In December 2020, the Climate Protection and Energy Agency Baden-Württemberg (KEA-BW) published a guideline for municipal heat planning. After the October 2020 amendment to the Climate Protection Act in Baden-Württemberg, municipal heat planning for cities above a certain size became mandatory. The guide serves as orientation and assistance for municipalities in the preparation of a concrete plan for a heat transition strategy.
Municipal heat planning should, by no means, be seen as a stand-alone topic, but rather as an important tool for systematic climate-neutral urban and district development. During the entire process, other projects of the municipality, e.g. urban land use planning, must be taken into account. It is also important to involve a wide variety of administrative units of the municipality (including urban planning and development, environmental protection, energy planning, structural and civil engineering, traffic management, its own energy supply companies, etc.), but also other stakeholders (including local energy cooperatives) in the process. In this respect, this approach can provide guidance for integrated urban and district development.
Copyright: KEA 2020; Maimento/Fotolia
Moreover, municipal heat planning enables the municipality to set political priorities in the field of heat generation and infrastructure compared to other projects of the municipality. This applies above all to preparatory and binding urban land-use planning, decisions on building land policy and other infrastructure, transport development and land securing for heat supply facilities. The participation of relevant local stakeholders is also taken into account in the guidelines for municipal heat planning. For example, additional municipal information campaigns for private households, e. g. on changing heating systems, are recommended.
Not only other states in Germany can learn from Baden-Württemberg's approach. The approach, which is entirely in line with main objective of Multiply, namely integrated urban development, is also likely to be of interest to municipalities in other project countries. It turns concepts for a climate-neutral heat supply from a voluntary task into an obligatory municipal planning issue. Especially for existing districts in cities, this approach can be seen as a particularly challenging, but also as a particularly important task in the context of an urban decarbonization strategy.
For more information, see here:
https://www.kea-bw.de/news/neuer-leitfaden-fuer-kommunale-waermeplanung-erschienen
The MULTIPLY project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 785088