Almost two thirds of citizens want to independently produce electricity from renewable sources, while 45% of them are interested in state subsidies, according to a survey by the Center for Environmental Improvement on the situation, needs and attitudes of Serbian citizens in the field of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.
Also, more than one third of the respondents are not at all familiar with state subsidies for the introduction of renewable energy sources in households.
Renewable energy sources for water heating or cooling are used by only 3.8 percent of households, mostly solar energy, while geothermal energy is used by less than one percent of respondents.
Citizens of Serbia most often use their own central heating for heating, 32.5 percent of them, district heating through heating plants (31.7 percent) and electrical appliances (15.7 percent). Solid fuel stoves are still a very present type of heating (almost 10 percent) and are almost five times more represented in the countryside than in the city, the research showed.
When we exclude respondents who use district heating through heating plants, the energy sources most used for domestic heating are electricity (41.5 percent) and wood (29.3 percent), followed by gas (12.9 percent), wood biomass (12.3 percent) and coal (3.4 percent), while only 0.6 percent of households use energy obtained from renewable sources for heating.
Electricity is used three times more in cities than in rural areas, where the use of firewood predominates, while coal as a heating energy source is much more present in rural areas than in the city, mostly in Southern and Eastern Serbia.
Over 50 percent of respondents who live in a house state the lack of money as a reason why they did not apply some of the energy efficiency measures, and among respondents who live in an apartment in the house that percentage is 38.5 percent, while for those who live in an apartment building it is only 14.2 percent.
The research showed that there is a great interest of citizens to improve the energy efficiency of their households, to get involved in the production of electricity from renewable energy sources, as well as to have a high awareness of the seriousness of the challenges of climate change.
The research was conducted in August 2021 and involved a total of 504 respondents from all over Serbia, and the project “Energy of Change” is implemented by the Center for Environmental Improvement in cooperation with the association “Climate 101”, within the project of the Belgrade Open School “Green Incubator” with the financial support of the EU and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Danas reports.
