus crisis. Within green transition, we are focusing on multiple priorities. This is increasing the share of renewable sources of energy, sustainable mobility and upgrading the distribution network. We do have a very good distribution network. Nevertheless, it is not provided to us to have a balanced implementation of these first renewable sources of energy, especially considering that the transport sector, traffic, is the biggest consumer in Slovenia. We need to decarbonize that sector, which means that we need to make sure it is “greener” because most of this sector is going to shift to electricity.
Slovenia had deficiency over the last ten years. Now we have to accelerate our endeavors to compensate for lagging behind, in order for us to catch up with the objectives of renewable sources of energy by 2030 and 2040. This is why these funds are important for us.
Slovenia’s Recovery and Resilience Plan is the framework in which the NextGen EU funds have been spent in your country. What have been the key areas of infrastructure and energy spending under Slovenia’s Recovery and Resilience Plan? In what ways is the Connecting Europe Facility contributing to enhancing Slovenia’s capacities? Which major projects have been enabled by these funds?
There are three projects that I wish to speak about. One project is our national project, which is about encouraging efficient energy in all buildings across the country, especially in public buildings. We can generate huge savings of electrical energy. Again, we are lagging behind the goals of renovation, talking about energy efficiency in all public buildings. It is a big project of a number of smaller projects within this major goal.
The second group of projects is renewable sources of energy. This is where we have district heating systems and cooling, and the production of electrical energy in individual households, in individual buildings. Slovenia set up a rather ambitious objective 13 years ago for 2020. While in 2020, our objective is the least ambitious for 2030: only 2% is planned, referring to renewable sources of energy in the upcoming ten years, from 25% of gross consumption of final energy to 27%. We need numerous projects of renewable energy in order to catch up with the lagging behind of the objective that had been set up, previously, 13 years ago. We know that Green Deal and Fit for 55 are coming. We are not reaching these objectives yet and we will have to increase our endeavors to follow them.
Slovenia already paid a financial compensation for not reaching this objective in 2020, in 2021, and we are going to have to pay for 2022 as well. We know that we will be in the same situation in 2023. We do not wish to keep paying that for 2024 and 2025. That is why we need to establish, if not an excellent, at least a sufficient regulatory environment.
The third group of projects refers to upgrading our distribution network, especially in low voltage, in order for us to be able to implement the first two projects (talking about the grid) so that we can connect to the grid. I’m not only referring to solar plants but also heat pumps, so that people can be enabled to move, with this transition, from heating using natural gas, to more environmentally acceptable solutions.
The Transport Development Strategy until 2030 serves as the main reference for future developments in the transport sector. It highlights, among other things, Slovenia’s position as a node between various countries, and, as such, its importance in the transport of goods via road and rail. What major plans are in place to develop the road and rail network in the country? How has Slovenia worked to take advantage of its geographic position? How is the Port of Koper contributing to your development strategy?
Slovenia has a very good geographical position, which is, at the same time, a very good position energy-wise and transport-wise because the transport flows east to the west. This is a crossroad between the north and south as well. At a European level, it has been recognized that we have this Baltic-Adriatic corridor, east and west, and the north and south corridor, Salzburg-Ljubljana-Zagreb-Belgrade-Skopje-Thessaloniki.
The same goes for railway corridors, considering that, in the past, as per our highways, we covered needs very well; that is why we have a very high consumption of transport. Again, we are lagging behind, working on our rail corridors. We are lagging behind with the legislation which would enable more efficient placement of railway corridors into space, and their upgrading equally so. At the same time, we are considering that, in the long term, we will be able to increase flow of rail corridors. We will have two tracks rather than one track rail, and higher speed will be ensured as well.
So higher speed, better flow of transport, and we’ll have the crossing points with transport points where we can generate inter-modality in the mobility. In this way, in the future, we can actually resolve two different things at the same time: sustainability and efficient mobility.
We have a very big investment, which is one of the biggest bottlenecks in this part of Europe, which is the Divaca-Koper railway line track. Again, with consideration into the future in the long-term, all the way to Ljubljana, we tend to upgrade the railway corridor, so that our window into the world, which is the Port of Koper, will be utilized better, not only for Slovenia, but for all hinterland countries; all the way to Ukraine, actually all the way to the border with Russia, we can feel the efficiency of the Port of Koper. The pressure of the hinterland countries is even bigger perhaps than our national interest. But we are aware of the fact that this is necessary as well. In this way, we are going to ensure the standards of TNT network, which Europe is helping with these European direct funds.
