Ahead of Independence Day, it is customary to take stock, look at what has been done and plan the next steps. This year, the country celebrates 29 years of its independence. I say, over the past five years the Regional Gas Company has made many more transformations in the gas industry than in 24 years before them.
We understand that the future of the gas market lies in customers who need quality service. That is why the Regional Gas Company has created and is developing such a service ecosystem that is affordable and convenient for our clients. Now we offer our clients a single service brand 104.ua that consolidates all communication channels and all service tools. 104.ua, a one-stop shop service for natural gas consumers, provides 8 million contacts with customers every month. This is exactly the number of residential consumers connected to the networks of DSOs operating under the RGC brand.
The operating network of customer centers — 104.ua Client Space — is the largest one in the field of energy and utilities. Over the last three years, we have deployed a network of 120 client spaces throughout Ukraine. These are the spaces where innovative technologies allow any visitor to address all gas delivery issues in a comfortable environment and master online services and do it quickly. Now we are getting ready to roll out another brand new product for our customers, a proprietary multifunctional 104.ua Terminal. Not a single utility in the country has ever created a multifunctional terminal that allows not only to pay for gas and its delivery, but also to transmit meter readings, check the balance and even print out the bill and other documents directly from the terminal. This is our know-how.
Our online services are actually personal service centers on a smartphone. Thanks to the digitalization of services, we serve 3.5 million customers using online services. In large cities like Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih and Lviv, more than 70% of gas consumers use our online services.
By developing online services, we are clearing the way for our next project,104.ua Smart, which we started to implement this year. It is a comprehensive software solution based on modems that allow customers to turn conventional gas meters into smart meters. They automatically transmit consumption data to the gas company during the day and display it in the consumer’s personal account or in the 104.ua Mobile application. We have launched the mass production of such modems that would increase the efficiency of gas usage and allow customers not to worry about the accuracy of gas consumption metering. This project is gaining momentum. In August, during the first week of the release, we shipped 4,500 104.ua Smart devices to the customers.
Ahead of the Independence Day of our country we are looking into the future. There, the entire gas distribution industry faces a global challenge — we need to completely redesign the system. Our gas distribution system was built for a completely different country. The system was designed to pump 100 bcm of gas per year while the country annually consumes only 25 bcm of gas. We use the system only by a quarter of its capacity. However, we need to maintain all its capacities up and running. This is ineffective and irrational.
Hundreds of kilometers of networks have been laid to settlements where almost no one lives now. Even in large cities, the de-industrialization that has taken place in our country made the gas distribution system excessive and ineffective. For example, we have to constantly keep the gas under pressure in large diameter pipes that no one will ever need.
A significant part of gas equipment has outlived two or three lifetimes and is unstable. During the winter months, in order to prevent interruptions in gas supply, we need to manually maintain the operability of many sections of the networks on a daily basis.
System redesign is a global challenge that also gives us a unique opportunity. We simply need to globally reconstruct the system taking into account the rapid changes that are taking place in the world energy sector. The European Green Deal is a set of European environmental initiatives that are on the European energy agenda for the coming decades. A modernization program for our gas distribution system can be built into this global agenda, and it must get ready for the new and clean energies such as biogas and hydrogen.
Ukraine has a unique opportunity to get integrated into the echelon of European environmental transformations and become an important part of the European energy space.
Such a large-scale reconstruction of the networks will require significant investments over the next 10 years. We have already carried out pilot projects to modernize network sections in various regions of Ukraine. This gave us an understanding that for the redesign we would need to use significant amounts of materials and equipment produced in Ukraine, and most importantly, we would need our specialists.
The first series of hydrogen tests as a clean energy of the future in our networks was launched in Ukraine some days ago. At this precise point in time, at the special test sites in Zhytomyr, Volyn, Dnepropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk and Kharkiv regions, our specialists are testing hydrogen in gas distribution systems for the first time. And this is just the beginning.
