Green concepts

The Centre “Our Kids” in Kyiv conveys a spirit of care and responsibility for environmental stewardship and education. Its philosophy has found its first concrete expressions. “Our Kids” is the first energy-efficient Centre equipped with state-of-the-art technology in Ukraine and the first Centre that is fully independent of conventional energy and instead run completely on geothermal energy. It is the first geothermal heating system that has been officially approved by the Ukrainian authorities.

This system exploits the temperature difference between the earth's surface and the air. In winter, it draws heat from the relatively warmer ground. In summer, the system cools our buildings by extracting the buildings’ warmer air and conducting it into the relatively cooler ground. The system supplies renewable energy around the clock and emits hardly any greenhouse gases.

Our geothermal system consists of an external geothermal field (54 ground probes, 3 collector wells) and an internal heating station (3 pumps á 60 kW).        

In addition to providing effective heat insulation in our buildings, this geothermal system significantly impacted on our utility bills in 2013/2014. In comparison to previous years we have reduced our costs by more than a factor of 11,5. The price increases for municipal heating from our first year of operation in 2007 (206 UAH) until today (1,892 UAH) per Gcal and the growth of the used area in our Centre in October 2013 would have otherwise resulted in heating bills amounting 892,093 UAH in 2014/2015. Our new system enabled us to spend only 78,138 UAH in this season. Besides its obvious ecological benefits, this system helps us to finance a European standard in child care. This achievement was made possible thanks to the existence of an efficient Public Private Partnership. 

Our efforts to save energy consumption and decrease spending thereon we plan following improvements to our current system:

1. Installation of dual-zone counters to make use of differences in day and night tariffs.
2. Installation of automation technology to our heating station to optimize usage of our 54 probes and 3 pumps, thereby minimizing the environmental impact of our system and its electricity consumption.
3. Review of electricity storage mechanisms to further use day and night electricity tariff differences.

One of our main goals is to promote the utilization of renewable energy sources and efficient energy systems. We conduct and host conferences, seminars and workshops concerned with green technologies in our seminar and conference facility for specialists, decision makers, children and youth. To support these efforts we plan to make the following adjustments: 

1. Visualisation of the operation processes and results of our geothermal heating station for comparative analysis with other technologies.
2. Certification of our seminar and conference facility in accordance with the German standard DGNB.

Our green activities:

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