People against the monopolist! Heat tariffs are being doubled in Yekaterinburg

Elena Petrova, Tatyana Sviridova

Spring has come to Yekaterinburg, but the scandal over new heating tariffs has not only not died down, but has moved to a new level.

Local heat supplier PAO T Plus sent a draft agreement to management companies and homeowners associations. Apparently, more than a dozen lawyers of the holding, which is represented throughout the country, worked on the agreement for a long time. On 39 pages, the homeowners association and management company explained that a new tariff calculation system will be introduced in the capital of the Urals from the winter of 2025-2026.

At first, the HOA where Elena works did not understand why they should be "connected" to the "alternative boiler room" and gave the document to their lawyer to study. In fact, this is not a boiler room at all.

— On January 20, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed the inclusion of the city of Yekaterinburg in this experiment, and the resource provider began sending us new contracts. We did not immediately understand why we started to spin this story, asking everyone questions. Management companies, homeowners associations. It turned out that only a few were able to answer. Many still do not believe that this will happen, — Elena told Novye Izvestia.

Two months later, another letter was sent from Yekaterinburg to Moscow - addressed to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. 300 Yekaterinburg HOAs, half of the 600 registered in the city, and homeowners demanded that the Prime Minister cancel the decision. 1,985 people and organizations signed the document. But this number could have been higher.

"I haven't heard about it yet. Where can I sign the document?" the chairman of the Tallinn HOA answered Novye Izvestia over the phone when asked what he knew about the letter.

The city authorities actually presented the HOAs as representatives of the homeowners with a fait accompli, says Elena. The decision to join the pilot project was made in October 2024. At the same time, the city authorities, as expected, held public hearings, which in fact turned out to be practically secret.

— There were public hearings, which were attended by about 100 people, about whom the city basically did not know, no one knew. After which they submitted a petition to the governor, and he submitted a petition to Mishustin.

— Who made this decision? Who initiated it — the heat suppliers?

— It's all hidden, I think, by heat suppliers, because there's never enough money. And then the city authorities followed their lead. They didn't take the more difficult path, but chose the easiest one — raise the tariffs, and the townspeople will pay. But the thing is, the townspeople learned about it from us.

The goal, as always, was noble — let's raise money and give it to a resource company. In the future, it will build new boiler houses and repair heating networks. However, none of the HOAs or city residents saw these plans. There would have been many questions. For example, there are seven districts in Yekaterinburg. Which one will be done first? What are they planning to reconstruct and in what time frame? Residents already have negative experiences:

— We had the same thing with the special vehicle depot, those who take out the garbage. We were promised that the tariffs would be raised, and then a new waste processing plant would be built. The tariffs were raised, they are in effect. There is no plant, they refer to the fact that the neighboring city does not give permission to build a plant. Everything is as usual.

Understanding how much the tariffs will go up is a whole science even for a lawyer. There are dozens of documents on the city hall website, but not a word about the price of heat. The HOA spent two months sorting this out, but finally figured it out. The increase was 94%!

" Currently, the heating tariff in Yekaterinburg is 2482 rubles/Gcal. After the introduction of the "price zone", the tariff is planned to be 4811 rubles/Gcal, posted on the REC website from 20.12.2024 - an increase of +94% for the population! And given the high share of "heating and hot water" items in the cold Ural region (up to 50% of the receipt for seven months of the heating season) - an increase in these expenses by at least two times - will fall as an unbearable burden on Ural pensioners, disabled people, large families, young families with children, i.e. on the majority of the population," the city residents write in their appeal to the authorities.

In addition to the price, the biggest complaints about the new contract are the significant fines. For example, the resource company introduces a penalty for "overheating" the house. At -10 degrees, the temperature at the entrance to the house should be 70 degrees, and at the exit - 50. If the house returns heat of 56 degrees, the HOA will pay a fine.

— If the house returns water warmer than it should, then either it was supplied incorrectly, for example, my house is well insulated, but the water was supplied incorrectly, at the wrong temperature. This is a common situation in the spring, when it starts to get warmer, the temperature jumps, the equipment can't keep up, it's very hot in our apartments. All the windows in the house are open. It turns out that I have to pay for every gigacalorie that was supplied to me, and also pay a penalty.

Now the mayor's office assures that the price increase will happen once a year and the authorities will closely monitor it. But there is a certain deceit here, Elena believes:

— In December 2024, an order was issued signed by former Governor Kuyvashov that some utilities in the Sverdlovsk region could be increased by 13.5% to 23% . I think they will review them once a year, but even once a year, a 20% increase for pensioners will be very significant.

Some pensioners who live in this house receive 15 thousand rubles a month, says Elena. For them, even five thousand a month for heating, as now, is an unbearable burden. And what will they do when a bill for ten thousand arrives?

