Cities in Germany and Poland agree climate-friendly cross-border district heating
Clean Energy Wire
A Polish and a German city plan to deliver climate-neutral district heat to households on both sides of the border. The network will supply Germany’s easternmost city of Görlitz and its Polish sister city Zgorzelec, which are located in the Lusatia coal region and separated by the border river Neisse.
The project “will save up to 50,000 tons of CO2 per year starting in 2030,” said energy company E.ON, following a letter of intent signed by municipal utility SEC Zgorzelec, an E.ON subsidiary, Görlitz’s municipal utility, and French utility Veolia.
The EU-funded project dubbed “United Heat” will involve investments totalling up to 195 million euros and “serve as a European flagship project for many other initiatives,” said Marten Bunnemann, CEO of E.ON Energy Infrastructure Solutions.
The companies will next form a joint venture to define a timeline, responsibilities, and financing. They plan to cross the border with a 3.8-kilometre pipeline, creating a total connection line of twelve kilometres, which is to be fed with heat produced exclusively from renewable energies.
“The heat will be generated in the future using solar thermal energy with seasonal storage, heat recovery from lake and wastewater, biomass boilers, as well as waste heat and power-to-heat systems,” E.ON said. “The individual technologies will be interconnected in such a way that they complement each other optimally and ensure a stable, decarbonized heat supply throughout the year.”
Already in 2023, the French city of Strasbourg and the German town of Kehl, which are located on opposite sides of the river Rhine on the opposite end of Germany, aimed to connect their heating systems in a cross-border district heating project. The project is scheduled to provide waste heat from industry to residents of the border region by 2028.
