BarcelonaAt the French swimming club Nogent Nautique, east of Paris, a security guard checks that people who want to enter the club’s pool do so covered in wetsuits. “The situation in France is borderline. The clubs cannot pay the price of heating the pools and they close them to users. Or in this case you can only swim in wetsuits, as the water is cold. This is not the case here happens, but we have been forced to modify some things”, explains the vice president of Club Natació Sant Andreu as he walks along the edge of the Pere Serrat pool. “We have lowered the temperature of the water by one degree. This is already a significant saving,” admits the vice-president of the club, Joan Marimon.
The impact of the energy crisis is jeopardizing the activities of clubs like the Andreuenc. It’s a weekday and the activity doesn’t stop, in this club founded half a century ago by people from the neighborhood, who managed to expand the facilities when they bought from Barça the land where the old football field had been built by Fabra and Coats. A plaque remembers the name of the members who endorsed the money to be able to build the pool. “The club is part of the neighborhood, it is one of the mainstays. We are a private entity in which all the profit, due to our identity, is used to promote sport, train athletes. More than 10,000 people are linked to the club and now we are at the best social and also sporting moment. We bring more swimmers to international competitions than ever before. But we are suffering a lot, some activities are at risk,” adds Marimon.
“The high cost of electricity is forcing the closure of public and private facilities. And things can get worse if no remedy is put in place,” points out Gerard Esteva, president of the Union of Sports Federations of Catalonia. Swimming clubs are one of the worst affected, as it costs a lot to heat the pools. “The energy emergency has increased the club’s gas rate by 280% and the electricity rate by 200%,” says Marimon. Sources from the Catalan Swimming Federation explain that the question is already on the table of the Minister of Sports, Miquel Iceta. Even when the king of Spain received the swimmers and water polo players who had medaled at the Europeans, some let the king know that if they wanted to keep receiving athletes with medals the clubs had to be helped or they could end up closing, due to the increase in costs. “We are talking about clubs that can disappear,” complains Esteva. “We talk about the importance of health, but what will happen if the clubs can’t open the swimming pools and gyms for people?” he asks. “Here we have agreements with the schools, who come to learn to swim. Look at the old people who spend the day here swimming, playing sports,” says Marimon as a group of about 30 women do aquagym. “These clubs provide a service to the community. And I’m not just talking about the elite athletes, I’m talking about how it affects people. There is a social impact, but then we don’t get help,” adds Marimon.
“The crisis in the energy sector is destroying the Catalan sports system. There are clubs that are already closing services. To give us an idea, personalizing in our case of the UFEC, in which we manage several facilities, this last year we billed a million euros more than we had budgeted for, which means we managed to attract people to the gyms. This should be good news, but since energy costs have quadrupled, it’s no use to us. If in 2019 we paid half a million euros for the energy of all the facilities, now we pay four million. In other words, even growing clubs cannot face this crisis. It’s a beast that ruins us all, small and big clubs -explains Esteva-. The four plagues have fallen on sport. The cuts of 2010, the application of the 155, the coronavirus and now the energy crisis. It is a very weak moment, with some entities touched by death, especially the that have water space or large areas to illuminate, such as p padel courts where people play at night after work.” Some clubs with padel courts have chosen to turn off some light towers, maintaining artificial lighting but with less power. “We were the first to start a process to save even before the crisis, and despite everything we notice what is happening. 15 days after paying the gas bill you do not know how much you will have to pay, this is the level,” he says the president of CN Sabadell Claudi Martí.
Pools at 24 degrees
“A study says that in the 43 municipal sports facilities in Barcelona, the cost of electricity has increased by more than 15 million euros compared to 2019. We always talk about 2019 because it was the last year without a pandemic and with a normal activity. If you add the private facilities, we go to 30 million euros. And speaking of the whole of Catalonia, more than 100 million euros that the Catalan sports sector has had to pay in utility bills. And there has been no compensation,” says Esteva. “And it’s especially complicated when you have pools to heat,” adds Marimon. In Sant Andreu they have chosen to lower the water temperature by one degree, from 28 to 27. “And now that the cold is coming it will cost more. Luckily the weather of the last few months has helped, but maybe we will lower it to 26. The technicians are talking about a 5% saving for each degree lowered, on the total cost of heating the pool. Can we save 16%, maybe? But if the bill goes up 200%, how do we do that?” , asks Marimon. “Other clubs already have it at 24 degrees, when it was always at 28. They have to lower the temperature to be able to pay bills. And the cold in the water is noticeable, believe me,” insists Esteva.
