Germany’s plans to clean up heating face new delay, analysis finds climate shortcomings

The final decision on Germany’s Building Modernisation Act (BMA), a reform to the country's law to curb emissions in the buildings sector, faces new delays, energy policy newsletter Tagesspiegel Background reported. An initial plan to present a cabinet agreement on the reformed regulation this week has now been pushed back to the end of the month, the newsletter said.

This means the government will have less time to formally complete the adoption of a law governing the use of fossil fuels and emissions in the heating sector. Renewable energy requirements for new heating systems in areas with a municipal heating plan, as stipulated in the original law, come into force on 1 July, the Tagesspiegel newspaper said in a separate article. This means that the economy ministry, led by the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), and the buildings ministry, led by the Social Democrats (SPD), must agree on the proposal to drop the mandatory renewable energy share for new heating systems before then. A demand by the SPD to protect tenants from financial consequences of their landlords’ choices regarding heating systems played a key role in the dispute, the article said. 

In a first informal agreement presented in February, the parties agreed to continue to allow households to install new fossil fuel boilers to heat their homes instead of having to rely on climate-friendly alternatives such as heat pumps or district heating. In an analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) shared with Tagesspiegel Background, researchers found that the proposed BMA means Germany would miss its climate targets in the buildings sector in both 2030 and 2045. 

“Compared to current regulations, the BMA means that about 3.3 million additional oil and gas heating systems will be in operation until 2045,” the newsletter cited from the study. This would amount to about 230 million tonnes of additional greenhouse gas emissions by 2045, the researchers said. At the same time, plans to add more biogas to gas networks meant prices for customers would likely double by 2045, PIK added. 

An alliance of local energy utilities at the end of last week announced its rejection of the government’s heating plans, Tagesspiegel reported. Local suppliers from cities including Hamburg, Leipzig, Mannheim and others said they fear their investments will be devalued if homeowners opt to continue using oil and gas boilers. The proposed reform presented by the economy ministry was “premature” and failed to account for the complexity of the challenges ahead, they argued. Scrapping the mandatory share of renewable energy would severely threaten the sector’s climate targets, the utilities warned, while costs for maintaining fossil gas networks well into the future are expected to skyrocket.