Bringing back the blue sky to Ulan Bator

Mongolia is traditionally called the "Land of Blue Sky". However, that certainly cannot be said for the coldest capital of the world, Ulan Bator. It is covered in a blanket of smog, especially in winter, when temperatures can fall below minus 30 degrees centigrade for months at a time.

The city’s three heating and energy plants run at full capacity to heat the old, decaying concrete buildings. In the around 150,000 traditional dwellings known as yurts, people fuel their hearths with anything they can find.

Saving energy would not only save money, but it would also take a good deal of smog out of the air. Germany's federal association for technical cooperation, the GTZ, is currently running a program in Ulan Bator which will make many of the decrepit buildings energy-efficient.

Self-sustaining solutions

"We need to consider heaters and warm water," explains Ruth Erlbeck, the head of the program. "Ulan Bator is having difficulty providing heating and energy. The heating and power plants are hardly able to deliver heating to residents. So we decided to strive for self-sustaining solutions."

One of the solutions is the so-called Mongolian-German eco-city, an area comprising 72 hectares and 2,200 apartments, schools, parks and stores. Currently, there are only two eco-buildings, but construction workers are working round the clock to set up the next five. The eco-buildings will use solar energy, and Ulan Bator is just about the perfect place for that, with its average of 2,800 annual hours of sunlight.

A further environmental-friendly aspect of these buildings is water usage, Erlbeck explains. "We will recycle dirty water and re-use it in toilets, washing machines and for watering the parks to keep them nice and green."

Renovating Soviet-style apartments to save energy

Around 250,000 people are cramped into 60,000 apartments – many of which are in poorly built, poorly-insulated Soviet-style buildings from the communist period. Now they are falling apart but the GTZ has shown that they do not have to be torn down.

In 2007, they took one of the city's concrete buildings, which was built in 1982 and had around 30 apartments, and renovated it. GTZ's Hendrik Becker gained a lot of experience with this kind of renovation in the former East Germany, which he is now applying to Ulan Bator.

"The building was fully renovated with in three months," he says. "We added new heating and repaired the roof. We sealed holes and leaks and laid new water and sewage pipes. We did just about everything we would have done in a renovation in Germany."

The renovation reduced energy use in the building by almost 70 percent. According to GTZ's calculations, one of Ulan Bator's energy plants could be completely shut down if all of these old buildings were renovated. This would cost around 100 euros per square meter, which would be three to four times cheaper than constructing new buildings.

More and more people have been showing interest in GTZ renovations. But it will take a lot of time and work until the sky over Ulan Bator is blue again.

Author: Matthias von Hein / sb
Editor: Anne Thomas