Thursday, October 09, 2025 in Essen

As part of the KliWinBa project, our workshop “How can the heating transition succeed in metropolitan areas?” took place on Thursday, October 9, 2025, in the glass pavilion on the Essen campus! The aim of the workshop was to discuss the challenges and opportunities of the heating transition in urban metropolitan areas and to jointly consider solutions and strategies for a sustainable and efficient heating transition.

Around 50 stakeholders from academia and industry gathered at the University of Duisburg-Essen to take part in the workshop. Prof. Christoph Weber welcomed the participants and gave a brief insight into the current challenges on the road to climate neutrality by 2045. This was followed by presentations on strategies and measures for the heating transition in existing buildings (Dr. Pawel Naliwajko, Vonovia SE) and on municipal heating planning in Duisburg (Katja Kleegräfe and Stefan Foraita, DVV mbH). Both presentations left plenty of room for questions, leading to lively discussions between the speakers and participants.

After a slight delay, there was a short coffee break before Daniel Brunsch and Tobias Ader (UDE) presented the initial project results and the online tool developed in the project for calculating the economic efficiency of heating systems. This presentation and, above all, the tool were also well received, leading to lively discussions afterwards! The comments and questions continued into the lunch break.

In the afternoon, the program continued with two presentations on legal barriers (Prof. Dr. Christian Pielow) and current experiences with the design of GEG-compliant heat generators for existing buildings (Thorsten Coß, AVU Serviceplus GmbH). In a subsequent breakout session, the participants discussed practical, regulatory, and economic challenges. In particular, topics were addressed that had not yet been covered in the previous presentations—such as the sometimes overly complex and misguided subsidy structures, the lack of cooperation between stakeholders (e.g., in infrastructure measures, when roads are opened anyway, district heating, fiber optic or drinking water pipes could be laid or renewed at the same time) and the high electricity prices compared to other countries, which make it difficult to expand heat pumps in Germany.

Finally, workshop participants enjoyed a presentation by Lars Grothe (BDEW) on the topic of “From heat planning to financing to implementation.” Using the example of the Germany Fund for District Heating announced by KfW with a planned volume of around €10 billion (as of the end of June), he showed how funding instruments could be used in a more targeted manner in the future to facilitate investments in the heat transition. The event concluded with a summary by Prof. Dr. Christoph Weber.

We would like to thank all participants for their active involvement in our workshop! Below you will find a few impressions of the day.
 

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