Development of the heating structure in new residential construction in Germany. Only 10% of new housing permits approved so far this year are for houses heated by natural gas

9 comments

1. source: [https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/entwicklung-beheizungsstruktur-baugenehmigungen/](https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/entwicklung-beheizungsstruktur-baugenehmigungen/)

2. Legend:

   Elektro-Wärmepumpen= heat pumps

   Strom=electricity(excluding heat pumps

   Fernwarme=district heating

   Solarthermie=solar heating

   Heizol=heating oil

   Sonstiges=other

3. It looks like transitioning away from gas was pretty big even before Russia’s attack.

4. The elephant in the room is that subsidies are needed to de-gasify existing/older homes. A 25% tax rebate or whatever is not going to get gas out of every house, given the price of electricity.

   What is the political solution to this problem? It looks to me like the state will have to offer a combination of mandated degasification and subsidies for homeowners, both of which seem like unpopular, but necessary, policies.

5. Romania is going the opposite way. Romania is building a lot of new apartments and 90% of them have individual gas furnaces because centralized management of anything in Romania is so atrocious that nobody trusts it anymore.

   There are brand new 15 storey apartment buildings in Bucharest, in Militari, that I’ve nicknamed the Guns of Navarone because of all the exhaust pipes sticking out their walls, all aligned the same way.

6. Does it say anywhere what is used by the district heating (Fernwärme)?

7. I know they plan to ban giving permits to new residential projects with oil and gas heating systems (which is great) but is there anything regarding gas use in the industrial sector?

   [Household and commercial customer consumption accounted for around 41% and industrial consumption accounted for nearly 59%.](https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germanys-gas-consumption-and-imports-declined-2022.html)

8. While generally positive, this graphic is a bit misleading.

   It shows Fernwärme as a standalone category, without breaking out the fuel source used for it. Fernwärme means district heating, btw.

   I read up a bit, and it seems about 2/3 of all district heating uses fossil sources. Worth mentioning that it isn’t always just for heating, but also for industrial uses, where the heat is a waste product… So it isn’t exactly the same as using gas only for heating as the first category in the data.

   With this taken into account, the fossil sources would have another maybe 10% above what the graphic shows (too early in the morning to do math).

   https://www.heizsparer.de/heizung/heizungssysteme/fernwaerme/fernwaerme-brennstoffe

9. Green color for gas 😂