Improving the economic performances of the beet-sugar industry

General trend of free trade at the regional level as well as in the direction of European Union has motivated sugar factories located in Serbia to invest into technologies that are more efficient in order to make their products more competitive in the markets of Europe. Until 2005, the project of energy efficiency improvement in Serbian sugar factories was conducted in Crvenka and Žabalj. Now, they have energy consumption around 1 MJ/kg beet, in contrast to the previous consumption of 1.2 up to 1.5 MJ/kg beet. Further improvements are possible but investments would be high. A result of measurements taken during 2006, after the sugar factory "Donji Srem" - Pećinci was reconstructed showed that a considerable saving has been achieved. The first set of measurements showed that the energy consumption was 1.01 MJ/kg beet, which was 20% higher than intended, but at the same time energy savings were about 30% lower with respect to the values before the reconstruction.