Last year, Slovenia announced it would build a second nuclear reactor. More recently, it announced a deal with Sonatrach to procure gas from Algeria. The country is also heavily invested in renewables, with around 30% of its capacity coming from hydropower generation. How will a second nuclear reactor complement your existing nuclear capacity? What timeline are you aiming for in terms of completing this project?
We issued an energy permit for the called Block-2 of our nuclear power plant. The previous leadership of the ministry did that. It was smart for them to do it, because this is the first point for placing this project. That was the number one step.
Slovenia is one of the smallest nuclear countries in the world. The first block was still built in Yugoslavia because Yugoslavia was nevertheless a big country, while the construction of a nuclear plant in a small country is extremely rare, especially in democracies. This is actually of very big public interest and we need to operate in transparency. In the process of finding location placement of the project, we need to consider all aspects. This truly is a long-term difficult process, and it has only initiated, so that, within three to four years, we reach a point, in 2027 at the latest, when Slovenia will have to decide whether the second block will find a location or not.
When finding the location and placement in space, we have a preparation: economic, technical and energy analysis, all kinds of analysis, so that we can reach the so-called final investment decision. Once these two processes are completed, within four or five years, because we are a democratic state, we decided that it is an obligation of our government to check through a referendum what the population decide. We are going to verify the decision with the population, whether this is what Slovenia wants, because we want a transparent decision to be made. Whatever decision ends up being in the referendum, we intend to respect it.
We are not placing all the cards in one source. We want to utilize all the other possibilities. We are looking into renewable sources of energy predominantly, and this is where we really want to be aggressive with solar, because Slovenia, again, over the last four or five years is lagging behind in that sector. We truly want, for at least every tenth roof, to be equipped, within four years, with solar panels.
We wish to have bigger utility scale solar plants. We are really lagging behind with a big deficiency there. We drafted multiple documents for a long-term plan for digitalization of renewable sources of energy. Further on, there are two ongoing projects of locations, where we identify all the possible places where utility solar plants can be installed and plugged in. At the same time, we have nearby land enabling that: we opened up a Slovenian map over land and network; we opened it up for public, for investors, so that there would be no obstacles for connectivity. Because we believe and we do have signals that, at the moment, there is no problem in money. Slovenia has a problem in finding location of these projects, especially for energy infrastructure; so placement in space. This is where we truly need to take big steps into the future.
We extend our words of gratitude to the European Commission, because in 2020 the European Commission understood that Slovenia has one of the most complicated legislations for environment, talking about locations — the placement of any kind of energy project in space — because we need to know how to positively discern a clean source and a fossil source in space. This is when we tasked ourselves with some kind of an action plan to be more rapid in positive discerning, to look at the sources that we want, so that the process of finding a location is sped up, and connectivity on the grid on the network is faster compared to other projects.
We brought all this into the National Energy Climate Plan (NECP), where we needed to perform an environmental audit. It’s truly the most important energy and environmental plan, in other words, strategy, at the national level, for us. In this plan, at the time, I was the State Secretary, so I am aware of what this plan is about. The democratic process of adopting that plan lasted for two years; there were more than 1,300 activities along the way that we needed to tick off.
Now, we have already started with an amendment to the plan, which is again conditioned in the European context. It has to be adopted on the 30th of June, 2024 because it is linked to the utilization of European funds. At the time when we were adopting this plan, many people underestimated its importance. Today, this is the core document of Slovenian energy environmental policies. In this document, we set up for ourselves that Slovenia is defined as a nuclear country and we wish to remain a nuclear state, but we have not decided yet to build Block 2 because we are still allowing the possibility of new more modern technologies, like small modular reactors (because we are a small economy) and we will perhaps be looking into the possibilities of introducing new technologies that will be easier to find locations for in space, and they are also more acceptable for our economy and for our energy network.
In early September, the second phase of the smart grid (SINCRO.GRID) between Slovenia and Croatia was completed. By 2027, this grid could be expanded to Austria, pending project approval. Can you tell us more about the smart grid developed between your country and Croatia? How has SINCRO.GRID been funded? What are the benefits or downsides of this approach? To what extent are they also stimulating opportunities to develop such new technologies?
SINCRO.GRID is truly an example of a very good project because this is an innovative integration of already established technologies with an upgrading of all technologies that are on the rise. The energy grids are very conservatively built. We need to implement the new technologies on a timely basis on the grid so that we increase robustness of the network, of the grid and reliability of the grid. At the same time, it enables the change of the character of the grid, so this is no longer a grid where we have two or three production sources and then one million consumers and the electricity is running from the production spot to the final consumer. The grid has to be active in character where the energy is constantly flowing both ways by the second. It is safe, it generates less losses and it still ensures reliability, so the grid is not vulnerable.
