Instruments for implementing municipal heat planning

There is a comprehensive need for planning for the building stock at the municipal level when considering the national goals for greenhouse gas-neutral heating. Strategies for increasing energy efficiency and decarbonising the heat supply by integrating renewable energies and waste heat must be aligned. Due to the urgent need for action, municipal heat planning is now taking centre stage in the debate in Germany. The implementation of innovative solutions for heat supply not only raises technical questions but also concerns the organisational design and legal implementation.

Against the backdrop of the timely constraints of climate targets and the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in March 2021, heat planning must be aligned with the climate neutrality goals for 2045. However, there is a lack of specific requirements for the implementation of municipal heat plans. The general provisions of building law can only provide a limited framework. Therefore, this research project aims to analyse supplementary regulatory, process-related and measure-related approaches. In addition, the fields of application on a municipal level and necessary developments of the legal framework must be addressed. Further, heat planning must be incorporated into the governance framework of climate protection law. Especially smaller municipalities are likely to be overwhelmed by the task of developing and implementing heat planning. Therefore, the legal framework will be analysed to identify what kind of cooperation modes can already be utilised and how the legal framework must be modified to enable inter-municipal cooperation. To develop a process-oriented strategy, planning processes, possible conflicts of interest, and necessary regional planning tasks will be identified and approaches to overcome possible barriers will be developed.