City of Berlin's clean district heating strategy criticised over hydrogen and wood reliance

The city of Berlin's public district heating company BEW confirmed its plan to phase out coal by 2030, but environmentalists said the company’s strategy for climate-neutral heat supply by 2045 relies excessively on hydrogen and biomass combustion. The country’s largest environmental association, Nabu, accused BEW and the city government of lacking ambition in deploying large heat pumps and geothermal energy, while betting on wood and waste incineration. 

Berlin's heat network is one of Europe's largest, stretching more than 2,000 kilometres and supplying around 700,000 apartments in the German capital. The city took back public control of the network from Swedish energy group Vattenfall in 2024, with a mandate to decarbonise it. District heating, which relies on centralised heat generation distributed through underground pipe networks, accounts for a significant share of urban energy consumption across Germany, making the sector's transformation a key element of the country's push towards climate neutrality by 2045.

In an update to its decarbonisation strategy, BEW said that emissions will fall by around 80 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels – up from a reduction of around 70 percent today – as “at least 40 percent of the district heating generated will come from renewable energy sources and unavoidable waste heat.” To achieve that goal, the company plans to invest in large-scale heat pumps, waste heat sources and biomass, power-to-heat plants, and heat storage systems to make the system more flexible.

The company plans to continue this strategy until 2035, but sets out three scenarios for the period thereafter because of “considerable uncertainty regarding the regulatory and policy framework.” 

The scenarios differ in reliance on local renewable heat, electrification, and green hydrogen, but Environmental Action Germany (DUH) said “it is not enough simply to envisage a scenario with a slightly higher share of electricity.” The NGO called on BEW to put its decarbonisation strategy on a truly climate-friendly footing by giving electrification a much higher priority, and by committing to largely phase out the use of combustion. "Ultimately, one must face a truth: the large network as it stands may not be fully decarbonisable at all," the group said, calling for a debate about shrinking the centralised network in favour of smaller, decentralised heat systems.

The NGOs welcomed that BEW dropped plans for a wood-burning power station following protests, but criticised the fact that another new wood incinerator was still part of the new strategy. They also said the company’s scenarios overstated the role of green hydrogen, which is highly inefficient compared to heat pumps.