The main areas of work of the Committee and adopted laws
The Committee, performing legislative functions, is called upon to ensure the preparation of bills in key areas.
In the construction sector, this includes urban development, architectural activities, tariff regulation and financial recovery of housing and communal services, road construction and road management. Legislative acts in this area, in combination with laws on the federal budget for the next year, form the legal basis for the implementation of the national project on affordable housing. Among the recently adopted laws, it is worth noting, first of all, the new Urban Development Code and the Law «On the Basics of Tariff Regulation for Public Utilities Organizations». Draft laws are coming: «On the Financial Recovery of Housing and Communal Services Organizations» and «On Highways and Road Activities».
In the industrial sphere, one of the main areas of the Committee's activity is the creation of legislative bases for reforming and developing the military-industrial complex. The solution to this problem will allow the creation of an effective structure of the complex and focus efforts on equipping the Armed Forces with the latest weapons. Deputies — members of the Committee — participate in the formation of the national industrial policy aimed at increasing the contribution of the manufacturing industry to economic growth.
The Committee is widely involved in the work on the implementation of the technical regulation reform. Currently, work is underway on the draft technical regulation «On Water Supply», which is of great importance for the activities of water utilities throughout the country. The Committee constantly monitors the progress of the preparation of technical regulations on the safe operation of buildings and structures, as well as on the safety of the building materials used. The Committee has repeatedly drawn the attention of the State Duma and the Government of the Russian Federation to the shortcomings of the Law «On Technical Regulation» associated with the failure to take into account the specifics of the construction industry. The Federal Law «On Technical Regulation» applies to relations associated with both the creation and operation of products, including buildings, structures and facilities, establishing the corresponding requirements for these processes in technical regulations.
However, in accordance with the same Law, state control (supervision) over compliance with the requirements of technical regulations is carried out exclusively at the stage of product circulation.
Thus, state construction supervision bodies do not have the right to exercise control (supervision) over the implementation of safety requirements in the construction industry at the stages of survey work, design, construction, and have such a right only at the stage of operation of a completed building or structure. Thus, there is no unified approach to the creation of a legal mechanism for ensuring safety during the construction and operation of capital construction projects.
The Federal Law «On Technical Regulation» established a seven-year transition period (until 2010), during which technical regulations must be adopted. Until they are adopted, the standards of GOSTs and SNiPs are valid only in the part that meets the objectives of technical regulations, i.e. only in relation to safety issues.
At the same time, it is not always possible to isolate from the content of SNiP or GOST those standards that are related to safety and separate them from those standards that are not related to safety. In case of disputes, only a court can resolve this, relying solely on expert opinions.
As a result, in the current legislative and regulatory framework, there are no indisputable and unambiguously interpreted requirements for the safety of construction projects, which gives rise to conflict situations between state construction supervision bodies and construction organizations.
The State Duma is preparing to consider amendments to the Federal Law “On Technical Regulation” in the second reading. The main content of the proposed changes is as follows:
• Technical regulations can be adopted both by federal laws and by government decrees.
• The division of technical regulations into general and special is abolished. This will allow federal laws to establish the most general safety standards for the main types of products and production processes. All technical standards containing complex tables, formulas, etc. can be transferred to special technical regulations approved by government decrees.
• Manufacturing processes and other processes may be regulated by technical regulations only if they directly affect product safety. In this case, the list of processes subject to regulation that affect product safety additionally includes design, construction, and installation processes. But at the same time, for example, labor protection issues that do not directly affect product safety are removed from the scope of technical regulation. This will allow, among other things, to partially remove serious legal contradictions between the Laws “On Technical Regulation,” “On Industrial Safety,” and the Labor Code.
• It is proposed to introduce into the system of documents used to confirm compliance with the requirements of technical regulations, along with standards and codes of practice. This will allow the current SNiPs and Design Rules to be preserved and used in the future.
The proposed changes will simplify the structure of technical legislation and facilitate the development of technical regulations. This approach is also consistent with foreign practice.
The place of intelligent technologies in the national project “Affordable Housing”
The need to implement high technologies in housing construction and in the existing housing stock in the context of the transition of the housing and utilities sector to market relations is increasing many times over. Currently, one of the factors holding back the implementation of the enormous energy-saving potential of the housing and utilities sector in Russia is the low level of equipment with systems for accounting, regulation and saving of consumed resources in both typical operating and new multi-apartment housing stock. Traditional technical solutions do not provide a comprehensive approach to solving the problem, are difficult to adapt to existing internal engineering systems of buildings, are often cumbersome and expensive, and therefore are not widely used. Qualitatively new solutions are required. It must be said that the solution to the problem of energy efficiency of housing begins with accounting and regulation of resource consumption and includes a set of measures from basic insulation of entrance doors to the transition to autonomous and local sources of heat supply for buildings and apartments, the introduction of new efficient materials and construction technologies and systems.
