The city council decided in 2019 that the city’s apartments should be heated in a climate-neutral manner by 2030. However, it is questionable whether this goal will be achieved. Around half of Gewofag’s and GWG’s apartments are currently still heated with fossil fuels, i.e. with gas, oil and coal. The plans for the heat transition of the municipal companies sound vague and full of imponderables. This emerges from a still unpublished response from the planning department to a city council request from the Die Linke/Die Party parliamentary group. Group leader Stefan Jagel calls for “more speed”.
According to this, 39 percent of the 37,000 apartments owned by Gewofag are still heated with fossil fuels, while this applies to 62 percent of the GWG with a good 30,000 units. District heating is not counted among the fossil fuels, although the public utilities (SWM) have so far generated it largely with gas and coal.
The two companies also quantify their progress towards renewable energies over the past decade. At Gewofag, around 40 percent of existing buildings are continuously heated with fossil fuels. The stagnation is explained by the purchases based on the city’s right of first refusal: Most houses with fossil fuel heating would come into the portfolio. In new buildings, on the other hand, the proportion of fossil fuels fell from around 50 to 24 percent. The GWG does not measure its progress by the number of apartments, but by the living space: while 63 percent were heated with fossil fuels in 2012, ten years later it is 36 percent.
When asked by the left about planned measures to achieve climate neutrality by 2030, Gewofag and GWG remain vague. Gewofag reports that new buildings “in future will only be heated by district heating or heat pumps”. But in the very next sentence, the municipal company limits this announcement: “Whether this will succeed” depends on SWM, namely the expansion of the district heating network and SWM’s willingness to connect houses to the network. And whether the use of heat pumps works is “not yet conclusive”. According to “first experiences”, air heat pumps are not feasible in view of the large buildings; whether water heat pumps can be operated economically is still unclear. It must therefore “continue to search for feasible technical answers for new buildings. Gewofag sees the most important lever in the existing building: A “renovation roadmap” is being worked on in order to “achieve climate neutrality in the long term”.
The GWG is even more vague: One is “striving” to “sustainably reduce” energy consumption through modernization. They are working together with SWM to connect “large areas” with GWG houses to the district heating network. Where this is not possible, quarters are to be supplied with solar power and groundwater heat pumps “in the medium term”.
Left parliamentary group leader Jagel calls for the heating transition to be socially designed with targeted measures in order to keep rents affordable. With a city council motion, the left-wing faction wants to oblige the municipal housing associations to present a concrete plan for the modernization and decarbonization of their houses, including the financial requirements. An information campaign for tenants is also necessary.