What cities need Staff is obviously a massive need. But it’s not just heating and building engineers. To implement local heating and cooling plans, cities must hire IT, legal, HR, communications, and administrative support to allow the engineers to work effectively. To give a related example, a 2021 Energy Cities study on meeting Europe’s existing targets for building renovation estimated that 214,000 additional local staff were needed at a cost of about €16b per year. Current funding for heating and cooling is often project- based—a fixed sum for a fixed deliverable. However, this misses the secondary staffing needs for cities, and it means that the costs of the integrated planning needs mentioned above fall solely on the shoulders of cities. If the national and regional governments want to hit their targets as cost-effectively as possible, they must share some of that burden. Technological clarity vs technological neutrality Changing heating sources, especially from an individual solution to a collective solution like district heating, can significantly intervene in peoples’ homes and lives. This is fertile ground for incumbent natural gas providers to promise future solutions like biomethane or hydrogen as an easy, non- disruptive option. “The natural gas lobby is powerful and will try to convince us to tone it down using framing concepts. One of these framing concepts comes with the slogan ‘green gas everywhere for everything.’ But it’s easy to see through. Vienna has made it clear that it wants real change. Thus, phasing out gas means phasing out all gases in the building sector. This includes green gas, which is far too valuable to use for heating apartments,” said Jürgen Czernohorszky, Executive City Councillor for Climate, Environment, Democracy, and Personnel at the City of Vienna. It seems clear that the goal for some legacy natural gas providers is delay—allowing them to extract maximum value from their existing assets (the local gas grid) for the maximum amount of time. Unfortunately, time is not something we have in abundance, and having the technological clarity to rule out false solutions like biomethane and hydrogen domestic heating is a crucial first step.
In the Netherlands, for example, the local heating and cooling obligation has come with a good support framework–that is, the staff and finances to do good planning. But in other countries, such as Slovenia and Poland, we see a massive gap in staffing levels. Therefore, they are unable to develop plans with all the necessary components realistically. Cooling plans have melted. The largest red flag from our analysis of all EU member states is that cooling planning doesn’t exist anywhere. In a way, that is understandable. Cooling hasn’t been a life-or-death requirement in the same way as heating in the past. But those days are gone. Public health experts estimate that more than 61,000 people died from heat exposure during the summer of 2022. EU member states need to start from scratch to ensure that citizens can access cooling in an ever-hotter world. In Denmark, the provision of heat is a public service, while cooling is relegated to a commercial activity. It is rarely covered in building codes (mandating solar shading, for example), and peak cooling can cause significant challenges for the electricity grid and lead to power outages. It’s an important example of the kind of coordination needed between spatial planning and energy systems. Planning, planning, and planning Another general finding is that energy planning documents (including SECAPs - Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans) often lack detail and spatial dimensions. It’s impossible to coordinate plans effectively without the detail necessary for coordination. In the same vein, there needs to be more coordination between different levels of government and between different sectors at a local level. That means municipalities need more powers in planning regulation and building codes to regulate heating supply sources effectively. It also means that cities must coordinate heating and cooling planning with things like biodiversity investments and tree planting, which can be an essential part of a cooling strategy. Outside of municipalities, heat planning must be aligned with national climate targets, strategies, and objectives so that things like renovation subsidies are effectively targeted. There is little point in a national government subsidising a heat pump on a street where a city is planning district heating soon.
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HOTCOOL no.4 2024
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