The business programme of the national forum will take place on 5 December in Moscow at the SAP Center for Digital Leadership. The forum will be held with the support of the Russian Ministry of Construction, Housing, and Utilities and part of the cycle of activities of the ROSINFRA Infrastructure Congress, which is organized by the PPP Development Center and the Roscongress Foundation. Sberbank is the general partner of the event.
The event programme will kick off with the panel discussion ‘Smart Utilities in a Smart City’. With the participation of the Russian Ministry of Construction, Housing, and Utilities, the event participants will discuss the target indicators of the Smart City project, the first results of the digitalization of pilot cities, and the experience of integrating information from utility operators into the modern realities of the digital economy. As part of a focus group devoted to the creation of a modern municipal waste management system, experts and representatives of the relevant ministries will consider problems concerning the status of regional operators and the role of the industrial development strategy and the Clean Country priority project in transforming the approach to structuring PPP projects involving solid municipal waste.
The forum’s plenary discussion will feature a discussion of approaches to measures for developing public utility infrastructure set forth in the ‘Ecology’ and ‘Housing and Urban Environment’ National Projects. The participants will identify funding sources for national projects and mechanisms for returning investments, including the potential for using public—private partnership mechanisms and determine the role of the Russian regions in implementing priority projects as well as criteria for selecting projects in the public utilities sector in order to raise government funding.
The open discussion ‘Off-the-Shelf Solutions in Housing and Public Utilities: A Frank Dialogue With a Bank’ will address examples of PPP projects in housing and public utilities implemented on the basis of standard solutions as well as proposals for their improvement. The theme of green funding will be addressed for the first time at the forum. Specifically, representatives of the Bank of Russia, the Ministry of Finance, VEB, and investment companies will come together in the format of an expert session to discuss the successful foreign experience of green investment in the utilities sector, the introduction of environmental standards for infrastructure projects as well as possible tax and other benefits for green investment. The final event of the business programme will be a discussion on the implementation of priority projects in water supply and wastewater treatment. In particular, experts will consider approaches to including such facilities in a list of priority projects, the potential of concession agreements in this regard, project management as well as independent assessment and control.
On the second day of the forum, the PPP Institute and Sberbank will jointly hold a practical seminar on key aspects of preparing and implementing PPP projects in the public utilities sector.
The detailed event
programme and registration are available on the website http://p3operator.ru/.
