• Ongoing Projects
• Key points of the municipal heat transition

The new Climate Protection Act of May 2021 brought forward the time target for achieving climate neutrality by five years from 2050 to 2045. In individual municipalities, such as Hannover, the capital of Lower Saxony, this time target was voluntarily set even earlier at 2035. It is therefore important to act quickly and with certainty of direction in climate protection.

Focusing on the heat transition

In addition to electricity generation, the field of the “classic energy transition” since the end of the 1990s, the focus is now shifting to the three other major challenges of climate protection: the heat transition, the transport transition and the conversion of industry to climate neutrality. With a view to the municipalities and their municipal utilities (if any), the heat transition is particularly important.

It is important to promote the ability to act at the local and regional level by providing information in line with demand. To this end, it makes sense to use Michael Bilharz’s (UBA) distinction between “peanuts,” “big points,” and “key points,” based on the example of consumption.

Putting central solutions in the foreground

In this specific case, it is important to focus on the key solutions for future heat supply and to concentrate the sheer diversity of technical innovations on those that are available both in the short term and on a large scale. Only in this way can we steer the debate and thus attention away from the diversity of less significant solutions and toward the “big points” and “key points of the heat transition”.

With the project we want to achieve that:

• local climate protection and environmental groups are provided with concise, precise, action-oriented and easy-to-read and understand information on central topics of the heat transition,
• this information also effectively addresses the target groups of local politicians and representatives of the business community, etc,
• overall clarity about the central solution strategies of the heat transition is promoted at local and regional level, as this is a central prerequisite for targeted local action,
  the networking of actors and stakeholders increases.

In other words, more citizens, more schoolchildren, more company representatives, more politicians in the subject areas of the heat transition are to be informed about the fundamental connections, the state of research, the need for action and the possibilities for action, and made able to speak competently.