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District heating plays a key role in the German heat transition (“Wärmewende”) to achieve climate protection targets. In order to realise the heating transition, the legislator has established cost efficiency as a central criterion in the relevant legislation. Ecology, as the third pillar of sustainability, is thus taking a back seat, despite the transformation’s influence on other sustainability dimensions beyond climate protection.
The article takes an ecological perspective on the district heating
transformation and shows that, from this perspective, greater emphasis
should be placed on local environmental heat and large heat pumps.
In the second step, the decentralised information available on the
actual transformation plans of district heating suppliers is aggregated and evaluated at a national level for the first time. The evaluation indicates a possible gap between the developed sustainable target state and the plans of district heating suppliers, which are primarily focussed on the cost efficiency criterion. This comparison identifies a potential conflict of objectives between the legislative cost efficiency criterion and the ecological sustainability perspective.