Thanks to the initiatives of local governments and high-tech manufacturers, a number of pilot projects have been implemented in the country to create high energy efficiency zones, and new developments in modern resource consumption metering and regulation systems are emerging. In particular, a software and hardware system has been developed using wireless sensor network technology and sensors for converting heat and power parameters, developed taking into account the capabilities of nano-microsystems engineering, allowing for the creation of standard systems for individual metering and regulation of resource consumption for multi-apartment standard housing stock, as well as a standard LED lighting system and lighting control system.
Pilot projects have been implemented to equip an apartment building with individual heat and water metering systems in Chelyabinsk and Yuzhnouralsk, to introduce energy-saving LED lamps in Kirovsk, Murmansk Oblast, and there is a positive experience of operating an energy-efficient residential complex in the Kurkino district of Moscow, and this list can be continued.
The system implemented in the Chelyabinsk Oblast covers hot water supply, cold water supply, gas supply, and heating. Its main characteristics:
• The apartment equipment is simplified as much as possible: compact and inexpensive measuring sensors are used that do not require special metrological measures or repairs (they are replaced upon expiration of their service life or failure).
• The system software provides the ability to have a multi-tariff mode for any type of resource.
• Readings from meters are taken without the participation of the resident and without entering the apartment (the ability to read the readings from the meter directly at the place of its installation is not mandatory).
• To simplify and reduce the cost of installation, as well as to ensure electromagnetic compatibility with apartment electrical appliances, wireless communication with characteristics that are safe for humans is used between the metering system devices.
• The number of commercial metering devices in the system is reduced to a minimum: one commercial meter for each resource per house (section), at the boundary of balance sheet responsibility.
• The apartment metering system for utilities remains operational during a power outage.
• All processing of accounting data (calculation of per-apartment consumption, calculation of consumption of common areas, redistribution of consumption) occurs in the house controller, with subsequent export of data via digital channels to the servers of organizations responsible for calculating payments.
• The system includes elements for ensuring energy consumption management in common areas (light sensors, presence sensors, floor and central control units).
• The system provides the ability to limit the supply of electricity to non-paying apartments.
• The system provides the ability to redistribute heat consumption metering from apartments located in the corners of the building, on the upper and lower floors, which are the heat shield for the entire building, to apartments located in the middle part of the building.
• The system provides control over unauthorized access and diagnostics of element failures, with subsequent adaptation to changing conditions, which ensures high viability in housing and communal services.
The task of doubling the volume of housing construction is faced with resource constraints in the supply of electricity and heat to new microdistricts. Therefore, the implementation of the national housing project stimulates the transition to energy- and resource-saving technologies in the field of urban heat supply.
Heat supply is the most energy-intensive sector of the country's economy, almost 45% of all energy consumed is spent on its needs. Thermal energy can be produced in a combined heat and power plant, in a block or house boiler room, and finally, in an apartment. The efficiency of energy use will be different everywhere.
In Russia, about 70% of heat is produced by centralized sources, including 30% at several hundred thermal power plants and 40% at 70 thousand boiler houses, most of which do not meet modern energy saving requirements. Energy and water losses during their transportation are especially high. The length of heating networks is almost 200 thousand km, of which more than 40 thousand km are subject to immediate replacement or decommissioning. The technical level of heating networks in Russia remains at the level of the 1960s.
In those same years, developed countries abandoned the use of extended heating networks, switching to local heat sources based on the principle of “one house – one boiler room”. As a result, fuel consumption for heating a unit of area in developed northern countries (Sweden, Canada, Norway) is today almost three times less than in Russia.
Innovative development of the heat economy requires modernization of energy equipment along the entire chain from energy production to its consumption. For this purpose, automatic domestic gas boilers are used, corrosion-resistant, with a service life of more than 100 years, metal-plastic pipes and shut-off valves, aluminum radiators-convectors and, of course, water and heat consumption meters.
Such technological solutions can and should be used in the construction of millions of square meters of housing in accordance with the priority National Project “Affordable and Comfortable Housing for Citizens of Russia”. Comfortable housing is always energy-saturated and energy-efficient housing.
For the mass application of modern technologies in urban heating, it is necessary to improve the legislative framework. Here, the development and adoption of technical regulations in the field of construction and operation of buildings, structures and public infrastructure systems is of primary importance. The regulations must establish requirements for the energy efficiency of buildings, minimization of heat loss through walls, roofs, windows. The examination of design documentation for construction for compliance with technical regulations must also take into account energy efficiency requirements. For this purpose, energy efficiency issues must be included in the purposes of adopting technical regulations. Today, the Law «On Technical Regulation» does not provide for this.
This example shows that the implementation of the national housing project requires large-scale implementation of innovative technologies in the field of construction and housing and communal services.
