This morning a visit to the EVN headquarters here in Plovdiv was on the programme. Touring the building, it was relatively easy to imagine how it was before, especially since the refurbishment of certain areas is still on-going – the old ‘stolovaya’ in the basement still radiates the questionable charms of a Communist Bloc workers’ canteen. Although there is little left but the panelling on the wall and a few moveable objects, the lack of natural light and the atmosphere down here makes the heat outside disappear. It has kept something of the upper deck of London’s Routemaster buses in the 1960s on an overcast, drizzly, early morning passing through Hackney. (The buses themselves are now part of history.) The conductor’s, ‘Upstairs only, please!’ meant humid air rising from body-heated coats and jackets. The sweaters of the permanently optimistic—‘it’s only a shower, it’ll brighten up again later’—giving off the odour of wet wool which immediately mixes with the sharp smell of printers’ ink from the the fresh Sun or Daily Mirror and the clouds of smoke from pre-clock-in cigarettes.
The managers we meet talk about the challenges and problems involved in converting part of the old state-owned and run electrical supply system into a modern enterprise. They talk of mobile generators being shipped down the Danube, renewal of substation equipment and masts, the exchange of electrical meters at the consumer level and bill payment issues. The modernisation of the fleet of vehicles is also an issue – most have been in service for many years and were inherited from the COMECON era and are thus from Russia, GDR etc. Tomorrow we will visit one of the main EVN workshops and see most of this for ourselves.
We are now in the administrative headquarters for the area situated across from a park. It is also where consumers come to pay their bills in cash and sort out complaints. We talk about the price of consumer energy relative to income and from the replies I see that there is still a multi-layered problem here. The first is that when a public utility is converted into a commercial company there is a major shift in the economic relations that is often not accompanied by a reciprocal psychological shift on the part of the customers.
We are talking here about the price of the electricity which is now fixed by commercial and not political considerations and the costs involved in paying the bills through the banks. |
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I’ve heard from Bulgarian friends that the bank charges are very high, especially for people with small bills and low incomes. These kinds of adjustment can be difficult to negotiate in a country with an established free market economy but here in Bulgaria everything happened simultaneously. The market economy was introduced in a single lump, causing multiple-level disruption of all the established givens—companies collapsed, jobs disappeared, government support systems evaporated. So the weakest groups feel the pressure first, most and longest—the unemployed and underemployed, those on small, fixed pensions, and minorities such as the Roma. The Roma don’t want to pay, we’re told, and, as in the shanty towns where the poorest of the poor live all over the world, they often tap into the current illegally. |
