Belgrade airport’s new heating plant reduces environmental impact

• State of the art trigeneration system heating plant
• Switch from heavy fuels to natural gas enables 25% reduction of carbon footprint
• Important milestone towards VINCI Airport’s goal to achieve Net Zero on all its airports by 2050

A new energy plant for production and distribution of the heating and electric energy is put into operation at Nikola Tesla Airport. Using more environmentally efficient energy sources and switching from heavy fuels to natural gas, the new heating plant provides the benefit of reduction of environmental impact. This is another important step in deploying VINCI Airports environmental action plan in Belgrade, as the whole modernisation project puts great focus on sustainable business operations with the ultimate goal of reaching Zero Net emission by 2050.
 

The new plant has 44MW of total heating capacity and is equipped with a state-of-art trigeneration system for production and distribution of the heating, cooling and electric energy. The total heating capacity of the airport has been increased by 25%, thus covering all the needs for thermal energy not only of the current customers, but also of the future ones, as envisaged by the planned development of the airport, while the carbon footprint has been reduced by 25%, or equal to the reduction of green-house gasses by 3,000 tons of carbon-dioxide. The provided solutions and the choice of equipment helped achieving greater efficiency in the production and distribution of thermal energy. This system, together with the smart Building management system will ensure an optimized energy consumption dependent on the outdoor temperature.

“The new power plant for production and distribution of the heating and electric energy, in addition to decreased environmental impact on global warming and local air quality, provides great savings, both for the Airport and in terms of utilisation of available natural resources. Extensive works on airport modernisation and reconstruction include significant investment into environmentally sustainable business, realised to reach one step further in environmental impact reduction in terms of greenhouse gases, water and waste”, said Francois Berisot, CEO, Belgrade Airport, operator-company of Nikola Tesla Airport.

As a reminder, in December 2020, Belgrade Airport joined the Airport Carbon Accreditation Program (ACA) and Nikola Tesla Airport obtained a Level 1 certificate. It has been the first result in this area since the Airport joint VINCI Airports, thus receiving acknowledgement for the efforts of our company to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

This is only the beginning of implementation of the projects related to sustainable business operations at Belgrade airport as 1 MW solar power plant, two solid waste processing plants and a wastewater treatment plant are in its final phase.

In parallel with the works dedicated to sustainable development and business operations, there are ongoing extensive works on modernisation and reconstruction of Nikola Tesla Airport.

Thanks to its extensive worldwide airport management expertise, the parent company VINCI Airports will boost growth and create additional value for the passengers and partners of the main Serbian airport during the concession project.