This means that the vision of building an energy grid, 100 years ago, is now changing in its core. SINCRO.GRID is a project enabling that, so that slowly the grid will shift, moving from a passive into an active grid, meaning that we do not need to change the hardware of the grid, but we can use software solutions to switch and to connect more dispersed renewable sources of energy. In this way, the existent energy infrastructure can be better utilized. We increase efficiency, we improve quality, we improve the carbon footprint of the energy infrastructure, and, at the same time, using less money we can do more, which is not necessarily in the interest of everyone, but it is in our interest as a state, where the energy infrastructure we have is not bad but one we wish to utilize better. For example, with the road, once it’s built, it makes no difference if 100 cars pass through or 1,000 cars pass through every minute. The objective is that we have the same road with the permanent transport of electrons, of electrical energy.
In 2020, Slovenia adopted the integrated NECP. With transport accounting for around 42% of the country’s CO2 emissions in 2018, your ministry has the potential to change a lot of things. How is the Ministry of Infrastructure pushing for sustainable mobility in Slovenia? Beyond the transport sector, what are the priority targets and programs of your ministry in terms of sustainability? What new reforms are you pushing for?
I have already mentioned before, that, in 2020, we adopted the NECP, which was actually a moment of truth for Slovenia. We checked the status where we were and saw that we wouldn’t be able to reach certain objectives. At the same time, we needed to address these issues in public, to reach the public.
There are about five dimensions of the NECP, and Slovenia has set up not so ambitious objectives in renewables. There are other dimensions where we are ambitious above average: we have above average objectives in efficient energy use; we are one of the best on internal market and international connectivity of transmission grid; we have a lot of funds we intend for the development of innovation, which, again, SINCRO.GRID comes to play a green switch in these projects that are not just pilot projects; they are demonstration projects, and then there will be followed by more such projects. In this plan, they identified the biggest consumer, which is transport, and also the biggest polluter of CO2 emissions, which is again transport (though partially also the energy sector).
After two years of observations, we see that we still have an increase of CO2 emissions but not so rapidly anymore. Nevertheless, with renewing the plan, we need to turn this trend down. Because we are on the crossroads of north-south-east-west, with transport flows from insufficient engagement of public passenger transport of railways infrastructure, this means that Slovenia will need to change our course almost by 180 degrees, which we can’t reach from one year to the next. We are talking about changing habits and we need to run multiple activities. We are considering all these things when we are changing this plan.
We know now that we need to be more ambitious in many objectives, because Europe is more ambitious — we are located on a very ambitious continent — and, at the same time, the geostrategic Ukraine-Russian war has truly changed the perspective, not the long-term one, but the short-term one, and, in infrastructure, it’s very difficult to make any rapid changes on the short-term.
We are working on three levels: the measures for short-term, for mid-term and long-term. Short-term is this upcoming winter, to live through it, mid-term for the next winter next year, and the long-term for the end of the mandate so that we can get another one. This crisis situation is not only the crisis abroad; there are crises situations within the Balkan countries, because citizens are not aware of the fact that, sometimes, life is too good for us and we are boiling in our own comfort. We need to generate changes within every individual, within the communities and, eventually, at the level of the whole country. But unless we succeed in the short-term and the long-term, then we hope somebody else will continue the vision that we set up.
Do you have any final comments for the readers of the Foreign Policy magazine?
Europe is truly at a breaking point, recognizing and realizing that it needs to take more rapid decisions about the long-term future. Europe has many good sectors: the energy sector is undoubtedly a good one where, over decades, we built a well-functioning one. The energy sector reached a most important key point, but what was in place a year ago is no longer valid; things have to be changed.
We received more than 50% energy from the east and we were counting on it; it was just taken for granted and this is what caused us to fall asleep; we were even lazy. We did not need to be ambitious because we were in the comfort zone. The same goes for Slovenia. It is a pity that the crisis needed to strike so that we became aware or more conscious of the fact that this is no joke anymore. In other words that it was confirmed that vision was right but we did not take it seriously.
Now, we need to take those steps more rapidly so that we reach the final vision, and the other continents will follow us in that. It is an opportunity. It is very challenging because a lot of things must happen now. In the coming years, we have to set up many policies and many measures. We established many goals, but we did not take it so seriously and the crisis came and woke us. But we have still time to set it correctly while having the right level of democracy.
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