In addition to the hosts, the ceremony was attended by representatives of the Ministry of Regional Development and European Union Funds, the Ministry of Health, representatives of the County of Istria, the City of Rovinj, project partners and numerous guests.
The director of the "Martin Horvat" Special Hospital, Marinko Rade, thanked everyone for their support, and also looked back at how the hospital and the rooms used to look, which were difficult to heat and cool in the summer.
"We restored the facade, completely changed the windows, renewed the roofs, but what we lacked was money for the old power plants. Funds from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway appeared to help us with the energy transition," said the director.
The Sea for Heritage Energy Transition project, or SEAHEaT for short, promotes the use of thermal energy from the sea through heat pumps in energy renovation projects of buildings that represent cultural assets. Namely, Croatia has an extremely high density of such facilities, and their concentration is particularly pronounced in the coastal area.
In Croatia, there are 102,615 protected buildings within cultural and historical units, of which 1,950 are individually protected. 44,889 of them are located in the continental part of the country, 57,726 in coastal Croatia, and approximately 15,000 in the County of Istria, so the potential, but also the need, for the inclusion of this sector in the energy transition process is extremely great.
The SEAHEaT project as the holder was submitted by the Special Hospital for Orthopedics and Rehabilitation "Martin Horvat" from Rovinj, and the donor partner from Norway Åpenhet AS, the Istrian Regional Energy Agency IRENA and the Faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Shipbuilding and Mining-Geology-Petroleum of the University of Zagreb. The result is the aforementioned pilot installation of a heat pump system that uses seawater as an energy source, which was ceremonially inaugurated in Rovinj.
The project promotes the use of thermal energy from the sea through heat pumps in energy renovation projects of buildings that represent cultural assets, since the technology is minimally invasive, high-tech and highly efficient.
The project was financed by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Financial Mechanism for the period from 2014 to 2021 under the "Energy and Climate Change" Program.
