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Insights 31.01.2025

Real es­ta­te: the hea­ting tran­si­ti­on is not hap­pe­ning fast en­ough

Klaus Schmidtke

Die neuesten Zahlen von Agora Energiewende und Dena zeigen, dass die Klimawende im Gebäudesektor immer noch nicht genug vorankommt.

The latest figures from Agora Energiewende and Dena show that the climate transition in the building sector is still not making enough progress. 

While Germany's greenhouse gas emissions fell by three percent overall to 656 million tons in 2024, the weaker decline in real estate by just 2 million tons to 105 million tons was only due to the mild weather. 

Without this effect, emissions would even have risen - so there was no structural progress. The weak phase in the construction industry, for example, ensured that energy-efficient renovations continued to decline. However, the reasons also include the fact that measures such as insulation are expensive and, despite ever higher efficiency standards, the bottom line is that no energy has been saved in residential buildings for over 10 years. 

Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of CO₂ emissions, mainly caused by heating. Renewable energies still play far too small a role and over 70 percent of heat in homes comes from burning gas and oil. This will affect tenants and landlords in the coming years due to rising CO₂ prices. 

Regardless of the stance on the current “Heating Act”, any new federal government must tackle this challenge. The previous strategy of driving forward the heating transition primarily through more and more rules and regulations has not worked. 

This has made modernizations and new builds more complicated and expensive and has led to a noticeable reluctance to invest - as the 46% drop in demand for heat pumps last year compared to 2023 clearly shows. What's more, in many cases, investment decisions are being held off until local heating plans have been finalized.

This, in turn, may take some time: All cities and municipalities in Germany must have completed their heat planning by mid-2028. Larger municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants are obliged to do so a year earlier. By the end of 2024, the first 120 or so municipalities in Germany will have published their heating plans. More than a third have at least started to draw up a municipal heating plan. 

The building sector faces the challenge of reducing its CO₂ emissions from 110 million to 67 million tons by 2030. To achieve this, more than one million heating systems would have to be modernized every year. Today, however, the reality is very different: Fossil heating systems using oil and gas were sold more than twice as often as heat pumps and biomass stoves in 2024. The heating transition is not gaining enough momentum.

It is now important to do the right things first and do them quickly. A major key to the climate transition is the rapid reduction of CO₂ emissions, especially in existing properties. This is exactly what we are working on at PAUL: we combine AI-supported energy management systems in the boiler room with heat pumps and photovoltaic systems. In this way, we ensure climate-neutral buildings, protect tenants from negative surprises on their energy bills and make properties future-proof for owners and investors.
 

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