— Can you imagine, there are 215 apartments in the building, and 80 of them can’t pay. And what will the utility company do? This is leading to discord, which will not improve the situation with the receipt of money. They will probably create a collection department that will knock out debts, and the money will go not to restoring the networks, but to paying for this hole.

The fact that PAO T Plus lobbies the idea of ​​raising tariffs at all meetings between business and the government has long been known, says Konstantin Krokhin, head of the Housing Union of Moscow and member of the Housing and Utilities Committee of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation. At the same time, this is not the first resource company to raise tariffs. A similar situation occurred in Moscow several years ago.

The notorious price zone is not a country divided into territories and painted in different colors in a presentation. It is tied to a specific energy producer, which has an approved tariff in accordance with its costs.

— In Yekaterinburg, this is not a problem of price zones, because when it is necessary to transfer, say, to increase the tariff, they cannot increase it just like that, because there is a federal index that cannot be exceeded, as it was in New Moscow in New Vatutinki. They simply changed the heat and water supply company. They simply took one gasket, terminated the contract with it, under which the developer transferred the equipment, transferred it to a new company, and it set new tariffs, because it is, as it were, in a different price zone, because it is a different manufacturer, — the lawyer says about the well-known practice of switching to new tariffs.

The situation with utility networks is dire in many regions and cities. Everyone remembers the cold winter of 2023-2024, when pipes in the Moscow region were breaking like threads. Only mild weather saved from a repeat of the collapse this year, says Konstantin Krokhin.

Yekaterinburg is unlucky in this regard. Winter here lasts seven months a year, and the climate is sharply continental. The wear and tear of networks exceeded 70% five years ago, the figure was cited by those responsible for the Ural capital in T Plus in 2019.

Five winters later, the situation only worsened.

— Today, the state, represented by officials and the Ministry of Construction or development institutes such as DOM.RF, is avoiding responsibility in terms of decision-making and planning, saying that this should be done either by homeowners, if we are talking about apartment buildings, or by heating engineers. We have come to the conclusion that the Soviet model of creating cities and servicing them does not work, because the USSR subsidized living in unfavorable places. That is why Yekaterinburg “shot”. And then there will be Komi, Arkhangelsk, — the expert lists the “hot spots”.

Yekaterinburg residents themselves told Novye Izvestia that it is simply impossible to meet the resource company's requirements. According to people, every degree of heat brings colossal profits to the resource company. It is equally impossible to heat a five-story Khrushchev-era building, a nine-story brick house, and modern high-rises. One pipe cannot supply different pressure to each of these buildings. And the owners must pay for this, as well as for the heat losses that inevitably arise for the resource company.

These are the delights of central heating, says Konstantin Krokhin. It was only in the USSR and remains in Russia. All other former Soviet republics are gradually switching to boiler rooms in every residential complex. They dream of the same in Yekaterinburg.

But then companies like T Plus, Gazprom and others need to invest in networks, and that's trillions of rubles. In the 2000s and 2010s, the country was bulging with gas and oil dollars. Some, like a resource company in the Urals, were buying up assets all over the country. Others, like Gazprom, were investing in businesses far removed from their core business, says Valery Andriano . There was a lot of money, and nowhere to put it:

— A strategy of further vertical integration has emerged. VINKs are built on the principle from geological exploration to production of oil products. Why not extend this chain further and buy up electric power enterprises that are ready and that exist? It is clear that this sphere was largely unfamiliar and extremely complex. The consequences of the not entirely successful reforms that were carried out during Chubais's time are being felt.

The consequences of the buyout are now beginning to show. The companies do not have the money for large-scale investments, and the state is in every way refusing to transfer the networks into its ownership.

— We are a northern country, and this needs to be addressed, because some regions need to be removed from centralized heating, like Kaliningrad. Southern regions need to be removed. The way out of this situation is simple — the Soviet heating model does not work. Either the Soviet system will be recreated, but this requires resources, financial, investment, or it must change, — says Konstantin Krokhin.

In Yekaterinburg, they don't really believe that Moscow will help them. They have formulated their minimum task simply: we want to get out of this "experiment". At most, residents are asking to transfer the networks to the city administration. Elena says:

— I wanted to get through to them, to show that not everything is so smooth. There are no cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg in this project. Of the large ones, only Novosibirsk is there, if I remember correctly. Mostly small cities. I can only sympathize with them. If the state is interested in preserving the city, it should participate in this.

There is also a plan B - to build mini-boiler houses in each of the 8 thousand houses in Yekaterinburg. Despite the big ambition, this may be cheaper than driving hot water across the entire city and losing heat at every intersection. But then the assets of resource companies will turn from a carriage into a pumpkin, and the state will lose taxes. And who will go for it?