Housing and communal services reform
The key problem of the industry was and remains low economic efficiency, behind which there is low labor productivity, extremely high energy and resource consumption, and a weak level of management. The transition of the industry to market conditions of management is not an end in itself, but the only direction for increasing its efficiency and development. The complexity of the reform is aggravated by the initial conditions: this is the huge accounts payable of housing and communal services organizations (over 300 billion rubles), the extreme wear of utility systems (the need for major repairs of the housing stock is estimated at trillions of rubles).
The peculiarity of the current stage of reform is that several processes are taking place simultaneously: institutional, related to the demonopolization of housing and communal infrastructure management, changes in the organizational and legal forms of housing and communal services organizations, and the redistribution of service markets; organizational, related to the redistribution of powers in relation to housing and communal services between levels of government, the withdrawal of local governments from managing the economic activities of enterprises, and the transition to new forms of contractual relations (lease, concessions, trust management). In addition, a parallel reform of local government and energy monopolies is underway, which directly affects the stability of the housing and communal services sector.
The report to the Presidium of the State Council of January 19, 2007 states: “The main problem with the implementation of the existing concept of reforming the housing and utilities sector is that, although theoretically correct, it is not motivated by the interests of the participants. Until recently, neither municipal authorities, nor homeowners, nor enterprises in the sector had either the desire or the ability to promote market reforms in the housing and utilities sector.”
Understanding the goal of market reforms as, first of all, a sharp increase in the economic efficiency of this sector, it is necessary to determine the reason for the absence of these motives. Housing and communal services cannot be economically efficient without energy conservation, energy conservation is impossible without instrumental metering of resource consumption.
Is there a solution to this problem? We believe that there is, moreover, what the planned economy could not solve, the market is able to achieve in a short time.
A fundamental change in position is required, namely: the purchase and sale of resources without measurements should become economically and administratively unprofitable, it is necessary to establish rules for “coercion” to comply with the specified norm — an increase in tariffs for the purchase and sale of resources without measuring their consumption, and also to provide a tool to attract funds to equip consumers with metering devices. Such a tool can be the institution of energy service (billing) companies. These companies install at their own expense, own and operate all types of meters, guarantee the quality of measurements at any time, prepare invoices for payment of resources, reimburse their costs through regular payments of consumers of billing services. The initiators of the creation of billing companies can be manufacturers of measuring devices interested in expanding sales markets.
To use such a tool, it will be necessary to amend the legislation on energy saving, tariff regulation, as well as housing legislation in terms of including energy service (billing) services in the composition of either utilities or housing services.
During the transition period (until the established deadline, after which the unmetered purchase and sale of energy resources will be limited), it is advisable to provide state support to the population in equipping the housing stock with metering devices.
It is necessary to understand that the entire chain of motivations for energy conservation, in particular, and increasing economic efficiency in general in the production, distribution and consumption of energy resources begins with the consumer.
Therefore, energy saving in the housing sector should become the most important, detailed direction of reforming the housing and communal services.
The arrival of private business in the housing and utilities sector is objectively predetermined. The annual volume of works and services in the housing and utilities sector is currently estimated at 1.2 trillion rubles. This is a stable financial flow, and the demand for housing and utilities services is stable. Not all sub-sectors are unprofitable, and not all housing and utilities organizations are bankrupt. Electricity and gas supply are already profitable today. It is noteworthy that these sub-sectors have the largest share of non-state legal entities. There are many profitable organizations in the water supply and heat supply, and public utilities sectors. Considering the losses and costs paid by the consumer, which reach 30-40% of the volume of utilities, effective managers are able not only to eliminate losses, but also to organize a sustainable profitable business. And there are such examples. The state is interested in attracting private investment to this sector of the economy. What needs to be resolved? It is obvious that the clearer the “rules of the game” in the relationship between government and business, the less dependence on the decisions of officials, the lower the risk, the more attractive the conditions for investment. In the sphere of public utilities, business must have a long-term tariff perspective, rules of interaction with the authorities in relation to public property, which are public infrastructure facilities, and, of course, have obligations and responsibilities to consumers.
These issues are regulated by federal laws «On concession agreements», «On the principles of regulation of tariffs of public utility organizations», the Housing Code and a significant number of regulatory acts of the Government of the Russian Federation. In addition, state support for business should be provided in terms of co-financing the modernization of housing and communal services facilities, restructuring accumulated debts, and training specialists.
The state should also establish requirements for the professional qualities of operators of investment projects in the housing and communal services sector, the financial solvency of organizations offering management services, especially if we are talking about extra-budgetary investment in the development of public utility infrastructure.
There are examples of successful projects by private companies in Russia. In the field of water supply, these are: Novogorprikamye, Rosvodokanal OJSC, Eurasian Water Partnership. In the field of heat supply: Russian Communal Systems OJSC, Communal Energy Systems. This list can be continued. |