Clubs are looking for solutions that may end up affecting users, such as an increase in the membership fee. “But many facilities are not owned by the clubs. They are owned by the town councils or the public administrations that grant them to third parties, in this case the entities. Within the clauses of the contracts, in most cases, the town councils approve the prices of the quotas. And in an election year, they do not authorize the membership price to rise, and the club is drowning,” explains Esteva. At Sant Andreu they first want to explore other avenues and, if necessary, they would bring it to the members’ assembly.
“There are only three solutions and they must be applied at the same time: firstly, both the Generalitat and the municipalities must pay a part of this increase in bills, be it 100% or 50% of the ‘increase; secondly, a true plan is needed for the energy conversion of facilities; thirdly, energy prices need to be limited, as has already been allowed in other sectors. We need to intervene prices, prices cannot be out of control in this way, because the social fabric will be burdened”, points out Esteva, who remembers how the Generalitat is negotiating “to issue a call for 10 million euros, six for the entities and four for companies in the sports sector, to deal with what has happened in recent years”. “But the increase in invoices is 100 million. 10 million is too far,” he adds. The Barcelona City Council was one of the first to react after meeting with the clubs and this Friday, October 21, it agreed to allocate five million euros “to attend to the emergency situation that has arisen in the last months with the strong increases in energy prices”. One of the agreed measures is the installation of nearly 13,000 m2 of photovoltaic panels in the municipal sports centers and the implementation of good practices in energy consumption.
“Everyone is moving. He thinks it’s a problem for everyone, not just in Catalonia,” says Marimon. “The forecast for the 22/23 season is to go from allocating 8% to 15% of the budget. It destroys our income statement, it’s about 600,000 euros more overcost. We come from a pandemic that already affected us a lot. Aid came after covid-19, but it wasn’t enough. The clubs had to go into debt and we made EROs. And now comes this unprecedented price hike.” they say to the Andreuenc club. And that they did the work, with foresight. “Last year, seeing how things could go, we locked a gas and electricity tariff for a year, a locked price, but this summer it ended. It was a success, but now we have different tariffs which will have a big impact in the future. The clubs that didn’t agree on fees are having it worse than us,” says Marimon.
Renew the ways of consuming energy
The solution, then, is to bet on a renewal of the way of consuming energy, as clubs such as Atlético Barceloneta have already done, where they dispensed with gas years ago by opting for a biomass plant to supply water hot “We already changed the lighting in the club to put leds, power limiters… We have been trying to put solar panels for some time, but it costs more than they say, since it has to be done on fixed ceilings and, in case of a swimming club with a retractable roof pool, you don’t have that many consolidated spaces. We want to abandon gas and focus everything on electricity with cardiothermia systems. But all these are expensive investments, money is needed, we are talking about 700,000 or 800,000 euros,” says Marimon. CN Sabadell was one of the first to bring cardiothermia systems to Catalonia, which convert the humidity and heat of gyms into energy.
The Valais club, in fact, was one of the pioneers when opting for an energy conversion process. Having some of the biggest facilities in the country, it is one of the clubs that has seen its bills grow the most. The historic Valaisan entity, which has sent the most swimmers to the Olympic Games and which now has more than 20,000 members, began a period of energy transition to try to be “an entity with almost zero consumption of fossil energy”, as it explained the president Claudi Martí, who has just been re-elected president of the club. The Sabadell entity has invested more than two million in the energy conversion process, but the savings achieved are greater. “It went well, it’s the way, but the pandemic made us lose members and not all of them have recovered. Now this increase in bills has hurt us a lot”, he adds, despite remembering how the consumption savings of energy in facilities, compared to 2019, is 40 lower. “We spend less but pay more because of price increases. We are consuming less energy. But we cannot influence the price. We cannot control government decisions either.”
As the cold weather approaches, Catalan clubs are forced to close facilities, lower the temperature of the pools, consider increasing membership fees or, if necessary, close. “If we keep losing sports clubs, private or public, then everyone will cry,” says Esteva. “These clubs are part of our society. People of all ages play sports here. It is vital to have these spaces. And we are at risk,” concludes Marimon. At the moment the aid is not coming. Negotiations continue.
